Any organ or visitor knows hiring top talent and good people is tough right now. The ad industry has its highest employment rate ever in a time when people are fleeing the industry due to burnout.
The last thing an organ leader wants to deal with is seeing their strongest employees go elsewhere.
So, how do you retain skilled employees during The Unconfined Resignation? The solution is grounded in towers a culture of trust.
How to build a culture of trust
You’ve invested myriad hours interviewing, onboarding and training your employees.
On the job, they’ve proven themselves to be strong performers.
You’ve moreover provided them with the tools and resources to succeed.
And yet, myriad agencies are run by leaders that micromanage their employees.
It’s time to trust them to do their job and get out of their way.
Here’s how:
- Get everyone on the same page: Be unshut well-nigh what you’re trying to accomplish, your vision and how employees play a part in that vision. The idea here is to get everyone rowing in the same direction.
- Encourage transparency: Building a culture of trust cannot happen without openness. We encourage our employees to be unshut and transparent well-nigh their feelings, and our managers to do the same. Leadership is transparent well-nigh visitor performance and plans for the organization. This transparency infuses a sense of ownership and respect throughout the organization.
Appreciate and recognize your employees
Nothing will shrivel out a good employee faster than feeling underappreciated.
Appreciation can come in many forms, including a quick thank you, promotion or salary increase.
Recognition can be public or private, and it should come from any level within the organization.
Here’s how my organ approaches appreciation and recognition:
Peer recognition program
Bonus.ly has been a unconfined wing to our company’s culture.
Each month, employees have a specific number of points that can be used to recognize peers.
Points are piled and redeemed through souvenir cards to restaurants, shops, entertainment, soft-heartedness donations or unprepossessed nonflexible cash.
The Slack integration makes it easy to see who is recognizing who.
Leadership recognition
Peer recognition is wonderful, but employees moreover need to know that they’re making a real impact on the company. This is where leadership recognition comes in.
Publically, we recognize employees who contribute to the marrow line through visitor meetings or internal specimen studies.
This public recognition serves to show appreciation to the employee but moreover helps to encourage others to unzip similar feats.
How to build connections between employees
The Institute of Leadership and Management found that 77% of respondents say that towers tropical relationships with colleagues was the most important factor in determining job satisfaction.
Connection is hair-trigger in towers a culture of trust and ultimately retaining unconfined employees. In a remote workplace, this is expressly important.
We’ve found three ways to help build connections between employees:
- Make time for connection: Take the time to connect with employees on a personal level. Towers rapport is essential when things are busy. This signals to your employees that plane surrounded the chaos, they’re still important to you. So, make time during 1:1s to learn well-nigh employees and tell them well-nigh yourself.
- Enjoy your colleagues: As a primarily remote company, this takes some effort. We regularly use apps like Kahoot for fun quizzes, ice breaker challenges and Polly for polls on Slack.
- Encourage sharing of expertise: Embedded within our culture is both a strong motivation to get largest and to support one another. We foster both by sharing our expertise. Employees will create brown bag training sessions taught by various team members. Managers will moreover often encourage team members to ask questions widely on Slack. As a result, questions have quick answers and employees are reminded that team support is valued.
Also, make sure to post pictures of team members meeting each other and having a good time.
Offer flexibility and grace
Always remember that you’ve hired people, not just “workers.”
Work is just one facet of their lives. Exhaustion in our industry is very real.
Take superintendency to ensure your weightier employees flourish. To retain unconfined employees, offer flexibility and grace.
Here’s how we do that:
- Daily flexibility: Indulge some flexibility within the workday for employees to take superintendency of what they need. We regularly have employees that need to pick up their kids, take the dog to the vet or plane go for a jog. We’ve found that providing this flexibility enables employees to perform at their weightier and be increasingly productive.
- Encourage time off: We saw many of our employees not taking time off during the pandemic. They felt like there was no point considering they couldn’t go anywhere. What resulted was decreased productivity and overall gloom within the organization. To turn things around, we encouraged employees to take time off. We implemented an unlimited vacation policy so people didn’t finger like they were “wasting” vacation days. And managers noted when an employee hadn’t taken time off.
- Create backups: One of the concerns in taking time off is the fear that the work will pile up. That’s why we created a system for employees to partner with other employees to act as backups while they’re out. With the replacement plans in place, employees are truly “off” when on vacation.
- Allow for grace: Throughout the pandemic, we’ve had to indulge some grace for employees dealing with circumstances in their lives that impact work. Everyone goes through stressful events, and its not reasonable to think it won’t stupefy work. We indulge some grace for productivity to decline, work hours to be shortened or spare time off for employees dealing with “life.”
Build the workplace where you’d like to work
This is how you retain unconfined employees. Trust, appreciation, connection and flexibility are the tenets of a strong culture. But they moreover happen to be the key to retaining unconfined employees.
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