Talent retention has received a lot of attention in recent years. Companies are doing all they can to make their human assets stick with the company for as long as possible. Maybe you are already taking action to retain people, but yet your members are showing discontent, producing sub-quality work, leaving the company one after the other, and so on. 

If any of these cases are familiar to you, make sure that you or your leaders/management are not doing any of the three no-nos below. It has a lot to do with autonomy.

1. Tie Employees Down With Bond

Just recently, one of my friends told me what a company did to retain its people. They made all their employees sign a three-year bond. No doubt, this is an immediate and effective way to reduce turnover but, going beyond that, the bad side of it is that it irks employees.

Daniel H. Pink, through his decades of scientific research, has narrowed down that one of the factors that motivates employees is autonomy. By tying down your employees with a bond, the autonomy that humans strive for is taken away from them. The frustration that your employees feel will only take your company further and further away from the higher productivity, innovation, great customer service, and other better results that your business wants to possess.

2. Enforce, Instead Of Asking For Feedback

In a thriving work environment, suggestions should be well received from all levels of an organization. If decisions are made without input from ground level, unhappiness is bound to be rife and will linger among your people for a long time.

In a company, if the things that employees do or follow always come from the directions given by the management, the rule of autonomy has broken, again. It could be as simple as negating suggestions/feedback from the staff on ways to improve, the way to make a project work well or how to solve issues. Instead of listening, gathering comments and collectively deciding on matters, when leaders pass down orders without considering all perspectives, employees feel that have no value in the company. With that, it’s not too difficult to understand why employees wouldn’t want to do their best to help the company succeed.


3. Micro-Manage

What exactly is micro-management? It is when a leader closely controls what its team members do. If your company has managers (or higher authorities) doing this, you are most likely to face a high turnover of staff. As mentioned above, it is a human’s inherent nature to crave autonomy.

No doubt, micro-management allows the leaders to follow closely on the progress. But that’s the only benefit. Period.

Over a period of time, it will be tiring and stressful for leaders. They need an update on everything and want to be in control all the time, but there’s a limit to how much one can handle. It is equally unhealthy for employees, as the need to constantly provide updates occupies a significant amount of time, which could be used more productively. Besides, employees’ morale will dip, as there is no trust in their competence from the higher level.

Some of the signs of a micro-manager are:

• You always want to correct whatever your team members have done.
• You are never satisfied with the work that your people have delivered
• Your comments to the team frequently include “You should do …”
• You always ask for email updates or to be cc’d on all emails.

Is your company, or any other company you know of, practicing, at least, one of the above? Stop them, because it is detrimental to the reputation and performance of the company. Employees are the first level of ambassadors for the brand and image of your business. If any of the three no-nos happen, I can assure you that no employee would speak highly about that company. It’s never too late to take action and turn your workplace into one that promotes autonomy, a driver for employee retention.

There are many healthy ways a company can retain its people. It’s a matter of knowing, understanding and observing what works for the organization. And, if you do it through data-backed processes, coupled with successful change-initiatives that are executed with a proven methodology (such as those that InviPulse provides), your chances of improving employee retention and reducing recruitment costs are higher, with the right actions and effort.

Visit the Invipulse page to find out more about Regina's work.

_{This article was first published on Invipulse blog and has been reposted on Executive Lifestyle with the permission of the author. 
Edited by Nedda Chaplin}

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