By JC Abusaid, CEO/President as Featured in Forbes
The “great resignation” was a reckoning for companies: If you don’t find ways to encourage your employees’ engagement, they won’t stick around. Like any hit to their companies’ futures, this exodus is prompting leaders to come up with better answers.
Gen Zs and Millennials have adjusted their expectations, partly in response to the pandemic’s breakdown of working norms. So, what can you do to attract talent from younger generations and avoid high turnover?
While my firm thankfully didn’t experience a “great resignation,” many years of investing in our company culture helped ensure that our staff knows that we value them.
Here are some thoughts on how businesses can source talent and protect against turnover.
Working From Home: Rewards And Reasons
For many companies, working from home is here to stay. With this new paradigm, you must support your employees’ preferences to work remotely while offering positive encouragement when they do come in.
Of course, if people abuse your trust or slack off, then requiring them to come back to the office is the obvious consequence. Strategies to help make WFH work:
• Trust, but verify. Use CRM data and natural measurables such as meetings scheduled or tasks completed.
Your customers may start complaining if the services they’ve come to expect head south.
• Reinforce the office-centric responses you want. Offer to take an employee out to lunch or happy hour when they come in, or provide team breakfasts or lunch on specific days. Get creative in providing culture-building experiences, and give employees a reason to come into the office.
• Make sure your employees’ WFH space is appropriate. If it’s not, give them the tools they need. Have managers check in with their team to ensure they are set up to successfully work from home, such as having screens, stable Wi-Fi, a keyboard and mouse.
• Lead by example. Your C-suite should be coming in with aligned expectations and connecting with employees in the office. Engaging with the other employees who are in the office that day promotes camaraderie and emphasizes to workers who come in that they are seen, which might encourage them to come in more often.
• Be honest about the benefits of working from the office. Show employees that it’s beneficial to come into the office and spend time together there. Whenever I’m in the office, I’ll spontaneously invite an employee who’s also in to lunch.
Ultimately, your employees have to see the value of being there for themselves.
Double Down On Communicating And Connecting With Your People
Maintaining a remote workplace demands a lot of energy and intensity to support engagement. If you used to meet one-on-one with an employee once a month, you might try doubling that to every two weeks.
It’s important to ensure that your people feel like they’re being heard—and for management to be able to respond to issues quickly to avoid blowups or disengagement. If you can find out where your people might be struggling, you can work with them to find solutions. If your staff is struggling personally, you might be able to find helpful solutions such as increased child care reimbursement or allowing them to bring their dog into the office.
