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I think it’s really important that a senior leader is well-educated and never naïve about
why great staff leave organisations. It’s easy to say, “Well, we couldn’t compete
with the amount of money that they were offering,” or, “We couldn’t compete with the travel
time that the other job had”; or, “Gen Y hasn’t got a solid work ethic; they just
want everything overnight, and so they’ve gone somewhere else where they think they
can get it.”
These things are all components, but the truth is great people will stay in an environment
which facilitates their greatness which allows them to live into what their capable of. We
need to understand that the baby boomer generation had a long-term approach to their careers,
and they’re actually now moving out of the workforce due to their age. We’ve still
got a culture in many organisations that says, “Yes well, you grow slowly through your
career.”
Well, Gen Y is coming through, and Gen Y never had to go to use the catalogue cards in their
library to find a book. They could just Google. They’re quick on everything. When they come
into an organisation, they expect growth in a short period of time in their career and
a whole lot of environments so much so they look to companies like Google. They see how
that company is set up with their funky workspace and their ability to allocate time every day
or once a week to producing their own projects and the like.
They look at that and they go, “That’s an attractive company. I want to work there.”
Then they look at their environment and go, “This is not it. Oh, this other company
over here, at least they’re going to give me more money or at least it’s closer to
home.” They settle for a cheap top-up, if you like, like a little caffeine fix in their
career, when really great people will stay if they’re in an environment that facilitates
all of their intellect, all of their ability, and how that plays out in the rest of their
life.
At the end of the day, your workplace needs to be, dare I say, more important to them
than oxygen. They need to feel like they can come there and just live and be the full expression
of themselves. So your workplace, the quality of your workplace, what you do to create that
space defines whether or not great people will stay in your organisation.