Oh No! Not Another Amazing Team Member Leaving

It’s hard to find, let alone keep great talent

All business is two steps forward, one step back. Whether it’s Jobs and Wozniak at Apple in the late 80’s or Paypal’s pivot to online payments; good business is done by scrappy people who just keep stepping. Today, this scrapping is found in the pursuit and retention of great talent.

The talent market is incredibly tight right now. For those who like charts, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics has it at an eye-popping low of 3.8%! With this environment, it’s an employee’s market and you are going to (in most cases) be fighting to hire and keep good talent.

The good staff turnover curse

So you have two problems you need to solve:

• Find good talent to do the entry level and rote work you have.
• Keep good staff who want to move on from that work to something more challenging.

If you can’t find (and keep) a team to do the mission-critical, though highly unsexy, work you may have (like bookkeeping, admin tasks, list development, remedial coding, etc) you will be on the endless hamster loop of hiring, firing, begging to stay, and draining margin to pay people more. 

You need to keep good talent doing challenging & rewarding work.

On a thread from 2015 of a popular Q&A platform, Quora, the question was asked: “How do l continue in a job which is not satisfying but can’t quit for at least a year?” And 2015 was an employer-friendly market.

You want to keep your top talent. Because if they are turning over, client relationships are turning over, increasing churn rate and it’s 5 times as expensive to get a new client as it is to keep an existing one happy.

Do you want to know something troublesome? According to a Bain & Company study, 60-80% of customers who described themselves as satisfied don’t become return customers.

After all, no customer remembers the service that satisfied their needs. They remember the service that exceeded their expectations and was ahead of schedule and under budget.

Again, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average length of an employee’s tenure is 4.4 years. If you only consider the younger end of the labor pool, it’s about half of that.

So while there may be plenty of fish in the sea, it’s in your bank statements best interest to hold onto a great employee for as long as you can.

A lot can be said in regards to the cause of these numbers but instead of looking at the problem, let’s turn to a solution.

Time to do the job right

It’s important to remember this: your best people will perform at a higher level if they are doing their specialized, challenging, and fulfilled tasks. For example, problem-solving unique customer issues and being creative with the solution.

What doesn’t keep talent: high-volume, repetitive, back office tasks like data entry that will burn out your senior accountants. One article from the University of Illinois found that a large cause of employee burnout is a lack of employee resources, specifically time. These tasks lead to a sense of apathy when they believe that despite their best efforts, they are unable to complete the job in front of them. 

Instead of burning out your best and brightest on repeatable tasks, turning them towards your customer-facing workload will both provide a higher level of service to your customer and greater satisfaction to your employee.

There’s a reason old men like their barber; familiarity, both with the service provided and the service provider. The same goes for your employees. Retention decreases attrition.

The same Bain & Company study cited that a 10% boost in customer retention creates a 30% boost in the value of the company. Offload the rote, laborious work that threatens employee retention and satisfaction to a partner, and get your team focused on making customers loyal and happy.

Outsourcing = Employee Satisfaction

Outsourcing- There I said it. It’s not a nasty word if you look at in context. Look at it in the context of leveraging a trusted partner and their talent pool. We do it every day when we hire a contractor, vendor, etc. to do something not core to our business. I call this Other People’s Management (OPM knockoff).

I recently wrote about how a very successful business leveraged this: Read how Daymond John of FUBU did just that here and in this other case study on how one of our partners does this every day with our teams offshore here.

Now go scale your business by leveraging the talent pools around the globe (and in another blog post you make the world better by doing this)

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