Retain Employees by Re-recruiting Them Daily

This is step three of People Ink’s values-based leadership model for creating great organizational cultures.

• Principle One: Define your corporate culture by starting with a values blueprint.
• Principle Two: Hire “A” players who mirror the values of your organization.     The hiring model.

Great, you have successfully defined your company’s core values and associated behaviors, you have or are are beginning to hire “A” players on your team. But it isn’t enough just to hire “A” players. You must continually exceed the expectations of your people and re-recruit them every day. Don’t make the mistake of failing to recognize or spend time with “A” players. Leaders often assume “A” players don’t require attention. Most leaders invariably spend the majority of their time with “C” players trying to change their behavior. In our experience, “C” players are people who are in the wrong job at the wrong time. And most likely, they can not, or will not, change their behaviors.

Listen to your employees

A few simple strategies will help engage your employees. By listening to your employees, you will learn what they value the most. With this information, you can design reward and recognition programs that will create a competitive advantage in your market. Effective rewards involve both the financial and emotional paycheck. Most companies under-utilize the powerful value of the emotional paycheck. Use creativity to design a flexible rewards package that meets individual, workforce, and business needs.

“Mary K. Ash was one of my favorite people. I got to meet her before she passed away in Dallas. She had Mary Kay cosmetics and was a brilliant leader. And she says there are two things that people want more than sex or money and that is recognition and praise. You may not agree with that, but I think she’s right.” … Ann Rhoades

At Southwest and JetBlue, recognizing people is worth a lot. They don’t give lots of cash rewards, but they give tons of recognition. They have “stroke sheets”, that you can send to the department heads and right to the CEO that tells what someone did. They immediately generate a letter to that employee to say thank you.

And the interesting thing is they actually send the letters to their home, because they want to engage their families. And then employees bring them back to work. So they get a two for one, with other employees seeing it.

The next step of People Ink’s five step model is about Customer Transparency. A great deal has been written about customer service. But in our experience, transparency is the differentiating factor between good and great customer service companies.

Ann Rhoades’ book “Built On Values, creating an enviable culture that outperforms the competition” will be released next year filled with many useful ideas and tools.

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