I am not looking around every day hoping to leave just for the sake of leaving. I'll stay here forever, maybe, if it works out. I'm not hoping to leave. Just help me make it work for me.

—Twentysomething

“We have an elaborate recruiting apparatus that gives us a huge presence [in college and university career placement centers],” said one senior executive in a major financial services firm. “We are known for our fast-track program, so we get a huge number of applicants and we put them through this meticulous screening process. After we hire them, we invest a huge amount in them right away over the course of the first year because we truly believe they are the future of the company. Still, by the end of the second year, half of them are gone. Most of them leave to go work for another financial services firm, and the competition is happy to have them precisely because they've been through our fast-track program. It's so frustrating. It seems that that no matter what we do, we just can't keep them.”

I hear different versions of this scenario from leaders and managers in every industry. Leaders and managers are very worried about high levels of turnover among their youngest, least experienced workers—and they are right to be. In most organizations, turnover among new employees has been going up ever so slightly but steadily over the past two decades. Turnover is by far the highest among employees with zero to two years' tenure and next highest among employees with two to five years' tenure. Is this partly a function of youth and the unsettled nature of early career positions? Yes. Is it also a reflection of overall labor trends toward shorter periods of employment? Yes.

But there are also generational issues at play here. Young people are coming of age in a labor market that presumes total job mobility. Meanwhile, young people are more likely than those of earlier generations to see the job as just one piece in their life puzzle rather than as the first, indispensable anchor piece without which they cannot build a happy life and family. To today's young people seeking to customize the perfect life and career, the job is a less important puzzle piece than, say, where they live, what schedule they keep, opportunities to participate in certain activities, proximity to friends or family. Add all these factors together, and it's easy to see that today's young workers are likely to have the highest early career stage turnover in history.

But is it impossible to retain the best young talent? No. You can retain the best people indefinitely, one day at a time, as long as you are willing to keep making it work for them. You can even turn many of the best into long-term employees and some of the very best into new leaders. You have no choice. They are the future of your organization.

Instead of Trying to Eliminate Turnover, Take Control of It

When my phone rings, there is often a desperate business leader on the other end of the phone. She will sometimes start rattling off numbers, but usually the message is simple: “Turnover among our new employees is up. We want to bring it down. Help!” The reason these leaders are desperate is that high turnover among this group is extremely costly.

• When you lose an employee, you incur the additional cost of recruiting a replacement.
• You lose (often to your competitor) the formal or informal training dollars you have invested in that person.
• When you lose a relatively new employee, the loss of the training investment is exacerbated because most employers spend the bulk of their training investment in the first stages of a new employee's employment. What is more, the sooner a new employee leaves after receiving that training investment, the less time the organization has had to reap a return on that investment.
• When any employee leaves voluntarily, there is disruption in workflow and work relationships on the team. Some employees leave suddenly and not well, and as a result, the disruption is greater.
• A new employee's leaving sometimes triggers other new employees to leave too.
• The greater your turnover among the newly hired, the less robust is your supply chain of potential home-grown new leaders up the ranks.

Yes, high turnover is bad. But not all turnover is bad. That's why my response to desperate business leaders facing high turnover is usually to ask three questions: “Who is staying?,” “Who is going?,” and “Who is deciding?”

Your goal should not be to eliminate turnover among young people. That's never going to happen. Your goal should be to take control of the turnover among all your employees. You want the high performers to stay and the low performers to go. The only way to make that happen is if you are the one deciding who stays and who goes. How do you achieve that?

One key to gaining control is the prestige factor. Young people especially are highly aware of prestige and status, and they want to be associated with them. A Twentysomething recently told me, “I want to be part of a prestige group. I don't want to be associated with some second-rate anything. Are you the best? Is this a place where just anyone can work? Where is your prestige factor?” In order to retain the best, you need to send the message that “not everyone gets to work here” and that “it is a privilege and an honor to work here.”

Very few organizations achieve outstanding prestige as employers: McKinsey & Company, the GE Audit Program, the U.S. Marine Corps, Google, and Enterprise Rent-a-Car, to name a handful of employers in this select group.

I could name plenty of others in various industries with vastly different missions and a wide range of corporate cultures. What these organizations have in common is that they are superpower employment brands among young workers, even though they are not exactly new young hip companies. Why? They all have reputations for being extremely demanding, highly competitive, and fiercely merit based. They all have reputations for shining a bright light of scrutiny on the organization and on every single person working there.

Maybe you don't work for a blockbuster employment brand. Even if you don't, here is the good news: you can be the manager who sends this message: “It is a privilege and an honor to work here!” Shine that bright light of scrutiny on yourself as a leader and on every single person you manage. Hold everyone to a higher standard, and help everyone meet that higher standard. Set up a constant loop of challenge and evaluation.

What else can you do to increase the status and prestige of working for you on your team?

Push Out the Low Performers

What you can do is shine that bright light on the very top performers. But you should also shine a bright light on everyone else. In fact, you should be prepared to spend the bulk of your time working with the vast majority of employees who fall somewhere in the middle of the performance spectrum. Meanwhile, with a bright light shining on them, the stubborn low performers will usually stick out like sore thumbs. Remember: part of sending the message that “it's a privilege and an honor to work here” is sending the message that “not everyone gets to work here!” If you are serious about retaining the best people, one of the most important questions you should be asking yourself is how you can get turnover to skyrocket among the low performers.

For many years, Juan has run a small house-painting business, employing about a dozen painters. He told me this story about a young crew of four painters he was managing a few years ago: “They were all in their early twenties, except the older one was almost thirty. He had been with me for less than a year, but I made him the foreman. That's when the trouble started.” Juan explained that the three younger members of the crew complained regularly about the foreman. According to them, the foreman insisted that they work from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., because those were the hours he preferred. The younger members of the crew preferred starting at 9:00 or 10:00 a.m. and working later, which coincided with customers' preferences as well. But the young painters' most serious complaint was that the foreman was not doing any work: the foreman met them at 8:00 a.m., split the tasks for the day into three, and spent most of the day talking on his cell phone. Juan said, “If just one of them had been talking behind his back, I might not have paid attention. But they were all telling me the same thing. I thought I better start showing up at the jobs to see what was up.”

Sure enough, whenever Juan dropped in on the job, he found the foreman walking around the customer's yard talking on his cell phone while the other painters were up on ladders working. Said Juan, “I decided I better start showing up at the beginning of the day and making sure that all four of them had work to do. Instead of having the foreman divide up the work three ways, I divided up the work four ways in the morning. Then I'd come by sometime during the day to see what was up. It didn't take long for me to see what the other guys were saying. Then I started really pressing the foreman, whenever I talked with him, to tell me how much of the work he was actually doing. He was gone within two weeks.”

Remember that stubborn low performers hate the bright light of scrutiny and usually will find a way to escape. You rarely have to fire them if you are willing to shine that bright light. I cannot tell you how many leaders and managers have told me stories about stubborn low performers who “fire themselves” after just days or weeks of the sustained bright light.

What did Juan do with the rest of the crew? “I asked the guys what they wanted to do. They had already discussed it. They wanted to work 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on the jobs instead of 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., and they asked if the three of them could split the foreman's pay since they were going to be doing the work of a four-man crew. I told them I'd split it with them, and I did. They each made an extra hundred bucks plus a week. They couldn't have been more pleased to have that guy gone. One of those young guys is still with me, running crews, and he's really valuable to me. He runs the crews and I've been able to work much less.”

Once you push out the stubborn low performers, the trick is getting everyone else to want to stay and work even harder for you. How? Keep shining that bright light. While low performers squirm under bright light, high performers usually shine brightest under the bright light. They want to know that someone knows just how much great work they are doing. One Twentysomething told me, “My boss finally fired this kid. He looked at all of us like we were going to freak out on him. We were all bumping fists, high-fiving, and like, ‘Yo, man! What took you so long to fire this kid?’ It was like, ‘Okay, now you got my attention. Now maybe I can respect you.’”

Don't Let Good People Get into Downward Spirals

What about that vast group of employees who fall somewhere in the middle of the performance spectrum? Your job is to use that bright light of scrutiny to help them see their targets at work more clearly and aim better at those targets. By shining a bright light on their work, you tell them they are important and their work is important. Best of all, you will help them work a little faster and a little better.

We see this in our research all the time. So often young people, particularly those in the middle of the performance spectrum, lose interest in a job or start having negative feelings about an organization because they are struggling with the work. One Twentysomething shared her experience: “If I feel like I'm having a hard time doing the job, if I do not understand something, or if I keep getting stuck, that is a big demoralizer. That makes me feel much less into the job. Maybe this isn't a good place for me to succeed. I don't want to do a job where I feel like I'm failing.” These young employees feel frustrated at their inability to adequately learn a skill, perform a task, or get comfortable with a responsibility. Maybe they become weighed down by a particularly challenging project. That's usually the beginning of a downward spiral for these mid-level performers. Often, they decide to leave long before they tell you. As a result, the downward spiral spins out of control. By the time they leave, you might think, “Good riddance!”

How do you stop the downward spiral? Start an upward spiral instead.

In these cases, the number one thing a manager can do is help the employee improve so they will start feeling better about the job and regain interest. Use the bright light of scrutiny to help the employee see what's going wrong and how to make things go better. Break down the project, responsibility, task, or skill into small pieces. Guide and direct the employee in accomplishing one very small piece at a time. Instead of suffering the pain of failure, the employee will get a chance to bank one tiny success after another. In the process, the employee is likely to learn and grow, and feel increasingly competent. You'll also put that employee in a much stronger position to earn more of the rewards they need. Even more important, you'll restore the employee's hope about their future potential for advancement and success in this job and your company—and greater earning potential. Young people feel much better about a job when they feel they are winning as opposed to losing. The problem is that you can't make them feel that they are winning just by telling them they are. You actually have to do the hard work of helping them start winning. That's how you shift the momentum and start creating an upward spiral.

Turn the Reasons Young People Might Leave into Reasons They Will Stay—and Work Even Harder

Young people will start thinking about leaving a job as soon as they start thinking they might not be able to get their needs and wants met. If they suspect their boss doesn't know or care what they want and need, they get nervous. The moment they conclude that their boss will not work with them to help them meet their wants and needs, they'll be halfway out the door. That's true for high performers, low performers, and everybody in the middle. At that point, you should hope they leave soon rather than stick around for months on end with one foot out the door.

Managers are sometimes offended that new young team members have needs and wants, and expect their bosses to help them meet those needs and wants. I often tell managers that it's a transactional relationship. No hard feelings. “My boss just wouldn't do business with me. He'd look at me as if I had no right to expect anything from him,” a Twentysomething recently told me. “His approach was, ‘You get what I decide you get when I decide you get it.’ Well, if you won't do business with me, I'm not going to do business with you.” Young people are coming to work to earn. Part of your job is to help them earn. And that's the key to retention. You have to turn the reasons people leave into reasons they will stay and work harder.

Find Out What You Can Do to Keep Them

Don't wait until young people start thinking about leaving to ask, “Is there anything we can do to keep you?” Ask on the first day of employment and keep asking every single day. Does that mean you should do everything for everybody? No. Should you cater to their every whim? No. But employees need to know that somebody knows what they want and need, somebody cares, and somebody is going to work with them to help them earn more of it. The key is not to give them false hope or make false promises. When young workers express needs and wants that are totally unrealistic, you should let them know that immediately so that their expectations are clear. The next step, however, is to help them see what is realistic.

“Half the time, what they want is impossible and it's a nonstarter,” said a manager in an agricultural sciences company. “But the other half—what they want—is easy. You want to leave early this afternoon to visit your grandmother in the hospital? What manager would say no to that? I've got managers who say no to small one-time accommodations and then, guess what? The next day that person is gone.” Small one-time accommodations are easy to grant and usually a matter of kindness. Failure to grant them usually costs much more than granting them. But, of course, you can't let employees take advantage.

This manager continued: “If you want to leave early every afternoon to visit your grandmother in the hospital, then that's not a one-time accommodation. That's a special schedule. Don't get me wrong. I've got chemistry technicians who are really good at their jobs and they are hard to replace. As far as I'm concerned, they can work in the middle of the night if they want to. I'll do just about anything I can do to keep them happy because they are so valuable to me. I tell them off the bat when they come to work here, ‘Tell me what you need. I'm here to facilitate your work. If you are not happy, you need to come tell me. If you need something, you need to come tell me.’ Of course, some of them do, and some of them don't. It's the ones who don't come tell me that I really have to worry about. I have to go ask them once in a while.”

Do Whatever It Takes to Hold On to the Best and the Brightest

The reality is that you can't do everything for everybody. Otherwise, where does it end? The agricultural sciences manager told me, “I've lost some really good technicians lately just because they were exhausted, burned out. They didn't want to be working so hard. They're young. They want to have some fun. After that happened a few times, I realized that I had to find a way to give these guys a break. They didn't have any vacation to speak of, and our workload wasn't getting any lighter. In one case I was going to HR to try to get one guy on a part-time status for a few months at his request. Finally, I told him to just quit and reapply whenever he was ready. It was a risk for both of us. But after about four months, he was in my office. Talk about loyalty. This guy would walk the plank for me.”

Is this manager going too far? I don't think so. Once the organization has invested in recruiting and training an employee, management has a huge stake in retaining that person—even if not as a full-time, on-site, uninterrupted, exclusive employee. If you can't keep the whole employee, why not keep as much as you can? Instead of losing them, offer valued employees the chance to take an unpaid sabbatical, to work part-time or flextime or as telecommuters or consultants. When valued people leave, stay in touch with them and on good terms. Try re-recruiting them after they've had a chance to rest or after they've had a chance to see that the grass isn't so much greener on the other side.

“I have to do whatever it takes to retain key technical talent. I get slammed if one of my good chemistry technicians leaves the company,” the same manager explained. “We have all kinds of incentives in place to make sure we don't hoard good talent on our teams, to make sure we export good people around to different opportunities within the company. We are given pretty strong incentives to give our best people opportunities to take on new challenges within the company—whether that means moving to a new geographical area or to a different kind of role or a whole different business within the company.” As a result, the manager explained, “people can reinvent themselves and their careers” without leaving the organization. If one of your best people really wants a new challenge, a new set of tasks, new learning opportunities, new work relationships, or even just a change of scenery, maybe you can help that person find what they are looking for without ever leaving the company. As hard as it might be for you as a manager to lose a talented employee on your team, that is a giant service to the company and the individual. They will definitely remember that you helped them at a key point in their career.”

The lesson: Start talking with your people about retention on day one and keep talking about it. If you are talking with them about how to meet their needs and wants on an ongoing basis, they are much more likely to talk with you at those key points when they are trying to decide whether to leave or stay. If you are willing to work with them, you can be flexible and generous. That's how you make them want to stay and work harder, at least for a little while longer. Years from now, those young (today) people who turn out to be long-term employees will be the ones who decided over and over again that they wanted to stay a little while longer.

Go the Extra Mile to Keep the Top Performers

“The worst thing is when we lose the very good ones,” said a senior partner in a major law firm. “Sometimes it's the very best among the young lawyers who leave us in the first two or three years. That's when we question ourselves. There are plenty of situations in which we would have been willing to do much more for certain people in order to keep them. We would have given them significant salary and bonus increases or maybe cut a year off their partner track, let them work totally remote, or move them to a different office. There are a lot of things we can do for people. There are so many we would have been willing to negotiate with in order to keep them.” Why don't they do that? “By the time they tell you they are leaving, they usually have accepted another offer. The ones who are worth more have no problem getting very generous offers from other firms. That's the point.”

That is exactly the point. Your best young people have the most options and are not about to accept less than they think they are worth. “I know what I can get out there, of course,” a Twentysomething told me. “We all do. If you care at all, you can find out what just about anyone makes. We all keep track of that stuff.” Remember that most young people today have a pretty high opinion of their worth. The winners know they are worth a winner's lot. You might want to start negotiating with them before it's too late.

Yes, some employees are more valuable than others—to you as a manager, to your team, and to the organization. I promise you they know this as well, and the real winners know it best of all. Not everyone gets a trophy, but the winners will be expecting them—lots of them. And they'll want valuable rewards to go along with those trophies. It follows that the more valuable the employee in question, the greater your retention efforts should be.

Make a point of talking regularly with your very best young people. Don't just ask them, “Are you happy here?” Rather, talk to them regularly to find out what they really want or need—whether it's a special deal or a small accommodation. Understanding an individual employee's unique needs or wants is the key to being able to reward that person in a meaningful way. The more unusual the needs and wants of a particular employee, the more valuable it will be if you are able to meet those needs and wants, because it will be harder for other employers to replicate those rewards. If you can work out a special deal with a star Twentysomething to meet some unusual need or want that really matters to that person, you will have a powerful retention tool. Of course, you have to keep asking because their needs and wants are likely to change over time.

Whatever you are doing to be flexible and generous to retain your good employees, you need to be much more flexible and generous to keep your great employees. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What are you paying your good employees? Pay your great ones more. Consider giving them more in base pay and benefits. Definitely give them more bonus money contingent on clear performance benchmarks tied directly to concrete actions they can control.
• What kind of scheduling flexibility are you providing for your good employees? Give your great ones the best schedules, and give them more control over when they work.
• How are your good employees assigned to work with vendors, customers, coworkers, subordinates, and managers? Give your great employees first choice in relationship opportunities at work.
• How are tasks and responsibilities assigned to good employees? Give your great employees first choice. Give the great ones first choice on any special projects or choice assignments.
• What training opportunities are being made available to good employees? Offer the best training resources to the best people first.
• How are good employees given remote work opportunities? How are they assigned to work locations or workspaces? What about travel? Give the best people the first choice of location, workspace, and travel.

Every Twentysomething wants a custom deal. The more you are able to customize for them, the longer you will keep them. But if your resources and your ability to customize are limited, you had better concentrate those resources on your very best people. That's only fair. And it's the only way you are going to retain the best young talent for any reasonable duration of employment.

Providing more generous rewards and work conditions in order to reward and retain high performers is a growing workplace trend. Business leaders understand it because it dovetails with the strong trends toward employee ranking and pay for performance. What we've learned in our research is that providing differential rewards works only when managers do the hard work of shining that bright light of scrutiny on every employee. Every single employee needs to understand how and why she is earning her rewards and what she needs to do in order to earn more. That means defining expectations every step of the way and tying concrete rewards directly to the fulfillment of those expectations.

When your employees deliver on their commitments for you, you deliver on promised rewards for them. If they fail to meet commitments, you have to call them on that failure immediately and withhold the reward. When every person is managed this way, your employees are much less likely to wonder why another person is receiving special rewards. They all know that someone who is receiving some special reward must have earned it fair and square.

Give the Superstars the Most Time and Attention

“I am repeatedly taken aback when I look at which consultants have stayed and which ones have left in recent years,” said an executive in a major consulting firm. “I sit in on team meetings or client engagement sessions. I read performance evaluations. I talk to the senior managers. I take small groups to lunch. I can always tell the high potentials. I used to be able to predict with pretty good certainty which ones would stay. But in recent years, I have been repeatedly surprised. It seems like too many of the high potentials are leaving within the first few years now. That is something we need to turn around.”

What can be done to turn it around? The executive continued: “Our culture is such that if you are really doing a great job, you are less likely to have contact with your senior manager. The senior managers probably spend too much time on a few low performers, whereas they spend very little time interfacing with the fast learner who immediately gets with the program, stays busy, and solves his own problems as they come up. If you are a senior manager and one or two of your consultants know how to pick up work and make themselves useful, you are grateful to have a couple of people you don't have to worry about. The problem is that you don't worry about those high potentials because you figure they don't really need you. And then you find out they are leaving. One day it seems that everything is going great with this person. The next day that person is leaving.”

This is a common situation. Taking their cues from the workplace of the past, many leaders and managers look at their best young employees and think what they always have thought: the self-starting high performers must be the employees most likely to stay here, pay their dues, climb the ladder, and thrive. Surely, these young stars must know they are doing well here. They must understand that no news is good news. They must realize that as long as they keep doing more work and better work than everybody else, in the long run, they will be rewarded.

Does it work? No. Not anymore.

Don't make the mistake of thinking that some of your young people are so talented, skilled, and motivated that they don't really need the attention of managers. As one Twentysomething put it, “If you expect me to believe I am one of the best in my class, then why would you totally ignore me? You tell me I'm the future of the company, but you don't give me the time of day? How do you expect me to interpret that?” The better they are, the more attention they want: the superstars want managers who know exactly who they are, help them succeed, and keep close track of their success.

“We realize the high potentials need a lot more time and attention than we've typically given them. But it's not always clear who the right person is to give them that time and attention. Is it the manager or the senior manager on the project? Should we assign them mentors who stick with them over time regardless of what they are working on?” We hear this conundrum often from leaders and managers. What is the solution? We recommend focusing on four types of developmental relationships to surround superstars with high concentrations of time and attention.

Teaching-Style (or Coaching-Style) Managers

Any leader, manager, or supervisor who is charged with managing any person on any project for any period of time has an obligation to play this role. But it's doubly important with young people and triply important with the best young people. Any manager who is weak, disengaged, and out of the loop will seem completely unworthy to high-potential young talent. This will cause the superstar to quickly lose confidence in the organization and the chain of command. Young superstars want managers who know and care enough to teach them the tricks and the shortcuts, warn them of pitfalls, and help them solve problems. They want managers who are strong enough to support them through bad days and counsel them through difficult judgment calls. And even more than average young people, the superstars want to know that someone is keeping track of their great work and looking for ways to provide them with special rewards.

Mentors

Many organizations try to put in place mentoring programs. The idea is to match promising young people with older, more experienced people in the organization. But mentoring means different things to different people. To many, mentoring evokes a deeply personal relationship that requires a natural connection between mentor and protégé that often takes a long time to develop. In this view, you usually wouldn't know who your real mentors are except in retrospect. Who has shared with you the rich lessons of their own lives over the course of many years? Which of those relationships have been profound and formative for you? Many argue that this type of relationship shouldn't be forced. So, what can you do as an organization to promote this kind of mentoring? Encourage older, more experienced leaders to seek protégés and help these would-be mentors develop some of the techniques and habits of mentoring. Encourage younger, less experienced high-potential employees to seek mentors and help these would-be protégés develop some of the techniques and habits of being a good protégé. Perhaps you could hold matchmaking sessions including would-be mentors and would-be protégés and help them gravitate toward each other. One word of caution: the big lesson I've taken away from the dozens of corporate mentoring initiatives I've studied is that mentoring is usually the wrong word. I think it is usually the case, when organizations launch “mentoring” programs, that what they are really talking about is matching high-potential young people with what I would call career advisers and organizational supporters.

Career Advisers

These are more experienced (usually older) leaders and managers within the organization who will make a commitment to be available to one or more young superstars to provide career advice. The adviser meets with the young team member on a regular basis to talk strategically about how the person should navigate their career within the organization. They might discuss how the team member's work assignments have been going and what assignments should be sought next. They might discuss what the team member could do within the organization to request new training opportunities, transfers to new work groups, or moves to new locations. The career adviser might recommend strategies for pursuing raises, promotions, or desired work conditions or might counsel the Millennial to delay such requests until a more opportune moment. The idea is to offer the team member regular career advice from an insider's perspective so they don't have to get it from outsiders (like headhunters).

Organizational Supporters

This is like an internal career adviser with some clout. Organizational supporters don't just discuss career strategies. They actually use their influence and authority within the organization to make sure that the most valuable young people are getting the lion's share of resources to support and accelerate their career success. Typically, organizational supporters talk regularly with their high-potentials to make certain that nothing has gone wrong or is going wrong in their work assignments. They steer their superstars to the best training opportunities, the choice projects and assignments, and the most powerful decision makers. They help fast-track their superstars to help them win bonuses, raises, promotions, and desired work conditions. The idea is to make certain the superstar never slips through the cracks and finds a better deal elsewhere.

If you really want to retain your very best young superstars long enough to grow and develop them, someone has to make concerted efforts to surround them with teaching-style managers, advisers, organizational supporters, and maybe even mentors. The questions every leader and manager should be asking are: What roles can I play in this process? Who are the young superstars in my orbit? Will I be that person's teaching-style manager? Career adviser? Organizational supporter? Mentor? What can I do to make it clear to that person that she is the best in her class?

If this person is the future of the company, give her more than the time of day.