Curb Attrition with Behavioral Skills
Companies today are dealing with an inevitable dark cloud over their heads - attrition. From the great resignation to quiet quitting, trends over the last couple of years have dictated the shift in the way companies are now looking at employee retention. Organizations are understanding the roles their leaders play in retaining or attracting talent. However, attrition continues to be a huge business metric for companies because it comes with a huge cost. Replacing talent can be very expensive and also lead to a significant productivity drain.?
A few weeks ago, we’d broadly discussed how to navigate the talent war in our podcast. This week, we’ll dive a bit deeper into what companies can do to curb attrition significantly.?
At Fundamento, we’ve been working with employers to understand critical power skills that drain and drive their customer-facing teams with regards to specific business metrics. When it comes to attrition, irrespective of whether customer-facing or not, our team of IO psychologists and experts have identified that leadership plays a huge role. After understanding our data and analyzing this further, we’ve narrowed down the power skills that organizations must develop in their leaders and teams in order to improve employee experience, enhance productivity and dramatically curb attrition.?
Furthermore, we’ve broken down these skills into micro behaviors that reflect manifestations of each skill in day to day work life. Organizations must constantly attempt to answer certain questions in order to genuinely solve for attrition.??
Does your company have solid leaders??
While there are several aspects of a leader that are critical to business success within an organization, it is important that the leader is also one who is able to inspire and motivate their team to do better. This ends up being one of the biggest gaps when it comes to employee satisfaction. Investing in the development of leaders then becomes a priority for organizations dealing with high attrition. Therefore, the power skill associated with this is Inspirational Leadership.?
Inspirational Leadership refers to one's ability to inspire, influence, and lead by example. This involves creating a shared vision and articulating a mission towards achieving common goals.?
This power skill allows leaders to become role models for their team members wherein the team follows their footsteps to deliver high quality work.
Do your leaders communicate openly??
A lot of discontentment in the team comes from the fact that there’s limited or selective top-down communication. More often than not, teams feel disengaged or disconnected due to low transparency and trickling information delivery. At every level of leadership, clear and open communication goes a long way in instilling a sense of trust within the team. It is considered a significant driver in curbing attrition. The power skill that organizations need to develop in their leaders is: Transparency.?
Transparency refers to the ability to maintain honesty, openness, and integrity about emotions, beliefs and ethical principles.
This power skill allows leaders to build trust within the team which enables team-bonding, better collaboration and higher productivity.?
Does everyone on your team contribute to peer growth??
Leaders set the ball rolling when it comes to peer-to-peer learning. If a leader invests in the growth of their team, the team invests in each other's growth. Lifting each other up is step one to enhanced productivity because it taps into the strengths of each individual. For this, we’ve identified two power skills that once developed ensure the entire team contributes actively to peer growth: Empathy and Developing Others.
Empathy is the emotional ability to understand, share and anticipate the feelings of another.
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This power skill allows leaders to make the team feel heard and invested in. This correspondingly creates room for an approachable and open culture within the team.?
Developing Others is the ability to determine strengths and areas requiring improvement in others and mentoring or coaching them towards enhancing their abilities.
This power skills allows leaders to make decisions on the back of their team’s needs and make their growth a priority.
Does your team focus on solutions over problems??
Conflicts within a team are unavoidable, but how they’re addressed is key. If the leader sets a problem-pointing culture over a solution-finding one, the team’s morale can take a big hit. Therefore, a power skill we believe is crucial to minimizing friction within a team, hence retaining employees is Conflict Resolution.?
Conflict Resolution is the process of putting an end to a dispute by utilizing active ways of rectification. It involves finding a solution to a disagreement or opposition.
This power skill ensures that leaders initiate a culture of problem solving within the team and reduce friction to the extent possible so that teams are able to perform better.?
Does your team reflect often??
A metric such as attrition is complex and there are several factors that must be considered while solving for it. However, behavioral skills go a long way in creating a work culture that employees don’t want to leave. The power skills elaborated above manifest in ways that significantly help curb attrition. None of that is easy to maintain though without an extremely critical power skill: Emotional Self Awareness.
Emotional Self Awareness is the ability to identify one's internal states - feelings, emotions, values or goals and to be conscious of their effect on one's speech and actions.
This power skill is the one way to ensure that neither the leader nor the team is unaware of their own strengths or weaknesses. This allows then to be open to feedback, not make emotional decisions and understand consequences of their actions.?
While all of these skills are primarily focused on leaders, it is important to note that leaders precisely set the tone for the way their teams function. If these skills are developed in leaders, the chances of them transferring to the team are manifold. In order to curb attrition, the most effective way is to develop necessary power skills in leaders and see a trickle down effect in the team. When the team collectively feels more productive, individuals are more likely to stay and deliver high quality output.