Lesson 04 - Employee Retention - It’s just lunch! ( Not the dating service)

I spent 40+ years working in the controls industry for Siemens. Let me share some lessons I learned along the way.  Lesson 04

Employee retention is always a hot topic and even more important now that it is so hard to find people to hire.

Many companies have put in retention goals and programs and try to figure out how to keep people from leaving.

Most people leave because of a boss, not a company. If your turnover is high, you should start by changing how you deal with your employees. In lesson #3, I talked about listening and working with your employees on their issues.

Lesson #4 is easy and very effective. Take your employees out to lunch. Really it's that simple, don't underestimate this!

If you have someone (or many people) working at a job site, let them know you are coming out to see them and that lunch is on you. It always amazed me how much people are motivated and excited about their boss/supervisor taking them out to lunch. If it is people working within your  office (not on a job site), just let them know in advance what the plan is.

You don’t have to talk about work or the project they are working on, but it will probably happen anyway. If the lunch takes longer than the normal time, don't rush them to get back to work.

Think about it - If you have ever gone to lunch with your boss, didn't  it make you feel good? You felt like he/she cared a little bit more, and recognized you just a little bit more. You felt a little less like ‘just a worker”. Your employees will talk about it with each other and people outside of your team. They will brag about it and talk about how nice it was.

It's important that this is lunch and not dinner - with dinner, you are cutting into their personal time. Lunch is cutting into company time, and they feel the significance of that.

One more important aspect of this - cost. If the company will reimburse you for this lunch, that's great. But if they won’t, just pay for it yourself. These employees are what make you successful. You should be willing to invest a couple hundred dollars in lunches over a year to help make your employees happy and you successful. If you are not willing to invest it, then you need to realize that you may be part of the problem!