HOW TO RETAIN EMPLOYEES

How do we retain employees? This is part three of a three-part series that we started with "Why Do People Leave Their Job?", and that was followed by "What Drives Us?" We've covered different meta programs that we found were connected with whether people feel comfortable or not filling a position, or if they are at the right place.

As seen in part one, what happens is that on the first day of your job, you think: "Oh, please like me." And you want everybody at work to like you, and then the on 91st day, you think: "Oh, I hate you so much." What happens inside these 90 days that make people change their mind so drastically, and how can we prevent that? Watch the following video or keep reading for more...

Part One HERE

Part Two HERE

1. Prevent

If you are an employer, you can't just let everyone go, and if you are an employee, you can't just keep quitting your job all the time. It's better if you start learning more about yourself and do a better job right away before you start working for an organization.

The prevention piece starts with the hiring process. When you are conducting an interview, there are different questions that you can ask in order to be able to recognize peoples' meta programs. Try to find what their rule structure is, what their affiliation work style is, what their scope is, if they will go into emotions or into feeling when faced with a stressful event...

I do conduct a lot of interviews like this with corporations. They narrow down their choices to four or five candidates, and I interview these candidates in order to identify their meta programs. This way, we can find the best candidate for the position. Prevention is part of the solution!

2. Identify

Arrows and orange target, business success and goal

The second piece is to identify the actual meta programs of the people that are already in place. Very often, we are looking to fill a position without even wondering about the people who are already there. If you are looking to hire someone for a position and your criteria are based strictly on tasks and on the candidates' resumes, then there could be some frictions in the team, or an incomplete department, for example.

If you already have a few people in that department that are a big picture, then you need to go get some people that are detailed oriented in order to compliment that. Try to identify, in the position that you're looking to fill, what is missing in your organization, of course, but also what could complement the team.

Most people don't leave their job.

They leave the coworker they can't stand, or the boss they don't respect.

I do some specific one-on-one interviews with the actual staff and the team to figure out what is everybody's meta programs so that we can find out if, one, everybody's at the right place, and two, what the team needs.

3. Rectify

Let's say we identified that some people in our team are in management positions, and they shouldn't be, because their meta programs shows that this is not really what drives them. They don't like conflict, they don't like to be in charge of other people, they like to work alone and do their own thing... There are lots of positions that are filled because of the salary that's attached to it, or because of seniority, and not because they actually fit the position's criteria.

It was once thought that meta programs were set in stone, but they are not. There are different processes that we can use one-on-one with people to help them change. By understanding their own meta programs, we can tell them what to be aware of and what specifically to work on when they seem to be stuck in their meta program.

Organizations are built with so many different personality styles, and it is very important to understand that everybody has a different brain and we can, more than we thought was possible, plan all this. We can plan personalities to fit well together and make peoples' internal drivers work for the benefit of the corporation while keeping them happy and true to who they are.

Meta programs are a fascinating topic. Once again, there are a lot more of them than the ones I went over last week, and they will be an upcoming blog topic for sure, but for now, I hope you enjoyed the new learnings! They are our internal drivers and they are what keep us from just staying in bed and not wanting to get up. Hopefully, you had a good time reading about them!