HR folks and academics who study leadership talk a lot about "talent retention."
"Talent retention" means keeping your employees on board rather than letting them fly off to other companies. Talent retention is big business. Consultants around the world will be happy to jet into your company's facilities and help you figure out ways to keep your employees from quitting.
There's only one problem. "Talent retention" is a made-up concept. Only unhealthy, toxic workplaces ever think about retaining talent, because in healthy organizations nobody thinks about quitting their job.
Watch on Forbes:
It's a pain in the neck to job-hunt. People who are happy at work are not spending their free hours job-hunting. People only start a new job search when they aren't happy in their current job.
"Talent retention" is a made-up name for a simple and common problem most of us would call Running Your Company Badly. If your company is poorly led, people will be unhappy and they'll start to peel off to go work someplace else. If they're happy, they won't!
No company needs a Talent Retention program or people on their staff assigned to Talent Retention initiatives. Talk of Talent Retention is just a way of pretending that a company doesn't have cultural problems when it actually does.
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What's especially poignant is that it's easier to keep your employees happy than to make them mad. To keep your employees happy to work on your team, all you have to do is treat them the way you'd like to be treated yourself.
I was a corporate HR SVP for years. I never had one conversation about talent retention. I never oversaw or even thought about a talent retention program, because in a healthy company there's no need for anything like that.
To build a healthier workplace, you don't need to add anything new. Instead, your task is to remove sludge in your culture that keeps people from being able to bring themselves to work.
You can start by getting rid of the most insulting and obnoxious HR policies, the ones that talk down to your teammates and treat them like cattle. You can follow that up by training your supervisors and managers in interpersonal communication and problem-solving.
I'm not talking about "Emotional Intelligence" workshops -- more HR/OD nonsense substituted for honest, human discussion. Learning about a made-up construct called "Emotional Intelligence" won't help your managers or employees speak their truths. Honest talk about fear, trust, power and community will -- but it will take time. Healthy cultures are built slowly, over time.
You can start conversations throughout your organization -- conversations about your culture and trust and good ideas that haven't yet seen the light of day.
You can tell your HR people that their job is not to protect the company from its own staff members but rather to build a workplace that fantastic people want to work in. You can empower every employee to bring problems up the line to someone who can solve them.
You can tell the truth about conflict, instead of avoiding it. You can talk about sticky topics like working hours and heavy workloads and the gap between reality and what your senior managers think.
It's very easy to create a workplace where your industry's top talent wants to be. It's less expensive than running your company using old-world, fear-based management, too.
In order to create a healthy workplace where talent retention will become a non-issue, you have to step out of whatever boxes and fears are keeping you locked in the traditional corporate mindset. You have to be human and acknowledge that without the brilliant people on your team you wouldn't have a company.
You have to be willing to tell the truth about sticky topics and to recognize that just because someone is a manager (or a VP, or CEO) that doesn't mean they are always right.
You can start building a healthier culture right now -- or you can pretend that Talent Retention is a serious business topic worthy of your time and watch in horror as your best employees stream out the door to join your competitors, who will treat them better than you've been able to do.
