When I work as an employee retention trainer doing employee retention training for organizations, I notice that most people are afraid to speak their mind at work. This is tragic. It is tragic for their manager, for the person and for the organization. From an employee retention strategies perspective it is deadly. People are the engine that drives everything in your organization and the ideas that people bring to the table are a major contributor to an organization’s success as well as to how well an organization is able to retain talent. The ideas in people’s head are what differentiates the American worker from their counterpart in Mexico, China and other low wage areas. If people are afraid to speak up…they won’t tell us the great ideas they do have and they won’t tell us when there are concerns that ultimately lead to turnover.
Before I became an employee retention speaker, the vast majority of the ideas that made my department more efficient were generated by the people that worked for me. They knew the way we worked and what could be changed to make things run smoother. They knew the systems that we operated and what it would take to make things hum.
In many cases their ideas also freed me up to be able to concentrate on bigger picture ideas so that I didn’t have to think about running the department day-to-day. They felt empowered and were into their job. I was not bogged down in all the nitty gritty details of running the department and got to do the higher level things most managers only dream about. The more I let them do…the more time I had to do other things.
Because I let people speak their mind, it became a positive vicious cycle instead of a negative one. In the end the results were incredible across a variety of fronts including employee retention strategies.
