How to make great employees feel special

The secret to employee retention is not to reinvent the wheel, but to emulate the practices used by organizations that are successful at keeping their staff.

Two such organizations are Marriott Hotels and Southwest Airlines. Both have extremely low staff turnover, while consistently posting profits.

The underlying basis of their success is that they provide for the basic emotional needs of their employees in a manner that creates lasting ties to the organization.

Both organizations believe that if you take good care of your employees, they will take good care of their customers. As Maya Angelou said, “People will often forget what we said, but never how we made them feel.”

Employees come first

Publicly, both organizations have defied the usual “customer first” strategy and state that their employees come first. They have discovered that the best way to ensure customer satisfaction is to have happy, motivated employees, which will result in having people who have a strong vested interest in keeping customers satisfied.