The Job Sculpting Method - How to Retain Top Employees and Keep Them Happy

People often love to be told things about themselves. This is because most people do not know things about themselves as well as they should. Even if they do know it, they need someone to verify things for them. Thus, to keep your good employees, you need to have a good grasp of their abilities and capabilities. Not only a good grasp, you need to have a better grasp of them than they themselves. This will enable you to help them pave out the career that they want and in return they will not leave your company because it has benefited them so much. This method of gaining loyal employees is called Job Sculpting.

Job sculpting is seen through the fact that talents will only remain in jobs that help them succeed and fulfill their life ambitions. Their jobs must be challenging and interesting, while not being too stressful at the same time. They need to fell that their passions are being met and most importantly, they need to enjoy what they do.

To implement this method, you need to use much time and effort to listen to your top employees. After all, they are your top employees. If you lose them, you will lose out to your competitors. This is best done in one-to-one conversations over coffee or therapy. You must try to find out their interests, their life goals and then work with them to achieve that within the company. Responsibilities given to them should reflect their interests and drive so that they can be driven to succeed even more. This may mean some short term swapping of jobs or tasks, but it is well worth it to up their loyalty towards the company.

You need the following eight areas as guidelines on what to listen and look out for:

Technology application
Analysis of chemicals
Development of new ideas and thinking
Innovation
Therapy and guiding
Interpersonal management
Leadership
Persuasion and influence

For example, if you have a company star who has been stuck in the area of customer relations for years but seems to be sliding down a little recently, you might learn that they would rather manage a team of personnel rather than liaising with customers. On the other hand, there might be someone who is tired of leading and would rather challenge her self in the area of customer relations. This could be easily achieved by a simple swap of jobs and you are able to make both employees happy again. This also makes them feel as if they have gained something rather than spending most of their waking hours slaving away for a salary.

If your workers are joyful in their jobs, the company morale and enthusiasm will increase, thus indirectly leading to reduced costs for your company. Moreover, if they should leave, you would be hard pressed to find someone just as efficient and talented as they are. More often than not, you would have to train a newbie which will cost you both time and money,

The worst thing a company can face is the lost of a treasured worker to a rival company-and having to fork out more to train a novice. Instead, the time you spend implementing job sculpting will surely pay you back in many ways.

Sources:

1. Butler and Waldoop, "The Job Sculpting Framework", Penguin 1999
2. Tai Neneku, "Managing The Workforce", Stephen-Watson 2000