How to Scare Off Your Best Employees

I’ve always had amazing employers throughout my career. Until I didn’t. Most of my managers were flexible and cared about their employees. They always tried to do the right things for them, even if it was difficult. I’d watch other people in other industries slog through a barrage of bad corporate decisions and bad cultures, always feeling incredibly lucky to work at places where I had a lot of perks and freedoms. But, even good employers can change for the worse and bad ones can change for the better. If you’re an employee seeing any of these signs, it’s likely time to think about moving. If you’re an employer and you find yourself doing the following, it’s time to evolve before you lose your best employees. Here are some things that tend to scare off your best and brightest.

Take Away Inexpensive, But Beloved Perks

At a company I recently worked for, the tech team got together roughly every other week for lunch ‘n learns. We’d pull up a video or have one of our own engineers give a talk. We’d order lunch and would collectively listen, learn, and have great conversations about the topic afterwards. Everyone universally loved the practice. It probably cost the company a couple hundred dollars per lunch. It was fairly inexpensive for the amount of good it did.

I, as a manager, loved it too because when prospective employees asked me if we had a culture of learning, I could always talk about lunch ‘n learns. When I did, I saw the candidates’ faces light up immediately. They saw the value of what we were doing. Nearly every year, I would get a request to come talk to HR about the lunch ‘n learns. They seem like an easy thing to cut when we’re looking for cost-savings. So, I’d have to defend the practice each and every time.

Unfortunately, I found out from several current employees that they just put new restraints on how many lunch ‘n learns the team can hold. It’s still fairly generous, but some employees are upset because it seems like the beginning of a slippery slope. Next year, will the budget be cut again? We’d had other perks reduced over the years (special vacation days in the summer, for one), so employees think they see a pattern here.

To employers, I say be careful about taking away relatively inexpensive items that have a big impact on overall happiness. Lunch ‘n learns are perhaps one of our practices that gave us the most bang for our buck morale-wise. Sure, it cost the company real money, but that’s nothing compared to employees leaving or missing out of a great recruit. Removing simple things like lunch ‘n learns, a day off, learning reimbursement, or special yearly celebrations have big psychological consequences. Employees might “get over it” in the short-term, but it plants a seed that maybe things at the company are going backwards and perhaps it’s time to answer that recruiter that just pinged them on LinkedIn.

Tolerate Below Average Work

One bad hire really can ruin an entire office. In the capstone course I teach at UW-Madison, students form teams of 4-5 students and work on a project all semester for a corporate partner. I have seen first-hand how much one person not pulling their weight can bring an entire team down. Not only does the team become less productive, but good engineers can start to feel resentful. “How come he can get away with doing so little while I’m busting my butt over here?”

Having a plan to address performance issues quickly is key to having and keeping an amazing culture. Hiring well in the first place is important too. I used to always tell my teams that if an interviewee wasn’t a “hell yes”, then the answer should be no. Good culture comes from finding and keeping great people so they can work with other great people.

Don’t Trust Them

Good employees get their jobs done well no matter when or where they work. My rule is always that if you’re there for your team and get your work gets done, I don’t care much about how you do it. You might want to travel for a couple of months or move to Alaska. That’s fine as long as your team can still rely on you.

So many companies are requiring employees to come back into the office these days. Just last week, Amazon announced they are now requiring employees to be in the office five days a week! Good people don’t need micromanagers watching them every second of the day. If your work situation doesn’t allow you to work in the ways that make you happiest and most creative, then you don’t do your best work. Not trusting them forces your good, trustworthy employees to seek work elsewhere. Remember, good people work well no matter what and those are the people you want to stay at your company. Get rid of the employees that don’t fit into your culture well and stop punishing your good people for the bad behavior of others.

Don’t Open Up Interviews

This was one of the reasons I left my most recent company. We had two C-suite positions open at the same time: our CFO and CEO were both planning to retire. Not very many people knew this. Our CEO found a qualified CFO candidate through his connections. We did interview him, but didn’t open interviews up for anyone else. For the CEO position, the same thing happened. Except that for that position, the Senior Executive team hired a friend they knew from a past job. They didn’t involve HR or post the jobs online.

This probably happens all of the time, especially at private companies. The problem, however, is that you run the risk of hiring sub-optimally. In these cases, this company happened to only consider and hire white men. The new CEO had no SAAS software product experience. We missed out on potentially hiring someone who actually knew how to run a software company and we also missed out on potentially hiring someone with a more diverse background and more diverse experiences. I spoke up at the time, but our CEO gave me some decent reasons for not opening up those jobs. I was satisfied for about one minute and have never felt good about it since. One of my biggest regrets is not blowing the whistle on that process. This, right here, is one of the reasons we don’t have more diversity in our C-Suites. This has got to stop.

There’s another major problem with this practice: it prevents good people from the inside from being promoted into better roles. When good employees see executive positions being hired from the outside, they realize there’s no way to grow. I remember seeing this happen at National Geographic over a decade ago too. Everyone wants to work there, so they had no issues hiring experienced executives from outside of the organization. They almost exclusively did that. Even though I was a fairly low-level individual contributor at the time, I got the message loud and clear: this was not going to be a place where I could grow my career for long.

Fail to Innovate

No great employee wants to work for a company that’s isn’t doing something exciting. You can stick a middle-aged engineer who wants to coast to retirement on a legacy product, but you can’t keep an enthusiastic, learning-oriented engineer on a team like that for long.

One of the things I love about Marty Cagan’s product operating model books is that he gives us a blueprint for how to build great products that customers love and how to make sure those products are innovative. All teams should be deeply in touch with their customers’ needs. And all teams should have a set of problems they’re trying to solve for those customers. If you can remove the bureaucracy between teams and their customers, you can create an environment where engineers can use their expertise around what the latest technologies can do, to build something highly valuable for those customers. If you’re not being innovative, your teams will atrophy and your good people will leave.