If 2022 was the year of attracting great talent, 2023 is the year of figuring out how to retain it. While companies in many industries have shifted their focus from hiring, now companies must figure out how to drive greater productivity with the talent that they have, making retention a top priority. To be sure, this is a good thing, especially when the alternative is letting people go, or laying people off, which still has yet to be proven as an actual cost cutting measure.
Short term, this means leaders and managers must figure out how to make employees more productive, and ensure that the right projects are being worked on. HR and Learning leaders will also step up and focus on figuring out the right learning and training to enable this, as well as to foster growth and development
But in the rush to focus on retention efforts I think this is also an opportunity to actually redefine what retention is for a modern world of work. There are real benefits to holding onto employees, especially as it relates to lost productivity due turnover and cost to hire. But simply saying you want to focus on retaining talent isn’t enough without a clear definition of why or what that looks like.
To help reframe this, I’m drawn to the work of Steve Cadigan, the first CHRO at LinkedIn, and author of Workquake: Embracing The Aftershocks of COVID-19 to Create a Better Model of Working. Steve is a big believer in needing new mindsets about the way we think about work, and retention is one of those topics. (Here is a great podcast episode with Dart Lindsley, where he talks about several different talent models of that can be used to help define retention.)
Part of his thesis is that once upon a time, the “company man/woman” was a real thing. People took pride in being with a company, the company took care of the person, and the employee had the desire to stay for the duration of their career or at least a big chunk of it. As a result, they got moved around, given opportunities to grow, and ultimately stayed. Having a pension at the end of the journey certainly helped too.
But this was a different time. Industries weren’t being created at the pace they are today, platforms like Linkedin didn’t exist, and our society and culture in the United States looked differently upon people who hopped jobs and changed careers.
Today, our world of work is different, but like many other models of management that still exist in the workplace in 2023, the way that we look at retention has remained the same.
In a static world of work, the goal is to make the trains run on time, which relies on predictability and reliability, and thus, retention is king.
But as work becomes more dynamic and unpredictable, there are much faster and more frequent cycle times of what a business needs, which directly impacts the human capital and skills they need to operate.
This, combined with employee expectations around their own career choices and desires for opportunities make our traditional views on retention outdated and obsolete.
As a framing point, Steve asks the question “In the next 5 years, do you think the average tenure at a company will be longer or shorter?” We all intuitively know the answer to that.
One of the opportunities around retention is to in fact define what it means within the context of your organization. Simply saying “we want to retain top talent” is fine, but if leaders and managers actually want to do this, they are going to have to do more than give high level platitudes.
- Does retention mean people should be able to change teams freely?
- Does it mean that they should stay in their current role but managers should be giving them a continuous stream of stretch projects?
- Does it mean that we’re going to train managers on how to facilitate career conversations, and reward those whose people stay/move internally?
- Does it mean that companies will prioritize key roles they believe will impact the business and then allow employees who have those skills to apply for those roles
- Does it mean that the company is going to set an internal promotion % tracker and try to hit it?
(btw, all of these are things companies are considering)
How do we actually create a definition of retention in our company that drives business outcomes and allows a company to operate in a realistic workplace in 2023? Here are a couple places to start :
1)Redefine and align on how what you think retention is
Retaining talent often feels like saying something like “soft skills” – everyone sort of agrees it’s important and true, but when it comes down to defining why and how to do it, we fall short.
The first step is to get to a philosophy in your organization around what retaining talent is. For better or worse, cultures like Netflix are pretty consistent and clear about where they stand (average performance gets you a healthy severance) – but doing so allows for clarity between employees and managers, as well as a steel thread to design talent and learning programs.
In my conversation with Hyde Park Venture Capital Talent Consultant Jim Conti, Jim made made a couple key points about retention that I thought were spot on. First he mentioned that oftentimes we talk about retention as almost like a “monolithic statement,” and “all or nothing desire,” but that actually defining what retention means in your company is critical to actually figuring out who and how to retain talent.
For example, Jim mentioned working with a portfolio company who started to clarify a definition of something they called a “pillar employee.” These were individuals who had critical skillsets or knowledge bases that were important to the company. This employee served as a marker for them about who they wanted to retain, but also, gave others an idea of how to define retention programs, processes and protocols. This is a great first step into actually identifying your retention philosophy, which informs the how behind what you do to actually achieve this goal.
2) Redefine the relationship between the employee and people manager around development and growth
Almost 10 years ago, Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha wrote The Alliance as a guide for how managers and employees could collaborate together in a more mutually beneficial relationship. The concept of the alliance means employees and managers are transparent about their goals and aspirations with each other, and work together to achieve them in the employee’s daily work and development. The manager does what they can to enable that, the employee does the job, and they both win.
When it’s no longer workable or the goal has changed, then they respectfully move on. The idea behind this is that we all know that at some point an employee is going to leave. Instead of being awkward or tiptoeing around it, it’s better to just address and work collaboratively towards a solution. This was necessary in high growth startups, where things were constantly changing, but elements of high-growth tech startups exist in all sorts of industries today. Even though this model is 10 years old, it’s still not widely adopted.
Leaders and organizations should consider how they are defining the role of the manager and ensuring there is a specific skill or line item for co-creating development and growth with their employees. This is more accurate and reflective of a modern-day relationship between a manager and employee, so that they can work together to achieve individual and collective goals.
3)Redefine Your Definition of the Employee-Employer Relationship
One of my favorite sayings is that you cannot use an old map for a new world. To update our map about retention, we need to redefine our baseline of the employer employee relationship, and what we owe one another.
A point Jim made in our conversation: the reasons why we have such outdated viewpoints on retention correlates very much to the education system in the United States. As an example, if you were held back a grade, or your teacher asked you to change to a different class, you’d probably feel embarrassed. That might be an awkward conversation for a teacher to have. So instead, leaders hold onto talent, or stay longer than expected, because it can feel like a failure otherwise.
But that misses the point, which is in a fast-changing world, markets and thus people must constantly evolve and grow, and as a byproduct of that, employees need to adapt, or perhaps even go elsewhere where they are better suited.
Nobody wants to be fired, layoffs suck, but accepting this belief also means that if employees do move around to another team (or in some cases choose to go elsewhere) it’s not seen as a kiss of death, but rather, an accepted reality of the workplace today.
But for that to happen, we actually need to rethink the nuts and bolts of the employee-employer relationship – what are people signing up for, and what are employers promising in return? It’s certainly not lifetime employment and a pension, so what is it instead?
One idea that comes from Cadigan, as well as Diane Gherson, the former CHRO of IBM suggested that skills, and an extension, growth+learning should be the bedrock of the employee-employee relationship. Employers give employees chances to build skills+gain skills, and reward those who have the skills relevant with new and better work, and provide opportunities to let employees gain skills they need that can make them successful, in the current role, at the company and even beyond.
Cadigan also offers re-thinking the nature of the employee-employer relationship by embracing an ecosystem talent mindset – he points to the fact many companies already make use of contract workers outside of their company on a regular basis, and instead of just focusing on the w-2 employee, to focus first on what are the “tasks” and “skills” that are needed to get the work done, and then focusing on who can do it.
4) Provide Mirrors and Practice Fields
An often challenge cited by employees about career development or growth is not knowing where they want to go. It sometimes is hard to see outside of your own perspective. A tactical approach to articulating retention should focus on expanding the aperture of their employees by providing greater perspective of the greater business context, which can then spur employees into thinking about how they might be able to take on other opportunities, either in their existing role, or perhaps another one. One approach to do this is through what I call mirrors and practice fields.
Mirrors reflect back to us what we see to help us see ourselves in a new light. Practice fields enable us to get the reps we need in order to help us perform on the field. If you want employees to start proactively identifying new ways they can contribute in new ways (and thus, stay) both of these can help.
An example of a mirror might be something like examples of possible career pathways, or consistent and just-in time feedback on performance that helps an employee see how they are progressing. An example of a practice field, are actual opportunities to practice a skill, task, or deliverable that is new and novel.
Leaders can take ownership of driving retention, but empowering your employees to find their own reasons to stay, grow and contribute is a scalable accelerant to retain the talent you want to keep.
Are you developing a strategy around retaining your employees and want guidance and best practices? Contact Us today to learn more about how we can co-create a retention strategy to develop and grow your people