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Summary: Excellent, easy & practical "how-to" on retention strategies
Review: Practical, fun, fast reading "how-to" book filled with great retention strategies from A to Z. For every manager, supervisor or boss.....corporate, retail, manufacturing. This is the best book on the subject and will be well used.
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Summary: Easy Does It!
Review: Readers who think this text is strictly for managerial types and/or upper-echelon executives should think again! As a high school teacher who manages a classroom, students, and curriculum, as well as administrative directives and state guidelines, I found the book an easy as well as an insightful read. First of all, the format is appealing. The 8 inch x 9-1/4 inch size makes the text easy to carry and to hold; the pages offer much white space framing as well as easy to read type, and consistent coloring of black/white/blue, all arranged attractively in terms of layout and shading. Readers can immediately determine major headings, sub-headings, details, examples, and practical suggestions. The clip art on the pages symbolically reinforces the organization and content while it focuses the eyes. Second, the contents are set up in an interesting fashion. Each chapter begins with a letter of the alphabet, focusing on a specific aspect of management and/or retnetion. For example, Chapter 1 is "Ask What Keeps You?" while the second chapter is entitled "Buck It Stops here." However, the Introduction to the text provides the focus for all chapters because it introduces readers to "A. J.," an hypothetical employee, "critical and solid," who has just submitted his letter of resignation listing a number of reasons for his impending departure. Then, as each chapter unfolds, readers again meet A. J., but, now, the meeting is in terms of one of his reasons for quitting. Here is where the information and anecdotes become insightful for "managers" in terms of how they can keep "critical and solid" employees: for example, ask why an employee is leaving, or, better yet, ask current employees why they stay. I particularly enjoyed this strategy because it personalized the content for me; I could envision an actual employee or employer experiencing frustrations in the workplace. Now, for non-managerial types like me, I had no problem relating the content to my teaching assignment. In fact, I was delighted when I came upon suggestions already a part of my "style." After all, students are more likely to succeed if teachers can "keep" their interest. I suspect the academic community would benefit from this "easy read," especially new or relatively inexperienced teachers, who have been inundated with educational theory, but who are essentially without practical approaches to handling people and information.
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Summary: Remarkably good: as entertaining as it is informative.
Review: Star Bright, Star FlightWhat more is there to say about retention? The facts are as familiar as they are stark. Barring a sudden financial cataclysm, the U.S. is rapidly approaching an era of full employment, likely to last through much of the next decade. At the same time, a drop in the birth rate a generation ago means there are fewer workers to go around; indeed, the pool of available 35- to 44-year-olds - the people usually selected for middle-manager and emerging-leader jobs - will plummet by 15 percent between now and the year 2015. Unswerving company loyalty, whether motivated by fealty or fear, has evaporated in the pressure cooker of 1980s downsizing and 1990s employee expectations. Whatever you call the competition for talent - war, race, prizefight, gymkhana - there's little question that good people will grow increasingly scarce and harder to keep as the next century takes hold. Amid all the retention studies and doom-and-gloom prophecies, managers should remember three crucial dicta. - It's not the money. - It could be your fault. - You can do something about it. For many employers these assertions will be lost in a flurry of knee-jerk denials: they don't apply to my company; my employees are as loyal as St. Bernards; I'm perfect, so it's not my problem; it's the economy, stupid. But for those employers who keep their blinders off and their minds open, there's now an outstanding resource and vade mecum. Love 'Em or Lose 'Em is insightful, straightforward, clever, charming, everything you'd want in a companion. Kaye and Jordan-Evans have created a combination between a reference work and a course participant guide, and like a good training course, it's designed to maximize impact through multiple formats. The book is chock-a-block with case studies, to-do ideas, quotations from managers and employees, quizzes, and fictionalized examples. It even features "Alas stories," brief tales of what went wrong to make an employee leave. (There's a certain guilty pleasure in thumbing through to these first.) "Make an employee leave" is the key phrase here. Although there are some people who are peripatetic or impossible to satisfy, Kaye and Jordan-Evans contend that most employees leave either because no one tried to keep them or because something or someone in the company made it too unpleasant to stay. Happy employees - those who have found opportunities, career growth, teamwork, enrichment, kicks, and more - don't jump ship even when someone waves a larger paycheck under their noses. And by taking inspiration from this book, managers can be sure they provide precisely the attractions their employees need to stay and succeed. For readers accustomed to grave and earnest tomes, Love 'Em or Lose 'Em will seem too informal, too friendly, too approachable. And it's true that there are occasional recommendations that seem silly, repetitive, or a tad self-promotional. But for the most part the book is a genuine pleasure to read. What more is there to say about retention? Turn to Kaye and Jordan-Evans and find out.
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Summary: Chock full of gems to keep 'em coming
Review: This approachable, engaging book offers useful, common sense strategies to address one of the most pressing challenges that managers face today. The material is immediately accessible in small, bite sized chunks, a veritable alphabet soup that is easily consumed letter by letter. Not only is the content palatable, but it is downright digestible! The suggestions are practical, doable and outcome driven. A must read for even the busiest of managers who is committed to keeping good employees!
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Summary: Finally: a how-to book real world business people can use.
Review: This book is FUN...and I never thought I could say that about a topic like retention. It's written for real world business people, everday line managers and supervisors dealing with real world people problems, and it gives practical, hands-on tips in a user-friendly way. I appreciated the elegant simplicity of the approach to employee retention, the easy to read layout, and the honesty the authors use in dealing with often difficult situations. And I certainly can understand A.J.'s dilemma: I think we all know her. This book should be a household word for every business household.
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Summary: A comprehensive and easy guide to employee retention
Review: This book takes a comprehensive (literally from A to Z!)and straight-forward approach to employee retention strategies for the busy manager. The strategies are easily referenced and recalled due to the authors clever organization of the book. The book contains numerous cost and time efficient methods of retaining talent using the strategies. Additionally, the authors reference to successful retention strategies utilized by various organizations is particularly insightful. I recommend this book to anyone in charge of retaining top talent in their organization.
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Summary: The Best Cookbook for Leadership
Review: This is a book for the experience or inexperienced leader. While it is written as a set of get-well recipes, the author recommends to take one or two ideas, study the concept, and work these with your team. You will see the results fairly quickly, and you don't need to follow the recipe exactly, either. The book is common sense and is written in an easy-to-read style. It is required reading in our organization.
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Summary: People-centered leadership
Review: This is a book for the experience or inexperienced leader. While it is written as a set of get-well recipes, the author recommends to take one or two ideas, study the concept, and work these with your team. You will see the results fairly quickly, and you don't need to follow the recipe exactly, either. The book is common sense and is written in an easy-to-read style. It is required reading in our organization.
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Summary: Good for the manager who doesn't have time to waste
Review: This is a good practical guide which will probably reinforce some of the smart things you're doing, but will also most likely give you some new ideas. I got some ideas on how to revise our employee attitude survey so that it better addressed the retention issue. I didn't expect that.
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Summary: Great approach to employee motivation
Review: This is definitely a home run. I particularly enjoyed the authors' approaches to dealing with the issues of employee retention and motivation. The solutions presented in this book are well thought out and easy to implement. In addition to this book, recommend a companion book my company uses to encourage the best performance in people at all levels, manager/team member: "The Leader's Guide: 15 Essential Skills."
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