Retaining Top Talent – Collaboration

Retaining top talent in a competitive industry can be a challenge for senior management. Yet, its importance cannot be overstated. Loss of employees affects customer satisfaction, coworker satisfaction, sales and overall reflects poorly on the health of your company. Further, the loss of knowledge, training expenses and the affect on your succession planning adds to the cost of failing to retain key employees. By offering your employees a chance to collaborate, you can keep the top ones around longer.

One of your best employees is leaving and you’re not entirely sure why. He performed at the top, consistently delivering against every assignment you handed him. His yearly evaluations were always positive and included discussion of advancement and additional challenges. He got along with everyone and demonstrated clear leadership. He was a star employee, seemed happy and seemed like a good long term fit. At his exit interview with HR, you discover the real reason he’s going across town to your competitor. In a word, it’s “collaboration.”

Collaboration

is a buzzword that has risen to significance over the past few years with the growth of the sharing economy and the open workspace. But, what does collaboration really mean and why do your best employees want a collaborative workplace?

According to Jesse Lyn Stoner of Sea Point Center for Collaborative Leadership, true collaboration is often confused with coordination and cooperation.

Collaboration

is working together to create something new in support of a shared vision. A group of team members bring their individual expertise to achieve a common goal and create something new.

Coordination

is sharing information and resources so that each member can accomplish their part in support of a mutual objective. It is more about teamwork in implementation and not about creating something new.

Cooperation is when individuals share relevant information and resources in support of each other’s goals. It is not focused on a shared goal. There is no collective team effort.

The best employees seek work that is challenging. They want to use their skills and expertise to solve problems. They don’t like simple assignments merely handed to them. They also want to feel that their contributions are part of something greater, that their efforts are contributing to the success of the company and ultimately their own success.

At NextGen, we challenge all of our employees to identify problems and opportunities and to work together to find solutions. We foster an environment where it’s everyone’s responsibility to maintain our relationships with clients and candidates. We use the tools of teamwork, coordination and cooperation to foster collaboration. It’s within this spirit of collaboration that we’ve developed a work environment with one of the lowest turnover rates in the industry. If you focus part of your effort on fostering collaboration among employees and senior leaders, you too can better retain your top employees.

About NextGen

NextGen is the brainchild of longtime telecom professionals with nearly 50 years of experience and millions of dollars in Telecom Recruiting Services. We focus on establishing long term relationships with our clients and candidates so we can recruit the best and the brightest in the telecom industry. This ‘quality over quantity’ approach is at the heart of everything we do and has resulted in successful job placements at Fortune 1000 firms worldwide.