Why Retaining Staff Is Not Always For The Best

For most companies, the idea of losing talented staff and having to spend time and money on recruitment is a complete nightmare. Every business book will tell you the same thing – retaining staff will only bring you benefits. It doesn’t always have to be this way, though.

Here at Xplore Life Science, we pride ourselves on our ability to think outside the box. We often hear from our clients telling us how terrible it is to lose their talent unexpectedly, but we encourage them to think outside the box too – that is, retaining staff is not always for the best. It is most of the time – don’t get us wrong. But we can give you some reasons why it might not be.

Keep on reading for our take on the matter.

Save Money

Not everything is about money, but a lot of things are. We’re in business, after all, and making money is the main objective.

The important thing here is that retaining staff usually means giving that person a raise in their salary. We’re not talking small raises here, either. To make someone stay in a place they don’t want to stay, you have to make it worth their while – you have to give them a considerable salary raise.

Is the person you want to keep worth the money? You could bring in someone else for the same salary or maybe even less. Once you raise one person’s salary, it can have a bit of a snowball effect – you often have to raise other salaries as well once other employees get word of it.

Loyalty

Let’s put it plain and simple here. Do you really want someone working for you who doesn’t want to be there? We’re not talking about people not wanting to be at work and just staying home – we’re talking about people who are actively looking for ways out of your business, people who are talking to other companies and are ready to leave at any moment.

When employees get to this stage, there’s no way they’re doing their best work. It isn’t mentally possible. Even if you hike up their salary and give them other benefits too, it will probably only be a temporary thing – sooner or later, they’ll be knocking at your office door again.

Improve The Culture

Following on from our last point, if you let go of people who don’t really want to be there, you might find that the culture of your office or workforce gets an unexpected uplift.

At the end of the day, when you have one bad egg in a batch, that negativity is likely to spread to others. That bad egg is probably telling other staff members all about how they want to leave, why they want to leave, and what they’ve seen on offer elsewhere, leading to another snowball effect of staff all handing in their notices.

Bring In New Ideas

Bringing in new talent is all about bringing in new ideas into the business. All it takes is a slightly different outlook from your new employee, and you could revolutionise your procedures and strategies.

You have to weigh up whether the person leaving has very niche knowledge that you can’t afford to lose, or if they’re perhaps just a little stuck in their ways and you could replace them with someone more original.

Take Everything Into Consideration

For us, taking everything into consideration is the most important thing to do when trying to decide whether retaining staff or letting them go is the best option. Go through everything on our list and try to weigh up whether these points may play a factor when making your decision.

Some of the points may be more pertinent than others, and you have to decide whether they will affect your business. For example, if you’re not in need of saving money, but you really value loyalty, you still might want to let that person go.

We Can Help

If you’ve decided to let an employee go and now you’re wondering how to replace them, we can help with that. We’re experts in recruitment for the life science and pharmaceutical sectors, and we know how to source the very best talent.

Tell us exactly what sort of candidates you’re looking for, and we won’t settle for anything less. We pride ourselves on our philosophy of getting to know our talent on a personal level before we try to match them to any jobs. Get in touch with us now to see what we can do for

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