Samantha Martin’s small-business nightmare typically stalks her on Gchat.
“It
will be a Wednesday, and an employee messages, ‘Can we talk today?’”
said Ms. Martin, who owns Media Maison, a boutique public relations firm
in Manhattan. “They’ll tell me they weren’t looking, but someone
approached them,” she said. “In this industry, if another company
dangles $5,000 and an opportunity to work on a fashion show, your loyal
employee can be out the door.”
Since
any departure leaves her 14-person team short-handed for weeks, Ms.
Martin tries to be proactive. She meets frequently with individual staff
members, helps new employees pay first and last month’s rent, is
generous with titles and promotions and offers benefits ranging from
educational assistance to a free trip anywhere in the world after three
years of employment. Last year’s recipient went to Paris.
“We
don’t have a 401(k) and can’t always offer a big salary,” she said. “So
I’m forced all the time to think about how to keep key people.”
With
a tightening labor market, more entrepreneurs are facing similar
challenges. A record number of job openings, with worsening skill
shortages and a tendency among young adults toward briefer tenures, is
forcing small-business owners to find increasingly creative ways to hold
onto their best and brightest.
After
rising in recent years, quit rates in private businesses held steady at
just less than prerecession levels in 2015. But survey data from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, which looks at job openings and labor
turnover by size of establishment, suggest that the number of employees
voluntarily leaving small companies remains on the rise.
At
businesses with fewer than 10 employees, for example, 1.8 million
people quit in the five months through May, a 34 percent increase from
the same period in 2014, the bureau’s data shows. In companies with 10
to 49 employees, resignations rose by 12 percent year over year, and, in
those with 50 to 249 employees, the increase was 9 percent.
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In a June 2015 survey by the National Federation of Independent Business,
80 percent of employers reported they had difficulty finding, or could
not find, the talent they needed. Even when they do find it, said Holly
Wade, director of research for the organization, “issues come into play
when small businesses can’t afford some of the bells and whistles bigger
employers can.”
Colin Darretta, a former investment banker, knew when he founded WellPath Solutions
in New York last year that he could not compete with a Google or Uber
on pay. So in seeking engineering talent for his company, which makes
customized nutritional products, he bypassed the Ivy League and hired a
local developer from App Academy, in New York.
The
fact that the candidate had taken a less traditional path, he added,
may have made him better suited to a start-up. “Here was a guy who had
developed an interest at a later stage and was willing to take a
personal risk to pursue it,” Mr. Darretta said. “The key is looking
where those big companies aren’t.”
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He
has also made a point of spending one-on-one time with all 10 staff
members and likes to capitalize on their interests. After a recent busy
period, he took a star performer and a newly hired engineer, both big
video game players, to a “League of Legends” event at Spring Studios.
Another
company can still try to steal employees by offering more money, Mr.
Darretta said. But the employee “wouldn’t be getting the flexibility and
the other stuff,” he added. “A lot of the time, the other stuff is what
matters to people, and it doesn’t cost that much.”
Most
people who leave a company do not do so for more money. In a 2015
survey of 11,000 employees by the staffing company Randstad USA, the
main reason cited for quitting was a lack of a career path or growth
opportunities. Nearly half of respondents said work-life balance was the
biggest factor motivating them to stay.
For any incentives to work over the long term, employees must be invested in a company and its mission.
Dr. Amy Baxter, an Atlanta physician who founded MMJ Labs in 2006, has six employees with advanced degrees on a shoestring budget. Her company developed Buzzy,
a hand-held device that uses cold and vibration to relieve pain from
causes as varied as hypodermic needles, carpal tunnel syndrome and
plantar fasciitis, an inflammation of the band of tissue that connects
the heel bone to the toes.
“We
didn’t even get F.D.A. clearance until last year, which makes it all
the more amazing that people have stuck with me with no promise of
equity,” Dr. Baxter said.
She
said flexibility and transparency helped. MMJ Labs’ manufacturing
manager spent early years fitting her work hours around an infant
daughter’s heart treatment. If Buzzy loses a customer, everyone is
involved in figuring out what happened and helping to fix it. Outings
like the company’s regular staff dinners and the all-expenses-paid
Caribbean cruise that employees and their families took to celebrate
selling the first 25,000 units do not hurt either.
But
Dr. Baxter says she believes the main reason her original hires are
still with her is their belief in the product and the ethics of the
company, including the fact that the device is reusable and in keeping
with the company’s concern for the environment. “If I made Buzzy
disposable, some employees wouldn’t stay with me,” she said.
Knowing
what really matters to employees, personally and professionally, can be
critical to retention, human resources specialists say, and easy to
learn in a small business.
When Brandon Baker and his wife, Carmela, founded Loveletter Cakeshop
on Fifth Avenue two years ago, they knew they would be making wedding
cakes for a affluent clientele where there is little room for error. So
as soon as they realize they have an exceptional employee, Mr. Baker
sits down with him or her to discuss career aspirations and creative
interests so he can assign responsibilities accordingly.
“Sometimes just the act of asking is enough,” Mr. Baker said. “When you find talent you have to nurture it.”
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This can be challenging as an organization grows. Proxibid,
which bills itself as the largest online marketplace for high-value
items (like tractor-trailers and classic cars), has expanded to 167
employees since its start in 2001. Ryan Downs, the chief executive, also
faces the dual challenge of finding young talent and luring it to
Omaha, where the company is based. To do that, he says he has worked
hard to maintain an open culture that offers opportunities for
advancement.
He
credits this with helping him retain the company’s top engineers when
software developers have never been more in demand, or recruiters more
aggressive. “You’re not going to stop recruiters coming around,” he
said. “But if you give a technical person cutting-edge stuff to work on,
we’ve found you can overcome other companies’ irrational prices.”
Michael
Mulligan, a senior software engineer, who has been at Proxibid four and
a half years, agrees. He says that although he hears from one or two
recruiters every week, it would be difficult to match the opportunities
of his current position, or the voice he has in the direction of the
company. Proxibid, he added, also gets the culture right, with outings,
support and companywide recognition of individual success.
“For
me, that’s the biggest thing,” he said. “At other places, it was like I
was just a number. I know it sounds cheesy, but this is the first
company I’ve come to that truly seems to care if their employees are
happy.”
Unfortunately,
in the rush to serve customers and clients, communication can quickly
fall by the wayside even when small-business owners know better.
David
Niu, a serial entrepreneur, learned this the hard way when he was
running BuddyTV. In 2012, a top employee quit, seemingly out of the
blue. Frustrated and burned out, Mr. Niu took a break from the company.
“It caught me off guard,” he said. “I kept thinking, if I had better
tools maybe I could have prevented it.”
That led Mr. Niu to create Tinypulse to help other employers get a grip on retention issues. Tinypulse, which is based in Seattle, and similar companies like Culture Amp and BlackbookHR
allow managers to solicit anonymous feedback from employees. This often
provides an early warning that workers are unhappy. Today more than 500
companies use Tinypulse alone, the company said.
Other
small-business owners still rely on the old-fashioned way of keeping
tabs. At her public relations firm, Ms. Martin says she talks to her
employees constantly and has them keep her cellphone number on speed
dial. Most recently, she gave the people who have been with her the
longest a share in her business.
“How
many under-30-year-olds get to say they own something?” Ms. Martin
asked. “But when you do find someone who is amazing and treats your
business like their own you want to reward that.”
Her
approach seems to be working. Ross Garner, the senior account executive
she sent on a 10-day vacation to Paris last year, said he still could
not get over the gesture. “Stuff like that,” he said, “makes you want to
work at 110 percent for somebody.”
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