Is Employee Retention Overrated?

There’s so much written about employee retention problems – how to stop employees from leaving for better opportunities, how to deal with head-hunters poaching the best-of-your-best, how to best allocate your training dollars to keep them from leaving, etc. And while it often is a shame when organizations lose good people, I guess I’m a contrarian about this because I think the bigger problem is that too many employees stay too long with an employer:

Marginal employees whose performance is sub-standard, but not quite poor enough to justify termination.
Chronic ‘problem children’ who’ve been shuffled around from one department to another so many times that they now feel justified in not doing their jobs well
Slippery bosses who regularly mess things up but still get tapped to head yet another plum assignment because they know how to play the political game
Long-term employees (including bosses) who stopped learning anything new years ago, but still insist they’re experts on the ‘right’ way to fix new, and significantly more complex, problems.
My recommendation is this: Don’t encourage these people to stay; encourage them to leave.

And why not? There’s hardly a better time.
Bonus monies have been paid out.
New vacation/personal/sick time allocations have been accrued.
The motivational aspects from the year-end salary treatments, for better or worse, have worn off.
Their lackluster performance has already undermined your efforts for a bigger and better first quarter.
And those fabulous employees who couldn’t be retained have created numerous openings in other companies for the very same marginal employees that you’d like to see go.

So who are the people you know you really ought to have some heart-to-heart conversations with about helping them move on? How can you help them be ‘discovered’ – and poached – by other companies?

Give it some thought. The upside could be considerable to them … and you.

~ by Ankit Desai on April 5, 2007.