“Restructuring” is becoming a very dirty word in business. It’s expensive, it loses skilled people, and it adds workload to a reduced staff base. Much worse, it’s wasteful. The new best practice on the employment market is staff retention, and it’s getting a lot of traction around the world.

Restructuring is also becoming a synonym for failure, or in some cases repeat failures. Layoffs are often simply a way of giving away money. Redundancies are extremely expensive, and they don’t exactly help the bottom line. Restructuring and downsizing have been the way out of business for many companies.

Many employers who expected a lot out of restructuring and downsizing simply wound up with a much smaller business and a “structure” which simply lacked the resources to help them rebuild. Worse, they lost the staff which were generating business for them as well, most of which went to their competitors.

The staff retention argument

One of the most common situations, which sometimes drives employment advisors to despair, is the fact that most organizations lose skills as fast as they turn over trained staff and don’t even notice the inevitable downturn in performance. Hiring new people and incurring the “run in” time of getting them up to speed is inefficient, as well as sometimes being unsuccessful.

The fact is that well-trained, experienced staff are cost savers:

• They speak the language of the business
• They know the procedures
• They know the business priorities
• They know how to deal with customers
• They know the policies
• They don’t need to learn/guess their way around complex situations

If a loud mental “Ker-Ching!” went off in your mind looking at those points, you’re 100% right. Experienced staff save employers money, and a lot of it, on a minute-by-minute basis. Just not making mistakes saves businesses a fortune per year. So “restructuring”, used as a tool to lose people that know their way around a business, is effectively throwing money out the window. It’s almost unbelievably wasteful.

Employee retention in a reorganization

“Restructuring” may be a dirty word, but “reorganizing” is pretty much inevitable. The key to employee retention ideas in this context is to make sure the knowledge base, experience and skills are kept intact, as far as possible.

The advantages are almost endless:

• The experienced staff can train other staff.
• They can act as de facto or potential supervisors, freeing up management for other high value tasks.

• The “memory” of the organization resides in the experienced staff, who can provide years of collective knowledge instantly. It’s like having a team of consultants built in, with expert staff.

• The reorganization itself also has to be test driven, and the experienced people are undeniably the best people to do that. They can see the problems and find the solutions.

• Every staff member retained also brings a lot of known skills to the new organizational model.

Employee retention is becoming the “new black” of the global job market. It really does go with everything.

Author Bio: Tom Mallet is an Australian freelance writer and journalist. He writes extensively in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the US. He’s published more than 500 articles about various topics, including staff retention.