This week, I’ve really been thinking about the organizational commitment of the employees at my company. What does organizational commitment look like and how does leadership impact it?
Over the past year, my company has had a ton of voluntary turnover, and even during the times of COVID-19, we continue to receive resignations. Just last Friday, I learned that two more of our employees resigned. Retention is an area of focus for our leadership team, but are they approaching and acting on it in a meaningful way? This year, as in years past, my company granted equity as a retention tool and even gave a handful of individuals a very sizable retention bonus just for staying at the company through the year.
For these recent two resignations, both employees accepted less pay, and one is taking a role that is lower than her current role. One of the employees, who is highly respected, said the work she was doing is “dumb” work, and the other employee is willing to take a role of lesser status because she is able to see the growth opportunities more clearly. The retention tools put in place for these two employees obviously were not effective. Leadership seems to think that equity and money is the most meaningful way to impact retention, but is it really getting to improving organization commitment? Do we really want employees bound to stay just for money? Is that the type of organizational commitment we want? Will it get us optimal results in terms of performance? The coach in me is happy that these employees took action to "find their happy" at another company - since those needs weren't being met at mine.
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