Treacherous

thoughts on retention and engagement

Not going to share where, but I recently overheard a conversation that bothered me quite a bit. I’ll paraphrase to protect, but it was something like this:

We had a lot of people leave our organization during ‘The Great Resignation’, but we’ve made changes, and now our turnover numbers are the lowest ever.

Causation, Correlation, and Critical Thinking

It may be obvious where I want to go with this, but first I want to think about this hypothesis - which essentially is, “We changed, and now fewer people are leaving” (We did X, and now Y improved).

Let’s tear this apart using some well-known critical thinking heuristics.

• Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc: This is where one might incorrectly assume that since event Y (people not leaving their jobs) followed event X (the effort in retention), that event X caused event Y. I will guess that no such investigation was done. Which is, of course, highly related to the more common…

• Correlation vs. Causation: Just because retention improved after an action was implemented doesn't necessarily mean the action caused improvement. It's important to consider other factors that might have influenced Y.
  
  Or - in this case, two important things to investigate are:
  

• Alternative Explanations: What other possible explanations could exist in the behavior change. Could there be external factors, coincidental events, or broader trends that contributed to the change? hmmmm….
  
  …and…
  

• Controlled Variables: In assessing the impact of an action on a behavior, it's important to control for other variables that could influence the behavior.

My hypothesis, based on my conversations with people around the industry, as well as my experience hands on in two different companies over the last year is that people are staying in their jobs because there are too few jobs to move into.

I May Be Right

This report from CompTIA confirms that there are fewer jobs in the market, so that at least could be an external factor influencing the initial claim. I do not know what incredible things the person who made the claim has done to improve retention, but at the very least, I think it’s fair to say that other factors are in play.

I May Be Wrong

Admittedly, I don’t have full context. The person making this claim may have already accounted for external factors, and is so, they’re awesome, and their organization is lucky to have them.

Either way, the continued discussion this week remains the same.

Even though it’s more difficult right now for a lot of tech folks to find new roles, this is the time to focus even more on employee retention and engagement. If our employees aren’t engaged in their work and excited about their future when the market changes, they will absolutely go somewhere where they can be excited and engaged.

Employee Engagement

I’ve written about employee engagement before, but probably is worth discussing again. Without recapping the post from April, engagement comes down to just a few things.

• Purpose - employees want to know why what they do is important. They want to know how it helps their team, how it helps the company, and what outcomes their work will generate.

• Growth - employees want to know what career advancement looks like. They want a vision of what their work could look like a year or two down the line

• Feedback - employees want to know how they’re doing.

Sadly, in a way, that’s pretty much it. Yet many employees - even those not riding the Great Resignation wave don’t know why their job is important, they don’t know what growth looks like, and they’re not getting feedback. This could very well be because their managers are also disengaged, but the message isn’t getting through.

The Job at Hand

As leaders, this is the time to go all in on improving engagement. In Drive!, Dan Pink points out that money is important - but only to the point where people feel like they’re paid fairly. After that the need for purpose takes over (along with autonomy and mastery for knowledge workers).

Additionally, No Ego, by Cy Wakemen discusses (at length) the importance of a culture of accountability to increase employee engagemen - and accurately states that Engagement without accountability creates entitlement, and perhaps more importantly, that Engagement is a choice, not something leaders can do for others. Accountability is an important pillar for me (I wrote a bit about it in a post here), and fits in well with the rest of the attributes I’ve mentioned. So what does that mean for me and the rest of the leaders who I think should focus more than ever on employee engagement right now? Here are some tips (or at the very least, points for discussion).

• Ask your employees about purpose. In a previous job, we asked employees what their mission was at the company, and why it was important as part of the performance review process. But I’ve found that asking employees to reflect on what they do, and how it provides value is critical for them making a connection with the organization.

• Give your employees an idea of what’s next. You don’t have to always talk about promotions, but talk about what growth looks like, how they can get there, understand what their career dreams are - and then help them get there. If they don’t have a growth path in your org, help them find a position where they can grow in someone else’s org. When needed, help them get training as needed (Mastery, in the world of Dan Pink’s Drive!)

• Build a culture of feedback. The easiest start I know of is “continue” feedback, where you say, “you did A, and it made B easier - continue doing things like that”. Do a lot of those so people get used to feedback. Then it’s easier when you throw in a '“you did C, and it made D more difficult. What can we do differently next time”. As an important aside, I like to focus on outcomes and behaviors when giving feedback as I think it connects better. You do what works for you.

• Let people be accountable for their work. Make it an expectation, but give them room to safely fail (and learn). If you have an employee who is consistently not accountable, or repeatedly fails to learn from mistakes, you are accountable to the team for helping that person find a new role at a different company.

There’s a chance that the person who inspired this post is already doing all of these things and more. In that case, this is just a reminder of how much we all need to invest in creating awesome teams now so that we can continue to have awesome teams in the future.