Employee Retention Strategies To Keep Your Best Talent
Have you considered the possibility that when you’re overly focused on the short-term financial priorities of your organization, you may be at an increased risk of losing your top talent?
We work with many organizations that are in high demand right now. They are focused on financial priorities as well as how they can avoid losing their best talent due to burn-out. This includes looking at the well-being of each stakeholder: customers, employees, partners, and of course investors.
When we create nurturing relationships through patience, transparency, and accountability, we can engage our employees with grace so that we meet our financial goals with ease.
In our last article, Managing Virtual Employee Engagement During Organizational Change, we shared this quote from Michael Peachy, the Vice President of User Experience at Ringcentral,
“Once the guardrails were off and we weren’t meeting typical business hours in the office, we noticed people working harder and have been getting stressed out. They lost the commute time that allowed them to decompress. Instead, they are getting up and sitting at their laptop with a bowl of cereal and then working straight through lunch.”
This is also true, (and maybe even more so) for your leadership team. Ideally, your leaders are your Crew Members (Crew members are people whom you would say are 100% committed to your success and vice versa).
For some, the uncertainty and change of moving themselves and their teams to a remote world while still performing strategically adds more complexity to an already challenging situation. Some are afraid if they, and their companies, cannot adapt then they’re going to lose productivity or their top talent.
How is the adjustment to working from home along with the extra burden of managing a virtual team, impacting the healthy work-life balance of your leadership team?
Here are some strategies to create a company culture of engagement with empathy to support you in retaining your top employees!
Build in a communication feedback loop.
“One way you can improve leadership in a company is to be curious and ask questions. The best organizations build feedback loops in their company cultures.
They have centralized communication teams, they have people who are really listening to what’s going on to make sure that the messages that you’re sending as executives are being received in a way that’s best for your customers and your shareholders.”
If you don’t have a centralized communication team, we are here for you! Metaspire can help you listen to your leaders to ensure they feel heard and stay engaged.
Invite your leaders and best employees to a meaningful conversation.
“One way you can get employees engaged is to realize that you’re inviting them to be engaged and to have that kind of conversation with your key influencers in your company.
So that you know how they’re motivated, and what they’re afraid of, and you really can put yourself in their shoes. You know, you can have employee satisfaction surveys and all these really great tools, but nothing beats a straight conversation.”
Is your leadership team still in the “Performing” phase?
“One way you can build a team culture is to realize that your team is in one of five phases. The first phase is Forming. The second phase is Storming. The third phase is Performing. The fourth phase is Norming. And the last phase is Adjourning.
So each team is in one of those phases. And the best way to know how to impact the team to move along and be in performing – or wherever you want them to be – is to do a team assessment. We customize team assessments and have a sample on our website that you can check out for free. If you go to SuperLeadershipTeams.Com.”
As most companies are moving to an increasingly virtual environment, where many people are also working from home, this may have placed your team into a Forming or Storming stage as they re-adjust. What can you do to help them be High Performing?
Find out how can you have a high performing team that doesn’t burn out today. Contact us for a personalized Team Jump Start.
Take time for some fun and bonding.
The water cooler is gone in the virtual world, (whether everyone is working remotely or the team is mixed) so consider adding time during your team meetings for a little pause to connect and bond with other team members.
“Some fun employee engagement questions can be really simple and you can do them during one on ones are just team meetings. And I encourage you to always ask fun employee engagement questions. Just make that part of your culture, because you can really learn a lot from these answers.
So for example, you could ask where the person’s favorite vacation is, you might even find out that you like the same spot. Or you could ask, who is one of their favorite superheroes. You can learn a lot about the qualities of someone who they admire. You could ask them their favorite drink or, you know, tell them – One of the best questions I really like asking is ‘what’s a piece of advice that you carry throughout your career?’. Because when that employee’s struggling, you can always point them back to what they already know.”
Here is a link to our recent article, Virtual Team Building Activities, for a few more ideas to encourage employee engagement and improve employee morale.
Having a committed leadership team creates an engaging and empathetic company culture that results in having great employees, increased employee happiness, and a low turnover rate at all levels of your organization.
