How to retain talent with new ways of working

The new work culture impact

After the well know changes on how we work and the new ways of working during and after the pandemic, there are many things we need to consider to retain and attract talent.

It is very tempting to just go with the flow and not take the time to know what is the right way of working for our teams or organizations.

After a proper analysis, depending of the type of work your teams perform you can decide what is the way your teams will work, remote, hybrid or onsite, or the three of them, but don't just take it for granted, because you might loose your best talent if you just go with the flow.

The working culture in an Agile organization

There is still a lot to be tested and experimented on the ways of working, as there are many variables to consider and every organization/team needs to assess their own ways of working.

But from my experience and my team's, the Hybrid way of working is the best for our agile ways of working, considering the following facts:

• Our teams design, create and collaborate on product development
• Decision making is still complex with many participants in the process
• Speed is determined by how good the design and definition of the product is.

Why Hybrid?

Our recent experience has shown that creative processes are best to happen on site with all the parties involved in the process ready to make decisions, contribute on the product or process definition, identify dependencies and produce final designs.

The simple fact, is that you need to be present (not just physically), it improves by far the way we interact to carry out those activities in comparison of being remote.

Once the product has been defined, designed and the plan has been created, everyone can go and develop their activities working from home or wherever they feel like.

Flexibility

Being flexible with our teams is the one of the best things we have learnt during all this time.

If you think that 1 or 2 days at the office from 9 to 6 is what being "flexible" is and that will get you the "hybrid" status, you will find the hard way that's not the solution, and they will leave!

So, consider defining what are the activities you need to do onsite, and then leave to each team to decide where to do the rest, you might find there are different type of workers and their needs vary greatly. From the one that will use flexibility to work from the beach a couple of days a month, to the mother or father, that will use it to expend more time with their children after school.

The importance of culture and the big risk of commoditization

Commoditization of work is a fast growing problem, what does it mean?. If your team members join the organization and:

• Receive a laptop, headset and camera
• Get their access to their mail, zoom/teams accounts
• And they start working without any personal contact with their peers, managers and the company culture

Then their work has been commoditized, because the above can be given by any company in the world and the only differentiation will be how much you pay. When they find someone to pay a little bit more, they they're gone!

If you really want to retain and attract talent, you need to expose them to your company's culture, interact with real people, make them feel part of something and that they have a place where they can get support, feel valuable and they can build friendships, build networking and develop themselves and their career plans. Create a bond with what they can call their family at work.

All of that cannot be done via Zoom or Teams.