Key Employee Retention: What You Can Do to Keep Your Star Professionals

As legal recruiters who place professionals in both the private and corporate sectors, we are often asked how hiring authorities can better assess the candidates they hire, and, most importantly, keep the key employees they bring on board. As employers, you are all aware that making an ineffective hire or losing a pivotal staff member of your department can prove extremely costly on various levels. This article will examine the soft costs of an employee vacancy to your department and how you can minimize those vacancies by implementing key employee retention safeguards.

To avoid the heavy costs associated with employee vacancies, you must first examine whether your organization has an effective recruitment process. In other words, are you hiring the right candidates from the start? Equally as important, if not more important, is that you must have an effective retention program in place to avoid excessive and unnecessary employee departures. The bottom line is that you cannot afford to lose your star professionals. But, how do you keep these important members of your legal team?

What Can You Do?

There will always be natural attrition in your organization due to factors beyond your control. However, there are some simple preventative measures which you can implement to limit key staff departures. Here is a list of actions your department must take in order to protect your most valuable assets – your key employees.

1. Talk to your employees. Stay in touch with them. Understand their concerns and listen to ideas and suggestions from both group and individual perspectives. If your department is large enough, create employee focus groups to discuss working conditions.
2. Groom strong leaders and mentors who have the ability to train and manage your employees effectively. Hold managers accountable for building strong teams.
3. Offer challenging work assignments. Your employees will take greater pride in meaningful assignments and grow to be better professionals. As a result, they will enjoy greater job satisfaction if they feel they are actually “learning something” and believe that they are making a valuable contribution to the organization and its bottom line.
4. Offer feedback and provide direction where needed. Don’t forget to praise your employees on a job well done and reward exceptional performance with financial incentives and opportunities for promotion.
5. Recognize the realities of career and family commitments and work with your employees to ensure that they are both productive and content in being able to meet these obligations.
6. Ensure that your compensation program is competitive in the marketplace.

In sum, it is imperative to recognize that effective recruitment and successful retention strategies are the key elements to avoiding the negative effects of unwanted staff vacancies. Invest in your recruitment efforts and in your employees once they have come on aboard. The end result will be a substantial increase in both overall productivity of the department and employee loyalty.