Three Mindset Shifts to Up Your Talent Retention Game

With the hyper-competitive labor market and talent shortage these days most companies are doubling down on their efforts to retain the employees they have. And no retention strategy is complete without committing more to your training and development budget. But what can be done besides doing more of what you've already been doing?

You've worked hard to increase training opportunities for all through a variety of mediums, improved the on-boarding and orientation programs, and finally rolled out some gamification training in order to make compliance training slightly more bearable. Cool.

And the Learning Management System (LMS) you purchased a couple years ago is finally bearing some fruit since you are finally able to provide some reasonable tracking and reporting for the executive team.

Ok, but that's simply not enough.

So you meet with your HR and training team and tell them we have to take it up a couple notches, without any increase in budget. And the response you receive is ... blank stares.

Now what?

Begin evaluating every program according to the three mindsets I've suggested below.

If any program or project you and your team are working on fulfills two or more of these mindsets then it's gold. Keep going. But if that big project you or your team is working on doesn't fulfill at least one of these mindsets, then a significant overhaul is needed. Or maybe dump it all together.

Here are the three mindset shifts I'm referencing. And you can and should immediately challenge your team to get their collective heads around them:

Learning instead of Training - it's not about training access or the amount of training hours completed, it's about training outcomes. Do participants learn skills critical to their success in their role and the business? If your answer is "no" or even "unsure" to training and development effort you're sponsoring, time to rethink whether to invest.

Feedback instead of Review - most HR teams are responsible for the performance management system adopted by your company. Make certain the process you champion is more about the discussion and employees obtaining feedback about "what's going well" and "what's not going well" than ratings, matrices or bell curves. The point of performance management is to make certain employees know what's expected of them and to receive feedback about what they are excelling in and what they need to work on. Make certain you're giving this to them through this process.

If you're frustrated by the talent shortage and your company's inability to attract new talent, and therefore want to double down on your retention efforts - these mindset shifts will do the trick. Get your team laser-focused on achieving these mindset shifts and you're sure to improve the retention of your best talent. And that's way better (and more cost effective) than your recruiting team telling you they've just landed that flashy new hire you hope turns into your company's next high performer.