While you can (and most are) debate whether the recession is actually ‘over,’ I would caution employers against exhaling too soon. If you’re like most, you’ve been looking at employees through the lens of cost-cutting and termination. Times are changing and it’s time to look through the lens of retention.
I would argue you should never shift focus away from retention, but this is perhaps for another blog post. The reality is that retention has simply not been a priority for most businesses in the past 18 months and that needs to change.
An extraordinary legacy of the recent economic downturn is its creation of a new kind of employee; one who has seen, felt and experienced first-hand the trauma of working inside an organization when the economic world outside is crumbling. These employees are the witnesses. The survivors. And while they’ve been seriously disgruntled for months now (Great Recessions will do that), they’ve stuck around because of limited options elsewhere.
That’s changing.

