Once your organization has invested in recruiting and training an employee, you have a huge stake in retaining that person, even if not as a full-time on-site, uninterrupted, exclusive employee. If you can’t keep the whole employee, why not keep as much as you can? Instead of losing them, offer valued employees the chance to take an unpaid sabbatical, to work part-time or flextime, or as telecommuters or consultants. When valued people leave, stay in touch with them and stay on good terms. Try re-recruiting them after they’ve had a chance to rest or after they’ve had a chance to see that the grass isn’t so much greener on the other side.
Give your best people opportunities to take on new challenges within the company, whether that means moving to a new geographical area, or to a different kind of role, or a whole different business within the organization.
Make it so that people can reinvent themselves and their careers without leaving your organization. If one of your best people really wants a new challenge, a new set of tasks, new learning opportunities, new work relationships, or even just a change of scenery, maybe you can help that person find what she is looking for without ever leaving the company. As hard as it might be for you as a manager to lose a talented employee on your team, that is a giant service to the larger organization and the individual. They definitely remember that you helped them at a key point in their career.
The lesson is - start talking with Gen Yers about retention on day one and keep talking about it. If you are talking with them about how to meet their needs and wants on an ongoing basis, they are much more likely to talk with you at those key points when they are trying to decide whether to leave or stay. If you are willing to work with them, you can be flexible and generous. That’s how you make them want to stay and work harder, at least for a little while longer. Years from now, the Gen Yers who turn out to be long-term employees will be the ones who decided over and over again that they wanted to stay just a little while longer.
