Fulfilling factors count in the long term
By Margaret Steen
hat makes one person stay with a company for the long term and another leave after just a year or two? According to our survey, the key combination for employee retention is challenging work and a competitive compensation package. When we looked at the respondents who had changed jobs in the past year and compared them with those who had been with their companies longer, there were few dramatic differences, and their top motivations remained relatively consistent.
When asked why they had stayed with their current company, the 43.5 percent of respondents who had been with their companies for less than three years ranked compensation ahead of work assignments that allowed them to grow. However, for the 56.5 percent of respondents who had been with their current company for three years or more, challenging work assignments were the top reason, followed by compensation.
The director of human resources at a biotech company on the West Coast confirms that challenging work is a major reason that many of her company's researchers stay with the company.
"People stay because of the uniqueness of the research that they're doing," the HR director says. "Scientists like to work on cutting-edge kind of stuff. We give our most sexy projects to our best people."
Benefits -- both formal and informal -- can play an important role as well. For example, although only 26 percent of our survey respondents told us that they chose their current company because it offers flexible work schedules, 35 percent cited flexibility as a reason they have stayed. At Lotus Development, in Cambridge, Mass., employee surveys have shown that benefits such as on-site day care are important to those who use them, says Liz Spada, director of compensation and recruiting at Lotus.
"People have said nothing matters more," Spada says, adding that some employees have turned down lucrative job offers elsewhere to keep these benefits.
Jan Jackman, vice president of strategy for IBM's ISP global industry unit, in White Plains, N.Y., and a company employee since 1982 (with a one-year hiatus), says that, in the end, a combination of factors have made her stick with the company: "the salary, the options, the things that make you feel that you're valued, [being able to] implement your ideas."
