Long-term employment relationships that are full-time, on-site, uninterrupted, and exclusive are quickly dying out. But that doesn’t mean long-term employment is no longer possible. It simply means that long-term employment must be reinvented. And that means the retention challenge must be redefined. In the new economy, retention means “long-term access to the best work of the best people.” The best employees nowadays are prepared to negotiate and drive a hard bargain. If managers are willing and able to negotiate the terms of employment (not just money) with their best employees, they can often turn the reasons employees leave into reasons why they will stay.

The top five reasons (other than money) that employees voluntarily leave, and how to turn them to your advantage:

1. Managers
Most employees leave because they are unhappy with their boss or manager. The best prevention is to have supervisory managers play the role of performance coach. When preventive measures fail, the challenge is to move the individual contributor into the supervisory orbit of another manager without losing the employee altogether.

2. Schedule
Sometimes people want to work more; sometimes they want to work less. Often they simply want to work the same hours but on flex-time or compressed-time. Even a slight adjustment in schedule is often enough to make an employee stay.

3. Work
Many employees leave because they want to tackle new tasks, responsibilities, or projects. If they can find those new challenges in the same job or, at least, the same organization, often they will stay.

4. Skills
When people feel they have exhausted the learning opportunities where they are, they often leave in search of new ones. Such employees are unlikely to leave when they are learning voraciously on the job, which is one of the reasons why employers must maintain an environment of constant learning. That doesn’t always mean formal training programs or financial support for external education. Other strategies include creating an infrastructure of learning resources and a culture of knowledge work.

5. Location
Sometimes people want or need to work in a different city, region or country, and many employers have the ability to accommodate this need. When an organization is geographically widespread, all it takes is a transfer. The transferring manager will still lose a valued employee, but at least the organization as a whole will retain the employee. Sometimes the relocation that a person wants is to work at home some or all of the time. Whenever practical, retaining an employee as a telecommuter is usually a better result than losing that person altogether.
 

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