Last month, research by professional services firm PwC found that a quarter of U.K. workers planned to quit their jobs within the next 12 months. The ongoing cost of living crisis is a key driver for people deciding to switch roles, with almost half (47%) of the U.K. workforce having little or no money left over at the end of the month after expenses. So, with skills shortages continuing, how can leaders hang on to their prized talent?
1. Value your people and make them feel part of the team
There is no one silver bullet when it comes to retaining staff, according to Darren Ashby, chief impact officer at change consultancy businessfourzero and co-author of Every Team Actually Doing Business Better. “People are complicated and our expectations of work have changed.” Nevertheless, he believes that leaders and managers will do better at keeping their people if they focus on showing that they care and on forming exceptional teams.
Ashby advises leaders to pay genuine attention to their people. “Regular check-ins, weekly, between managers and their people, are proven to drive up engagement,” he explains. “But only if they move beyond the superficial check-in, clarify specific short-term goals and identify practical ways the manager can help.”
Transparent, open, real conversations about everything from pay levels to the performance of the CEO, should also be on the table, argues Ashby. “A community is only as strong as the number of things that go unsaid, so if you avoid difficult conversations those issues don’t go away. They happen in corridors or behind closed doors and mutate into bigger issues that eat away at your culture.”
Additionally, Ashby emphasizes the importance of celebrating success on a regular basis. Clear moments of success are infrequent and hard to pin down,” he says. “Progress is far more frequent and tangible. Leaders and managers need to recognize and celebrate it more often – daily, or weekly at least – and remember progress can often come from failures along the way.”
2. Empower your people to manage their own careers
Leaders should acknowledge workers’ concerns around financial stability and job dissatisfaction and develop strategies to address these challenges, argues Antoinette Oglethorpe, author of Confident Career Conversations: Empower Your Employees for Career Growth and Retention. A comprehensive approach could include re-evaluating pay scales and developing robust benefits packages that address the cost-of-living challenges.
Yet it’s also important to look beyond financial remuneration. “Career management is about getting people to where they want to be and where the organization needs them to be,” Oglethorpe explains. “If leaders want their people to be committed to the organization, engaged with their work and driven to perform, they need to provide them with the tools and resources they need to manage their careers within the organization.”
3. Encourage your people to use their right brain
“A lot of people feel stuck and the current economic circumstances are making the situation a lot worse,” says Yda Bouvier, an executive coach and the author of Leading with the Right Brain. “Instinctively, when we feel stuck, we literally want to ‘get out’ and changing jobs is one way of doing so. Unfortunately, however, our issues simply follow us into the new workplace as we haven’t changed the way we look at the world.”
Bouvier describes her advice as “simple but radical”. She says that leaders should help their team members to access the strengths of the right side of their brains – the more visual and intuitive side – and, in doing so, change their relationship with work.
“Many of us are predominantly left-brain thinkers,” Bouvier explains. “What our left brain does is to simplify our view of the world around us and create a model of reality that we can then use and manipulate to get things done.” While this helps us to be effective, the left brain can also get trapped in its own system, paying attention only to what it already knows, rather than seeing new information that could help us solve problems or really enjoy the present moment.
This is where our right brain comes in. “The right brain helps us to understand ourselves better, and build stronger emotional relationships with others,” says Bouvier. “The right brain doesn’t process with words, but with visuals, so one of the quickest ways to activate it is with an image. It’s not for nothing that we say: ‘A picture says more than a thousand words.’”
Leaders should encourage employees to find a good metaphor for what work represents to them, Bouvier suggests. “An employee who explained his role in a complex project told his manager: ‘I am the chef, this is my kitchen and the food won’t taste the same without me,’” she explains. “He could have just said ‘I am monitoring the work.’ Technically, this would be correct, yet it conveys a completely different energy and relationship to the work.”
4. Reframe what ESG means to your team
“In this decisive decade, employees are no longer content with box-ticking and bureaucracy,” says Stuart McLachlan, CEO of sustainability consultancy Anthesis and the co-author of The Adventure of Sustainable Performance: Beyond ESG Compliance to Leadership in the New Era. “They are searching for a next generation of purpose-led leaders, whose values authentically align with their organization and who can empower individuals to unleash their potential and think bigger.”
McLachlan believes there needs to be an evolution of the ESG acronym to highlight the qualities needed to keep staff engaged and loyal: entrepreneurship, spirit and grit.
Entrepreneurship, says McLachlan, is the courage to move beyond current ways of thinking and find pioneering opportunities and solutions to thrive and drive sustainable performance while addressing the global challenges we face. Spirit is the ability to imagine and build projects and narratives of hope to inspire the loyalty of others to a common higher cause. Grit is the resilience to stay on track despite the setbacks and the determination to stand up to naysayers.
5. Treat your people the way you would like to be treated
We all have a good idea of how we like to be treated, but we don’t necessarily treat others in the same way. If we want to hold on to our talent, we might need to rethink that illogical approach, however. “Start with trusting your team and empower them to own and solve the challenges they face,” is the recommendation of Jeremy Campbell, CEO of performance improvement and technology business Black Isle Group. “Forget command and control. Be flexible with their working arrangements and judge them on results, not presenteeism.”
Campbell adds that leaders should ensure that there is thoughtful investment in their people’s training and development. “Care for them,” he says. “Listen to them. Seek their feedback and act upon it. Ensure that your company is driven by a greater purpose than profit. Then inspire your people to make a difference. If your employees are cared for, listened to, and empowered, chances are they will stick with you for years to come.”
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