Retaining Workers Is Key to Profits.

• Position: Brief Article

Everybody is looking for the best, brightest, most dynamic, and most productive workers to fill workforce rolls. An extremely competitive global economic environment demands it. Yet, finding good people is getting tougher all the time, according to human resources managers.

After companies have found and hired the best and the brightest, are they doing anything to keep them? Are they maintaining their training and mastery of the latest technology and trends, helping them develop and express their talents to ensure competitiveness in the marketplace, and paying them enough to keep them from moving on to competitors? In many cases in corporate America, the answer is no.

According to a survey of 50 major U.S. service and manufacturing organizations by University of Toledo (Ohio) College of Business Administration management faculty members Clint O. Longenecker and Deborah J. Dwyer, much lip service has been given to competitiveness and the need to keep up with innovation in the marketplace. Often, though, the mantra falls by the wayside as soon as new employees have been hired. "Organizations fail to employ effective human resource practices and often frustrate, alienate, and demoralize their workers without knowing it," Longenecker points out. Human resource managers who are tasked with finding and recruiting these individuals in the first place more times than not are left out of the loop when it comes to a company's philosophy, direction, and goals.

"Organizational survival in the next millennium requires that human resources...