Engagement and Retention: Essentials of Employee Care

Abstract

Employee care is omnipresent in human resource management. This chapter not only seeks to emphasize trivial behavior etiquettes which are a precondition human resource managers should possess anyway. First, the chapter indicates the strong influence that leadership style and welfare of top management have on the overall perception of employee care in a company. Furthermore, it gives insights on why the best employee is not always the right employee. In addition, the chapter stresses the importance of traditional methods that should be used as supportive tools in order to put a restriction on too much communication (hard to believe, but 100 % transparency is not always the best way to reach high efficiency) or the accumulation of alpha personalities that could possibly pose a threat to reaching the company’s targets. When considering all these ideas, it should be absolutely clear that the associated measures are not supposed to be obligatory. They are voluntary measures. Employee care should never create force or obligations. Finally, the section “Employee Care: Retention Tools” introduces three retention tools that show important but small-scale approaches that can be incorporated into the strategic alignment and action planning of a company.

Jens Peisert: Deceased