Entry-Level Satisfaction

Recently we’ve written several articles about how important employee loyalty is for long term revenue. Some estimates show the cost of replacing an employee (in terms of lost production, time spent finding an employee, etc.) of as much as twice the employee’s salary, indicating that losing even a single employee can be especially damaging to the company. Despite this importance, it often seems as though most companies value their upper management more when it comes to long term success.

In some ways this makes sense, as supposedly the best and the brightest (those that represent the future of the company) are in the upper management jobs, and these are the people that would supposedly be harder to replace. But employee satisfaction at the lowest levels may be just as important, if not more so, for the long term success of your business.

It is at the entry level, not the executive level, where turnover occurs the most. Those getting paid the least at a company (including young employees straight out of college) tend to be the ones that leave fairly quickly. In some cases this is due to factors beyond the company’s control.

For example, some people take jobs they don’t want just to make money, only to realize later there is a better job out there. Yet in other cases this is absolutely in the employee’s control, and goes to highlight the importance of putting real value in employee satisfaction. As author Michael Ball wrote : “The key is to get on board with the idea that it's going to suck for a while, and use what you can to get as much learning and experience as possible.” There is this idea within the corporate world that it is acceptable for entry level jobs to be awful experiences.

That should not be the case. You can find a variety of ways to reward entry level employees so that they are valuable to your company. Once you find those ways, you’ll be able to drastically reduce entry level employee turnover.

It’s not enough to simply claim you value all of your employees. You need to find ways to keep employee loyalty high including (possibly even especially) the entry level jobs. Find a way to do that effectively and your company will be far more likely to achieve long term success.