Keeping hold of early career team members

As I coach managers and leaders from different industries and geographies there is a common question emerging: ‘how can I keep hold of my early career team members?’

Over the Covid-era, with some positions furloughed, with employees asking themselves ‘is this what I want from my life and career going forward?’ and with the risk of losing a sense of belonging to an organisation when not used to home working, employees are taking stock and looking outside of their current organisations for answers. As a recent related article by Forbes sums up ‘It’s a collective realization that better things may exist or at least they exist temporarily. It may as well be called the great re-evaluation with employees prioritizing more flexibility, more control, and more influence over their career trajectories as we enter the brave new world of work in a post pandemic society.’

As a Manager, what can you do to encourage engagement and ‘stickability’ of early career team members at this time?

In a recent CIPD article shared that a new study suggests that basic respect could be key – key to early career employees feeling valued in a way that, together with support and appreciation, enables them to be more resilient and able to cope with setbacks. As a result, loyalty and engagement are also raised. So what can you do as a manager?

Here are 6 tips to help you:

1. Consider what respect means for you. How do you know when someone respects you? How are they acting, communicating and being day to day?
2. Build honesty and transparency with your team members. Work on building trust through gaining an understanding of each other. From there, you can potentially ask a direct question of your team members relating to respect – what does it take for you to feel respected? Are you getting that here at work? What more could I do to demonstrate my respect for you?

3. Recognise that respect can be demonstrated by helping a team member to know what you value about them. Create a culture of recognition within your team. Lead the way by role modelling giving an appreciation of work done well no matter how small in a meaningful way (e.g. use the SBI model – this was the SITUATION, this was the BEHAVIOUR you demonstrated, and this was the positive IMPACT that resulted). Encourage team members to do the same. Help them to start with themselves by including a ‘lightning round’ in your team meetings where team members not only indicate 3 priorities for the upcoming week but share a success that they’ve had from the previous week.
4. Recognise that every interaction with every team member is an opportunity to build the relationship, to build trust and to demonstrate respect, whether email, messenger, Zoom/Teams, phone call or face to face. If you know you can be transactional when under pressure, aim to review any emails before you send them to bring the human side into the equation.
5. Be sure to give time to listen, without interruption, to your team members. Help them to understand that their opinion counts; Gallup’s research on engagement indicates that an employee being able to strongly agree to the statement ‘my opinions seems to count’ is more likely to be retained. You may feel you don’t have time but how much more of your time will be consumed if your employee resigns and you need to recruit and train someone else?
6. Take time with your team to build psychological safety – it’s not just your responsibility as it takes the whole team but it does require you to role model what’s required as well as create awareness among team members. For more information on what it is and how to create it, read my May 2020 blog.

Finally, it doesn’t take much time to do what you need to in order to have a better chance of retaining your team members – it’s more about how you do what you do. Which of the 6 tips above might you focus on to help you?