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Employee retention is a key issue for all companies.  It is important to plan for turnover pressures and consider implementing a formal employee retention program. 

Why is employee retention a hot topic for 2008?

- Gen-X, Gen-Y and Millennials are a mobile group.  According to a survey by Manpower subsidiary Right Management in 2007, 61 % of college students and recent grads plan to stay no more than three years in their first job.

- Boomers are starting to retire.  The huge loss of knowledge workers forcasts a potential shortfall in 2010 of 10 million workers by the Labor Bureau.

 The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the cost to replace a worker in private industry to be $13,996.  Add on the that the value of lost knowledge and we’re talking real money.

Finally, consider this issue from a MARKETING point of view.  Employee retention should be a critically important issue for any company’s marketing plan.  Simply stated, employees are (or at least, should be) any company’s number one brand ambassadors.  Every single employee of a company is an invaluable marketing asset, growing in value each year they are with a company.  Employee turnover is MORE than an administrative cost.  Employee turnover literally drains a company’s marketing budget.   Now, that’s an attention-getting concept.

So, plan to deal with the factors affecting turnover in the near future.  Talk with Boomers who may be considering retirement soon.  Develop plans to allow these valuable workers to move into new roles, where their knowledge, ambassadorship and mentoring skills can be utilized in flexible and mutually satisfying arrangements.  Recognize what is important to Gen-X, Gen-Y and Millennials; develop a culture of recognition and appreciation, offer work-life balance,  involve workers in decision-making and be sure to schedule and budget just plain FUN. Check out www.EmployeeRetentionStrategies.com for more information.    Forward this to your Marketing Director and tell her/him that you want part of the company’s marketing budget to go towards employee retention!  It all about marketing!

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Competition has gotten unusually fierce in the last decade. It seems like we’re all working harder. I know that price pressures have never been stronger, as Wal-mart chases Mom and Pop’s out of business because they can’t compete on price. But it seems to me that the focus on price has left a casualty and a marketing opportunity.

This came to me the other day as I struggled for the 40th time to fix the picture on my TV. When I built my house, I paid extra for a subcontractor to pre-wire it so I could easily hang an LCD TV on the wall. (I thought that was pretty smart of me, considering I didn’t own one and couldn’t afford one at the time.) The builder, Toll Brothers, subcontracted to a company called LifeStyle Technologies. They were growing really quickly at the time, and had the contract to wire all 1,400 houses in my rapidly growing subdivision. What a deal, right?

Now, three years later, I’m crawling under my house trying to find the reason my picture is all wavy. As I follow the wiring, I notice this written on it: “Low voltage computer cable.” Low voltage computer cable? It was supposed to be component video cable, the stuff in the picture above. That’s all I needed.

LifeStyle Technologies used cheap stuff to save a couple of bucks. Now that I have to replace it, I see that 100 feet of what I need is only $73.00. I paid exactly 10 times that for the wiring. So what could they have saved by ripping me off with cheap cable, $20? 2.7% of what I paid them for the TV wiring alone?

Guess what? LifeStyle Technologies went from one of the hottest companies around 4 years ago to being out of business today. I guess that’s because the cut corners.

The BEST marketing strategy is word of mouth. Apparently, enough people spoke badly about LifeStyle’s practices to chase them out of business. I’ll be crawling under my house this weekend to wall-fish replacement cables.

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