Retaining Great Staff

By Joe Hungler on May 28th, 2008

After yesterdays post on hiring staff, here are some links about retaining great staff. I heard Jim Collins at BGCA’s National Conference. He said that great organizations had a double hump. They have a lot of people who had worked there less than a year and many who had been there more than 5 years. There wasn’t much in between. That meant that they did a good job of retaining their key staff. It also meant they got rid of bad fits right away. I think that is critically important. It is hard to be that honest and let people go right away, but as Collins research pointed out, it was a common theme for all the great organizations he looked at (I don’t think the work is published yet). Here are some links on retention.

The Practice of Leadership has research on what key staff value. I think non-profits often excel at 4 out of the 6 that he lists (Job Fulfillment/Challenge, Total Compensation Opportunities for Advancement, Being Linked to Business Results, Good Work/Life Balance, Integrity). There are few that get greater Job Fulfillment or challenge than those working in the non-profit world There are plenty of opportunities for advancement (Perspectives from the Pipeline on the Non-Profit Leadership Crisis). Front line staff get to see the results on a daily basis. Most non-profits have high level of integrity as well, although some do think that the ends justify the means. Non-profits do struggle with Total Compensation for obvious reasons. Good Work-Life Balance is also a struggle since we are filled with idealists who want to save the world. The nature of the business makes it difficult as well (being open until 9:00 p.m. to serve teens or similar is hard on family life). We work as hard as we can to be flexible and provide a family friendly work environment. The hardest part is modeling good work life balance J.