A co-worker (fortunately not in HR) was kind enough to provide a set of employee retention guidelines. Most are already widely used in the industry, though a company that can wield them all is truly fearsome.
As any half-decent HR course will teach you, branding will not actually keep cows, err, “employees” from wandering off. It does help you get them back if you lose them, but the real key to retention of livestock, errr, “human resources,” is having good fences. Keep ’em penned in, and you’re in good shape! So how to keep employees from leaving? Easy! Below I present a handy list of ten options. Any one of these is good, but use as many as possible for maximum effect.
- Locate in a small town where there are no other jobs or;
- Locate in a town with expensive real estate so the fear of going into default on a huge mortgage keeps them from quitting.
- Overpay the really good people so that they can’t afford to switch jobs. (Har har! Just kidding.)
- Hire dullards that no one else would hire, and then you don’t have to worry about them getting jobs elsewhere.
- Stupefy the workforce with tactical missteps, repeated strategic blunders and general insensitivity. Done over a period of years, it greatly reduces their self-esteem, and they lose the will to improve their lot in life.
- Merge with a huge company that is run by bean-counters and staffed with shell-shocked survivors of several years of post-bubble layoffs and hemorrhage-like offshoring.
- Ask employees to remove vacation from their account today that they will take in September. Now you know you’ve got some of them hooked at least until then. Of course, if someone would fall for this, you probably already retained these kinds of people with #4 above. This might be redundant, but why take the chance?
- Give the CEO a huge raise at about the time that the company reports a massive loss. The really twisted employees will ignore a red flag like this, and stick around like rubberneckers at a car crash.
- Allow employees to 100% vest in all of their underwater stock options. This gives them the ability to take a huge capital gains loss for tax purposes. This is a “goodwill” gesture that will leave them swooning with loyalty.
- Move to a new building and put managers in offices and leave the low-level “headcount” in cubicles. Employees *love* this kind of arrangement, especially if it also makes their commute a bigger hassle. As an added bonus, it carries the ranching metaphor a little further, as they appear to be in veal hutches.