Long-Term Loyalty Should Not Be Your Goal

Other companies keep luring your employees away, even though you’ve tried to keep them around with new compensation programs, fast-tracked career paths, enhanced training opportunities, and more. How do you get people to stay?

You can adopt a market-driven retention strategy that begins with the assumption that long-term, across-the-board employee loyalty is neither possible nor desirable. To adopt the new strategy, you first have to accept the new reality: the market, not your company, will ultimately determine the movement of your employees.

The old goal of HR management—to minimize overall employee turnover—needs to be replaced by a new goal: to influence who leaves and when. To have influence in this area, you must make truly honest assessments of how long the organization would like employees to stay on board. Different groups of employees warrant very different retention efforts.

SOURCE:Excerpted and Reprinted by permission of HarvardBusiness Review, “A Market-Driven Approach to Retaining Talent,” by PeterCapelli, January/February 2000.