How to hang on to good employees is the hottest topic on the minds of most managers as 1998 unfolds. So says Right Management Consultants after polling its U.S. and Canadian offices.

"With the labor tighter than ever and unemployment at an all-time low, many employees find themselves in a seller's market," says Richard J. Pinola, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Right Management Consultants. "This means they are on the lookout for opportunities and may not think twice about hopping to another company."

As a result, managers must find creative ways to keep good people from leaving, according to Pinola. This is especially true when companies are going through the upheaval of organizational changes such as mergers, acquisitions, and plant closings, when it is critical to keep a team in place long enough to make a transition succeed. Many companies are willing to pay good money to hang on to key employees, rather than lose them to the competition and incur high recruitment and training costs at a critical time.

The following list reflects Right's consultants' assessment of issues critical to organizations with which they have worked over the past year:

TOP FIVE WORKFORCE ISSUES

1. Employee Retention. Many companies are having a tough time hanging on to good people. With high competition for top talent, employers are looking for ways to keep their key workers, especially in the midst of organizational changes that sometimes scare employees into looking for new jobs.
2. Mergers and Acquisitions. Companies put tremendous effort into making a deal happen financially, but often discover that they have neglected people issues like communication, compatibility of cultures, trust, morale, and their possible effects on productivity and profits. This is especially true of companies doing their first or second acquisition.
3. Leadership. There is a need for on-the-job coaching at multiple levels within many organizations to develop leadership capabilities and styles compatible with the information revolution. Most leaders over 45 years of age have not been trained, formally or informally, to lead in the context of the computer age. Old style leadership based on control of information is meaningless when so much data is instantly available to workers at all levels.
4. High-Growth Best Practices. Organizations are studying success stories to learn the profile of a high-growth company. They want to find out how successful firms formulate a strategic vision, arrive at an optimal structure, define their market niche, develop and deploy employees, and measure success.
5. Coaching for New Executives. Companies in a growth growth mode may find themselves hiring so fast that they don't give enough consideration to how new people, especially top executives, will fit into the company's culture. A bad fit at senior levels can be disastrous, when so much depends on communication style and the confidence employees have in their leaders. More organizations are providing coaching support for new executives to help ensure their success – and the company's – particularly in early months of the relationship.

"Many tough issues are facing corporate executive in 1998," says Pinola, "But these are the ones we see coming up repeatedly – and they may well be the most important to address effectively in the coming year."