KEEPING Great Team Members

Now you have great people on your team – let’s keep them!  It’s so easy to get caught up in the latest trend on how to retain employees – first it was Engagement, then Higher Purpose, now it’s DEI and Inclusion and hybrid working environments.  All of these efforts are important and necessary, but they can end up treating symptoms rather than the root cause of why great people leave.

Here’s a straightforward, proven, 5-Point Blueprint for keeping great people on your team:

1. Make Your Culture Something that People Want to Be a Part Of. At its core, culture is about the values you choose as an owner/exec/company, and how those values come to life in people’s behaviors.  My company has one of our points of culture on our team meeting agenda each week, and we talk about that for 15 min or so as a team.  What does the particular point of culture mean to us? How are we living that ideal?  Where are we falling short and what causes that to happen?  Start having these conversations and you’ll give your people a voice and buy-in.  Don’t have these conversations and a culture will creep in – it just probably won’t be the culture you want.
2. Show Them a Career Path.  No one wants to be stuck doing the same job forever.  Use a Professional Development Plan and Process to let your team members feel in control of their destiny with you.  When they can tie their personal values to your company’s vision, mission and the role they play in it, that’s when you have an environment where a job is more than a job.  They feel valued and significant, and they have challenging, graduating goals to work towards.

   One of our high-tech manufacturing clients had a highly skilled technical employee who used his PDP to declare his 5-year goal of running the company.  I was surprised – this guy was pretty introverted, had never managed people, and knew his area of Production, but that was it.  His PDP took him from Individual Contributor, to Team Lead, to Department Manager, to Production Manager, and 2 years ago when the General Manager retired, he moved in to that GM role.  That’s the power of career pathing!
   
   

3. A Higher Purpose is Important.  One gift that our Millennial and Gen Z colleagues have given us is their insistence on marrying personal and company missions with their paychecks.  This makes sense – they want to know that their role in your company serves a real purpose; it’s more than just a job, and they’re working for a company that is impacting the world in a positive way.
4. Show Them How They Fit.  It’s so easy to do a strategic plan and forget to share it with the whole team. Even if you do have a practice of tying initiatives back to your plan, you may find that you have to directly connect the dots for people.  When I worked for Fiskars, the Orange-Handled Scissor company, we went through an acquisition spree and ballooned from 9 divisions around the world to 34!  Imagine coming into that environment as a new employee.  Imagine being in that wildly changing environment as a current employee.  I was forever drawing out the corporate org chart on a white board so people could see how their division fit with the overall company, and how their role impacted their own as well as other divisions.  When they understood how important they were to this growing manufacturer, they felt their role had a real purpose.  They were much more than just a cog in the machine.
5. Your Comp Plans Need to be In-Market. Sometimes people leave for more money – we just had that happen.  A company offered one of our people a $75,000 increase in base salary, and that’s something that I honestly couldn’t make a business case to try and keep him.  So we wished him well, and he’s doing a great job of transitioning his clients to the team.  We had 5 great years together and I am grateful for all that he brought to us.  If another company dangles a huge pay increase in front of a key person on your team, leave the door open.  Sometimes the tradeoffs that come with that big increase aren’t worth it. 

On the other hand, if you are below market, it’s time to get your people in line with what you’d pay to replace them.  Take their current compensation for what it is – we had the gift of years of inexpensive labor and now the market is righting itself.  We’re seeing wage increases of 13-30%, which probably means we need to take a second look at your financial model so that you can afford to get your people “in market” and they aren’t so easy to poach.