It takes more than training to keep good employees

Posted by: Matt Rivera

A recent Wall Street Journal article highlights the fact that some companies are increasing their training programs to build better existing employees rather than relying only on recruiting new ones.

The reasoning is sound, however I would point out that along with training, other efforts are necessary to ensure you are retaining these workers after they have been trained.

We’ve all seen it. The company sends someone to training, or they enter an internal development program, and six months later they leave because they got a better job elsewhere.

What went wrong? In some cases, there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s natural for someone to seek new skills, which often leads to new ideas, directions, or motivations, and sometimes, ultimately, the desire for a new job.

In other cases, the company might believe the employee will stay loyal to them and feel a debt of gratitude for the training or enrichment that’s been provided. Unfortunately, that gratitude can be short-lived if the right offer comes along.

Training and employee development are great (and should be brought back after many programs were cut in the past few recessionary years), but there are a couple of other ingredients that I would add to ensure you are truly effective in retaining employees:

• Engagement. Develop the whole employee. That means looking for opportunities to understand your employee’s motivation, work experience, and career path at your company. Manage their expectations of how they will be regarded after the training (i.e., new position, new title, other employees reporting to them, etc.). Make sure that conversation happens before the training, even if nothing will change.
• Opportunities. Where’s the carrot? Employees need a vision for what opportunities exist within the company — preferably ones that are better or at least comparable to what they can find outside the company. If they don’t have any idea how their new skills could be used inside the company, they will undoubtedly start looking outside the company.

Lastly, while this trend toward increasing training is certainly good news, I think that right now, many companies have been hesitant to increase investment in training at a time when many top performers are leaving for other jobs. As a result, many are more focused on recruiting.

I say, don’t hesitate. Do both. Look for new employees with the skills you need, and develop the employees you have. Just make sure you have other efforts in place to ensure your employees are engaged and have a vision of other opportunities within your company.

And if you can’t focus on both, figure out which one makes more sense to focus on (probably engagement) and outsource the other one.