on Monday should be people's own time, not the company's. You don’t want to go to bed early every Sunday.” Even if you don’t mean it, this kind of practice communicates that you don’t really care about employees as people.įrom 5 p.m.
And even if you don’t have kids, you want to get the most out of your weekend. This forces people with kids to juggle like crazy to get them to school on time. “No one wants a Monday meeting at 7:30 a.m. Guthrie has seen these get as early as 7:30 a.m. On the flipside, there are many companies that like to emphasize their rigorous hours by hosting early-bird staff meetings on Monday mornings. “Just moving the happy hour to Thursday would show a tremendous amount of awareness and make people feel that much better about the company and leadership,” she says. The result: People feel like they have to stay until 6 to be a good co-worker, then they get a slow jump on traffic, they get home later and they’re tired, when they really want to just go do their own thing. For example, Guthrie has seen countless companies throw weekly happy hours that start at 4:30 p.m. That’s the number one way to prevent people from feeling like they might want to be somewhere else.”īut it’s easier than you think to be thoughtless. “A really good CEO thinks about the bigger picture and realizes people have lives outside of work.
“Usually the hours are wearing on them or their spouse is on their case because they’re never home,” she says. In Guthrie’s experience, employees will follow up with recruiters and other job offers if they're even slightly angry, bored or dissatisfied. In this exclusive interview, Guthrie shares what she’s learned about why people quit, and what startups can do after an employee’s first day to make sure they stay happy, engaged in their work, and committed to your company (and to deleting every email they are most certainly receiving from recruiters). Step one to retention: Understanding why and how it fails. Turns out, the reasons people love and hate their work are largely the same across sectors. Guthrie has been watching employees take and leave jobs for over 15 years.
“And yet, there’s very little internal discussion about how to keep people.” “There’s a mercenary mentality in tech right now - an idea that there’s always going to be something hotter, faster, more groundbreaking,” she says. It shocked her that these types of candid conversations were hardly ever happening, and people left as a result. This approach stuck with Guthrie as she left the restaurant world to head up people operations for tech companies. Now, here’s how we move things from Column B to Column A.” “If we’re doing our job as leaders, a performance review should only be two columns: Column A is what you do great and Column B is what you do not-so-great. When Carly Guthrie was running HR for Per Se, one of the hottest restaurants in New York, the General Manager gave her a piece of advice: “You know, Carly,” he said.