In a hybrid world, you have to work harder to keep talent

In June this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk declared an end to remote working. In a leaked memo he said, “Anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean minimum) of 40 hours per week or depart Tesla. This is less than we ask of factory workers.”

I was interviewed about this statement at the time it was made and I supported Musk for (at least) being clear about the expectations he had of employees at a time when many senior managers are still sitting on their hands when it comes to providing direction to staff about their expectations of where work takes place.

However, I followed that up by saying that it’s a massive mis-step by Musk (and Tesla) and it fails to recognise that the world of work has changed forever. Atlassian co-owner Scott Farquhar thought so too and immediately cast his net in the hope of capturing those high potential employees who were looking for greater flexibility. In a series of tweets:

Technology companies are falling over themselves for talent right now and have realised that they can poach high potential employees from their competitors because the need to move cities or even countries is no longer a requirement given that the technology that promotes remote working has finally been embraced and (who knew?!) works well.

Of course, not everyone is in the position that technology companies are. It’s a lot easier for them to move to ‘work from anywhere’ approaches, as Atlassian have done, because most, if not all of their work can be done at a desk.

That said, we’re still seeing a great deal of people movement as employees reassess the conditions of their work and - as the world enters a global recession - look for ways to ease the burden on their own finances.

The pandemic has given employees time to think. Time that they’d never really had before because they were stuck on the hamster wheel of ‘wake - eat - commute - work - commute - eat - bed’. In this scenario there was very little time for mindful thinking about what’s important to them, not just now but in the future.

And for many employees, the pandemic shone a light on the culture that they were working in and /or the quality of life that they had as a result. Nothing accentuates issues like a crisis and many organisations weren’t proactive enough in the early days of the pandemic to address the cultural issues that existed beforehand, such that they weren’t manifested in a remote working environment.

The culture of an organisation was by far the biggest driver for people leaving, with one survey finding that employees are 12.4x more likely to leave because of poor culture than compensation and benefits. Where employees didn’t like what they saw, they made the decision that when the world was better able to manage the impacts of the pandemic, they would move. Either to new jobs or else to further education or to start their own business. But nobody moved in that first year.

Here in Australia in 2020, we saw the lowest turnover since records began. Yet in mid-2021, almost 40% of employees said that they planned to leave their employer within a year. Quite a change!

It’s easy to be sceptical about whether people would actually leave their job or not, statistics, however, show that 64% of managers say that attrition has increased. So the movement is real and it’s started.

All of these statistics demonstrate that every organisation has to put time, effort and money into creating an environment, development pathway and remuneration package that’s attractive to these employees.

So here are three things you can do to retain your talented people:

Define the new culture

If culture is the number one reason why people are leaving, then you have to deal with this first, not last. One survey found that remote employees were 94% less connected to their colleagues as a result of not being together.

• When evolving your culture, considerations should include:
• What did you learn throughout the pandemic? 
• What worked well? 
• What didn’t? 
• What new skills do you need to learn? 
• How are you holding each other accountable? 
• What tools are you going to use to collaborate and does everyone know how to use them properly?

Toyota Financial Services, for example, created a ‘listening network’ to engage employees in conversation and help shape how the culture (when working flexibly) should look. I’m working with many teams around the world at the minute to help them bring people together (often for the first time in two years) and make agreements with each other about how they’ll work, regardless of where they are.

If you have a workplace culture, with sensible salary and benefits that treats its employees with respect, then even in the face of more money, talented people will think twice about trading it in.

Trust your people to do the right thing

If employees don’t feel trusted to do the right thing, they will leave, period. People were hired to do a job, not continually demonstrate that they can be trusted to do it. So if you really care about retaining your high potential employees then you have to have absolute faith in them doing the right thing, regardless of whether you can see them or not.

People often doubt the effectiveness of hybrid work based on the behaviour of one individual and rather than deal with that issue, they choose to tar everyone with the same brush instead. Managers need to be upskilled on how to set expectations well and provide feedback such that people always feel empowered to make decisions, rather have to continually check in with managers.

There is a generation of managers who only know work as ‘the office’ rather than something that can get done in many different places. These ideals need to be challenged and managers treated with empathy to create a new approach to trust and productivity.

Do less work, better

One of the things that most people suffered from during the pandemic was emotional and physical burnout. Indeed work anxiety and stress is now at an all time high. One active thing that organisations can do to reduce this is to do less work, better.

Some may see this as a sacrilegious statement, because work is surely about ‘doing more with less’ or ‘building the plane whilst we fly it’, isn’t it? No. In the latter scenario, the ‘plane’ always crashes! As humans we can only concentrate on one thing at any one time and the goal should be to do this thing really well, so you can move onto the next one.

This will mean being ruthless around prioritisation and (potentially) cancelling some projects that the organisation simply doesn’t have the capacity for. The positive of this is that it could free-up valuable operational budget to increase pay or benefits to further help you to keep your talented people.

Of course, despite doing all of these things, your talented people may still leave, but you want to be able to send them on their way with your blessing, knowing that you did everything in your power to retain them.