A business reporter recently asked for my thoughts on building positive ties with ex-employees, so I turned my interview comments in to the piece below. As you’ll see, the answer is simple to understand, but complicated to accomplish.
The solutionis to create positive relationships with all employees from the moment they accept your job offer. This concept must be a credible core value and a visible part of your workplace culture:
- Also maintain a positive employee performance culture. Clearly define expectations, regularly evaluate.
- Create a proactive employee communication commitment from the top down and be one of its champions.
- Also maintain a positive employee performance culture. Clearly define expectations, regularly evaluate performance and fairly reward results.
- Be more than their boss; be their Success Coach and Mentor. Embrace the philosophy that you can’t succeed in your job until you help all of your team to succeed in their jobs.
- Collaborate on a creating a Career Development Plan with each of them, realizing that at some point, their best next step might be with another organization. Enjoy the reputation of being a committed developer of people.
- Wish them well when they do leave and keep in regular contact, especially the ones you would rehire if you could. Write a referral letter that is appropriately honest, but as positive as possible.
- Add them to your regular LinkedIn network and include your recommendation in their profile. Same for the other social media channels they use.
- When that better opportunity in your shop comes up that they would probably like and succeed at, reach out and invite them in for interviews. Often, the most loyal and appreciative employees are those who left for something better, but realized they were better off where they were and returned.
One interesting side effect of creating the above workplace culture is that you may have fewer former employees to keep in touch with because more people will love working for you. Nice problem to have.