Pay Your Employees To Interview?

Do your employees love working at your organization enough that you could give them a paid day off each year to interview at other organizations and they'd still stay with you?

That's right - pay your employees to interview at other places and report their findings to the team. If you're doing everything right as an employer you should actually increase employee commitment because there will be proof that the grass is not greener on the other side. Your employees ideally will bring back great ideas that can be applied at your firm. One caveat - employees should be up front with any employer about the nature of the dialogue. This could be something as simple as "My employer encourages everyone to benchmark us against other employers".

Leaders who see their employees as volunteers generally invest more energy into creating a culture that causes people to want to give their best, stay and recruit others. Many managers will say that there is no way they could do this - employees would literally jump ship and/or come back asking for a pay raise, more responsibility,etc.

Guess what? That just may be the fire you need to light underneath your managers to get them to act like employees truly are volunteers. I agree that if you simply started doing this out of the blue it would be bad news. However, if it's part of a broader initiative to become an employer of choice - however you define it - then involving your employees in the transformation, including something as empowering as external benchmarking, is likely to be a huge step towards higher engagement and retention.