Employee Engagement, Retention and Transition

Let’s have a chat about chatting with your employees.

Do you only talk to your employees when giving out tasks, receiving reports or during annual reviews?

Are you one of those who drops a bomb on someone at their annual review that thought they were doing well?

Have you even thought about it?

If the above describes you, I propose that you would be very surprised if you took a few minutes of your time, on a regular basis, to touch base with your people, outside of the above and related instances, and to give immediate feedback, both positive and negative. People respond favorably, even to negative feedback, when they feel that you are actually interested in them as human beings and care about their wellbeing…rather than just as cogs in the machine.

Do you know their personal and/or professional goals? (Yes, their personal goals are every bit as important as their professional ones.)

Do they want to go back to school or gain a professional certification? Learn ballroom dancing? Learn to code? Learn to cook?

Now let’s go a little deeper…

How well do you know your direct reports? Or their direct reports? In other words, your people.

Pretty well?

Okay then, are they married? If so, what is their spouses name?

If they’re not married, are they seeing anyone? What’s their significant other’s name? Are they serious?

How about kids? How many? How old? What are their names? Do they participate in sports or other activities?

What do they like to do when they aren’t at work?

No, I’m not suggesting that you stalk your people or pry into their personal lives nor that you need to know the answers to those particular questions (and there are definite topics to stay clear of that should hopefully be obvious), but when was the last time you had an informal chat, not directly related to work, with your people? One on one conversations (done appropriately), small groups, team lunches, etc. are a perfect time to get to know your people better. Your people are multi-dimensional and much of that is outside of work and a good portion of it has the potential to greatly affect their attitudes and performance while at work.

Taking a few moments of your time to invest in getting to know your people can pay huge dividends in employee morale, work performance and job satisfaction on top of helping you see issues in time to possibly head them off before they become train wrecks. Personal crisis often has a major impact on the workplace on top of the many potential negative effects on the people involved.

To be clear, I am not suggesting you become friends with those who work for you (that often ends badly), but rather just to get to know them beyond who they are in the office. When you treat people like…well…people they tend to react positively and will generally give you their best. (Of course, this is not universal but my experience has been that it is true more often than not.)

Now let’s shift gears slightly to a related issue.

Do you demand absolute loyalty from your people? Do you return their loyalty? Would you fire someone immediately if you found out that they were looking for or considering other options? I’ve worked in those situations personally and even watched someone walked out the door over a resume and, believe me, it was not a positive thing for the survivors.

Although I can’t claim credit for the origin of this idea, I am of the firm belief that part of my job as a leader is to help my people excel and to be in the right place, even if it ultimately isn’t working for me. Chances are that at some point in your career you’ve been in a role that didn’t really fit you, your skills, your knowledge, your goals, etc., or you had simply outgrown it. Did you feel trapped? Did you feel safe telling anyone, especially your supervisor, about your dilemma? Were you afraid that if your superiors discovered that you were considering a change that they’d fire you?

Yeah, me too. Not a great place to be, is it?

Consider as an alternative, if you’d been able to speak to your supervisor about your goals and aspirations, regardless of whether you could ultimately fulfill them in your current role or even at your current employer, and they actually listened, supported you, and maybe even helped you down that path.

Now consider the other side of that, have you had an employee that completely blind-sided you with their resignation? You had no idea that they were unhappy or dissatisfied but now you are stuck trying to fill a crucial role in your organization that could be empty for weeks or even months. What if you’d known that the person would be leaving in the near future and you could have worked with them to find and train their replacement? Is that radical? It shouldn’t be.

We often do it when a person is promoted or transferred within the organization so why not do it when it is their time to move on?

Which is better, tightly holding onto employees that aren’t happy and don’t really fit their roles (along with the associated performance issues) until they ultimately quit, or you’re forced to fire them…or actually contributing to their personal and professional growth and setting up a mechanism for orderly transition once it is time for them to move on?

An orderly transition sounds like a win-win to me.

Take a moment to think of the last role you had to hire for. Was it already empty before you could hire someone? Even with the standard two-week notice, most roles are likely to be empty before a new hire can be made, especially for more senior positions. Imagine if you will that you had a mechanism for an actual transition where you could fill the role at the same time that the incumbent is looking for their new opportunity and there could be an actual turn over and training provided for continuity. You could even work with the incumbent to possibly revise or update the role and to even have their assistance in finding the new person. Can you even imagine it?

If you are concerned that the incumbent could end up not leaving after you’ve hired their successor, a transition agreement could be drawn up and signed by both parties.

Bear with me while I dip into my military experience here for a moment. While service members aren’t generally in a position to quit their job, they do tend to move into a new role every few years. In most cases, when a person is slated to move, the person taking over the position arrives a few weeks before the incumbent leaves so that the new person can be brought up to speed and given everything they need. Then when they move on to the next position, the process is repeated for them. This process provides for a relatively smooth transition with as little disruption to the workflow as possible.

Is it flawless? Of course not but having been in both situations, I can tell you that having my predecessor available to show me the ropes and the tricks of the trade along with ensuring I had all the system accesses, equipment, points of contact, etc. needed to do my new job was generally a much better experience for me and smoother transition for the organization (not to mention much less time consuming for my new boss). It also tends to reduce the learning curve allowing the new person to be productive much more rapidly.

As the business world continues to evolve and new generations enter the workforce, organizations must reexamine the ways they do business and approach employee engagement, retention and transition if they want to not just survive but to thrive.

About the Author: Lee Crowson is a Story Teller and Asker of Questions who also happens to be a Navy Veteran and problem solver with over 22 years’ experience in organizational and operational leadership, communications and training. He has a strong passion for continual learning, endurance running, the outdoors and helping others to reach their full potential. He writes and speaks because it is more easily understood than his interpretive dance.