Ya gotta love anagrams…

I have the “Listen = Silent” one taped to the “legs” of my monitor.  It’s not a strength of mine.  My first “real” manager, Denise Casey once wrote in my performance review “Marc, God gave you two ears and one mouth, use them in that proportion”.  She also told me that I needed to wear socks.

I chose not to go the sock route, it was 1982 and I looked cool in my sock-less penny loafers (yes, with the penny nestled in them)…  The other recommendation is one I have tried to remember and put into practice.  Perhaps that is why I love public speaking, I get to use my mouth as much as I want, heck I even get paid for it…Life is good.

But sometimes I get myself in trouble.

I’m an “employee advocate”, a title a very early client gave me when I first started consulting about issues related to employee loyalty, engagement and retention.  Although I took it as a compliment, one of his colleagues mentioned to me that it wasn’t intended to be a term of endearment.

I’ve always considered myself a customer advocate, since I position my company as one which helps prove the link happy employees make for loyal customers who buy more stuff.  The fact that I have decided to dedicate my career (and a couple of books) to the employee side of the equation - the “assets with feet” - doesn’t change the fact that I’m someone who wants to assist in proving the Return on Investment of any company initiate designed to improve the bottom line.

And that’s what got me into trouble.

One of my clients was putting together a training program with a sizable budget, and by sizable, I mean big. Lots of time, lots of cash.  Looking at the training schedule and the list of associates to be included, I noticed that the majority of training was going to groups in the organization that would be considered “fully engaged”; strong commitment to the organization and a strong desire to go the extra mile for customers.

So, I opened my mouth in a meeting I was invited to (sigh).  I asked the training director why very few of the groups that we had classified as reluctant(reluctant to leave and reluctant to work hard) or unengaged(halfway out the door) were included in the training schedule.  My client (also in h.r.) raised his eyebrows and kinda scootched his chair back from the table.  Uh oh.

“Marc, why would we ever spend money on employees who are planning to leave anyway”?

Because they will leave later…

“So, we are going to train our employees and then they are going to leave anyway”?

Would you rather not train them and have them stay?  It’s simple.  If you know that you have a good performing employee who isn’t actively engaged or worse yet is thinking of leaving your company, why not take the initiative to do something about it before they leave?

“But aren’t we throwing good money after bad”?

No, you are throwing good money after good.  If it costs 50% of a departing employee’s salary to get a new employee up to departing employee’s productivity, why not take a proactive approach to trying to get them to stay, even if they only stay another 6 months to complete the training?

My h.r. contact bellied back up to the table, smiling.

“So what you are saying is that we should look at including some of the staff that we know aren’t happy in their current job in our training plans, with the goal of getting them to stay longer”?

Yes, get them to stay because they want to, not because they feel they have to.

Whew.  Sometimes listening and then talking really does work. I should send Denise Casey some flowers…