Retaining employees has long been a challenge, and is no less so today. There are plenty of compelling reasons to want to do so, from keeping continuity on your teams to less disruption in the work, and perhaps most of all, to keep costs down. When an employee leaves, work doesn’t get done, and then there is an added monetary cost to replace the employee externally.
Despite all of this, there is an underrated way to keep up retention that doesn’t get enough talk, especially when it comes to discussions of diversity in a workplace. A company’s talent needs to be allowed, encouraged and set up to grow and thrive. Succeed at this as a company, and you likely go a long way towards solving this big problem.
A company hires someone to solve a pain point for them. There is work that needs to be done and not enough staff to do it, or perhaps not the right skill set within the company as it is. While it’s possible that the right skill set is better hired from outside than developed from within, the latter might be more of an option than you think. There might be a perfectly capable person for the job right there, one who has been waiting for an opportunity to grow into a necessary skill for this job that they don’t yet have.
In fact, one second-level manager at a big company talked about exactly this as a key point for managers to think about, and it’s something that should happen long before there is a specific pain point resulting in expertise that appears to not be inside the company needing to be brought in. When it comes to who works on one project or another, managers should always think about developing depth with their teams. There is often more talent in front of a manager than they think.
One should not fall back on the same people all the time for key opportunities, but rather, allow others to get some of those opportunities so they can grow. Someone hasn’t been a lead before? Let them have that opportunity, so long as they have been a good performer. Someone hasn’t developed software working closely with a commercial real-time operating system? Let them get that chance, so long as they have handled other related assignments well such as writing some of the firmware for another project.
These might not always end up as unqualified success stories, but they are also unlikely to be disasters as well. Managed properly, a good result will come more often than not. There are plenty of benefits. One is that you don’t burn out the same people who always get these opportunities; no matter how much they embrace the opportunities, a chance to take a bit of a back seat can always be welcome, plus they get to develop other strengths of theirs along the way. In fact, relieved of such pressure, they can thrive in a slightly different role and likewise grow, perhaps even developing a skill they don’t have or only previously had to a small degree.
The bigger benefits come from the new growth opportunities that come with this. Stretching your team challenges them to grow into a better version of themselves. They get to prove that they can handle something they haven’t been asked to before, and some will thrive when given that challenge. In developing and demonstrating new skills, they show managers that they have more options in the future, and that their team can deliver better results. It becomes clearer that the team has a deeper bench. All of this comes without the added expense of hiring from outside, which takes time and money, and it keeps continuity with the team as people will likely work together on other projects down the road.
This kind of growth opportunity is what you sign up for when you join a company. We all want to do something we enjoy and that is challenging. If it’s easy, lots of people will do it. We want to be paid well and have good benefits, and have a good environment, but we want to be able to grow. When you can grow on the job and get better every day, it makes you hungry for more, especially in that setting. Succeeding at something new boosts confidence, and if this involves getting into a project or product you didn’t know much about and that has a lot to it, it may make you curious enough to explore other components of it in future projects. Curiosity is certainly not a bad thing in a business setting, and this is no exception.
Think of the alternative. You go to work and collect a paycheck, but you do the same thing all the time. In some cases, that works well, but many of us desire to be able to do more. Without the opportunities to grow into a better version of ourselves, as the aforementioned manager noted, talented employees will often leave the company to seek those challenges elsewhere, sometimes to a competitor. Replacing these employees, as noted, comes at a cost, not the least of which is having to basically start over again to some degree.
When it comes to assembling a diverse team, this has an added impact. There is understandably much content out there right now about recruiting and hiring a diverse team. This is certainly important. But once you have that diverse team, what good will that do if a year later, one person after another is walking out the door because they were not afforded a chance to grow? If your company gains a reputation for being a place where careers go to die, especially among a diverse group of people, that will hurt your attempts to put the best team together.
When hiring someone, surely a manager doesn’t expect that they will be essentially a carbon copy of themselves one, five or ten years later. A manager should want to hire someone who wants to grow, who wants to get better, who wants to do more and accomplish more all the time. Indeed, it’s not uncommon to be asked where one sees him/herself down the road in an interview (i.e., “Where do you see yourself in five years?”) While opinions on this line of questioning are mixed, a manager asking it at least gives the appearance of wanting to hire people who will not rest on their laurels if they are hired and work to get better.
Hiring the kind of employees you want is a challenge, and retaining them is another challenge. In industries where the demand for the talent outstrips the supply, retention is an even bigger challenge. In light of that, anything that can aid retention should be seen as a plus. Giving employees growth opportunities is one way to do that, and good management will make sure that happens.