Stop trying to retain employees

Every CEO I know is worried about employee retention. The questions are almost always the same. How do we reduce turnover? How do we keep our best people from leaving? How do we compete when another employer offers a dollar or two more an hour? After spending much of my career designing and commissioning factories, I think we’re taking the wrong approach. We should focus on how building a company employees wouldn’t want to leave in the first place. In manufacturing, turnover has become so common that many companies simply accept it as part of doing business. For some functions such as consumer electronics contracting, labor-intensive food processing, and temp heavy/light manufacturing and assembly, the lowest-paid positions turn over at more than 100% every year. In these cases, this means every one of those jobs is refilled annually—sometimes more than once. Companies often measure turnover by the stack of applications they process and the number of drug tests they pay for. They budget for churn because they’ve come to expect it. I don’t think we should accept this. When our team walks into a factory to develop an automation strategy, you may be surprised that one of the first th…