Staff Retention Begins With Challenging Work

In an article I recently wrote, I urged non-profit organizations to get their act together and develop a plan to do a better job of retaining staff. If we continue to climb out of the recession in 2010, this year will pose unique challenges to organizations who don't feel the urgency of having a plan to hold on to their most talented and dedicated staff. Even in good times, the majority of the U.S. workforce would change jobs if they had the opportunity. Now we have a situation where people have been grateful to have a job...any job, but because they are sitting still does not mean they are happy.

In my prior article, I suggested that a plan to build staff retention could be built around five ideas: challenging work, recognition, participation in what affects your job, job security and promotion/growth opportunities. These are the five workplace characteristics that employees typically identify as being most important. This article will focus on the first one, challenging work.

Do your employees see their work as challenging? Or, is every day the same old, same old? Here are five recommended actions that you can take which will ensure that employees feel challenged.

1. Screen carefully. Too often non-profits with low salaries and benefits are willing to hire the first warm body that comes along. It's counter-intuitive, but you make your job more attractive when you are more selective about who you are willing to hire. Thorough screening conveys the message that the job is difficult, important, cannot be done by just anyone. This brings the employee to your office on the first day with the mindset that he or she is expecting and ready for a challenge.

2. Encourage creativity. Most of your employees do have ideas about how to get their jobs done faster and better. If they don't have ideas, encourage them to take an hour every week to think, watch and observe, looking for ways that their performance could be improved. Staff at Google are encouraged to take up to 20% of their time working on anything that would improve performance. Let the work of your employees change and expand according to their native ability and imagination. Don't bind them in by insisting that the way they do their work be limited by a procedure manual that someone wrote 5 or 10 years ago.

3. Delegate. Be alert to employees who could do more. Give them the opportunity to try out all of their skills by taking on higher level responsibility. Even if it's a temporary assignment, they will feel like someone has noticed their work, and that feels good.

4. Train. An active program of training leads to staff retention. Every study that's ever been done on this subject has confirmed that fact. But why? Training says to people: our work here is so important that we want you to be at the top of your game, to have the benefit of the latest thinking of experts in the field. It's part of the way you illustrate that you are invested in their success.

5. Let people make mistakes as they try to improve things. You never know what you can learn through the errors of your staff. They show you where the "holes" are in your system. They lead you to new products like post-it notes which were originally a mistake at 3-M Corporation. But for the employees the freedom to make mistakes has an even more powerful message. It means that you have co-opted them into a search for truth. Deming said that the absence of fear leads to truth in the workplace. In this case "truth" means something bigger than the opposite of falsehood. The search for truth in the workplace means that employees are free to explore features that lead to product and process improvement; that there's no attempt to cover up reality based on the tried and true "way we've always done it".

Staff Retention Begins with Challenging Work

By Larry Wenger

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