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What Do People Need to Stay at Work?
Our team at Bravely has surveyed tens of thousands of employees to get their perspectives, insights, and opinions about what it’s like to be a part of the workforce today. We found that five key factors encourage employees to stay at their workplace.
Employee retention: 5 things that make people stay
Compassion
After coaching thousands of employees, we found that creating a culture of compassion is critical to greater retention. Organizations are often intimidated by the concept of compassion. Leadership sometimes views it as a quality that is difficult, if not impossible, to measure. However, compassion is the key that they have to embrace if they want to build a healthy culture and convince their talent to stay.
Having a culture of leading with compassion means that it is weaved into everything that companies do in a top-down approach. Leadership needs to put in place policies and procedures that support compassion and give people (especially managers) agency to behave compassionately towards each other.
“Compassion must be baked into workplace culture to build meaningful connections and increase employee engagement, which keeps employees sticking around during times of uncertainty or massive change.”
— Sarah Sheehan, President and Co-Founder, Bravely
For example, maybe consider what it would be like to have a grief policy. The last two years have been a confrontation with how vulnerable life is. What would it be like for our workplaces to truly honor the grieving process?
Having a culture of leading with compassion means that it is weaved into everything that companies do in a top-down approach. Leadership needs to put in place policies and procedures that support compassion and give people (especially managers) agency to behave compassionately towards each other.
Clear expectations
Clarity is one of the best gifts that you can give employees. As the 12-step slogan popularized by Brenè Brown says, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” When leaders and managers are unclear with expectations, employees can be left to wonder how to prioritize their work. Precious time that could be spent working toward shared goals is spent on the anxiety and mental gymnastics of guesswork. Without the necessary feedback, employees will be left wondering if their work is good enough, which leads to ongoing stress and pressure, and ultimately results in burnout and attrition.
By setting clear expectations, leaders are directly communicating the organization's priorities. In turn, employees have a clear understanding of what to work on, what the metrics of success are, and can therefore be more effective at their job, staving off burnout. Regular check-ins and increased communication provide workers with the insights they need to be effective at their job and stave off dreaded burnout.
Trust in leadership
Managers are the critical component of workplace culture and retention. They set the tone and expectations that their team follows, yet many organizations struggle to empower managers to create meaningful change.
To create meaningful changes that promote retention, leadership can empower managers to build trust with their team by providing the right leadership and compassion training and allowing employees the freedom to make changes and exceptions based on unique employee circumstances.
According to one SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) report, three-quarters of Americans believe that leadership establishes the culture, yet only 36% believe their manager has team leadership skills.
One survey of workers found that 61.7% wanted a job in alignment with their values and passion.
A sense of purpose
Employees generally don’t enjoy working for work’s sake, but are driven instead by a sense of mission and passion. Being connected to their own individual purpose provides employees with the intrinsic motivation to stay with companies and continue to be engaged.
There’s a lot of debate around whether an organization owns the responsibility in creating someone’s sense of purpose at work. While this weight doesn’t fully fall on leadership, and requires an employee’s personal investment, there is something to be said for leaders who can hold a vision that fits into a greater world view and connects to a purpose bigger than just the organization itself.
To create meaningful changes that promote retention, leadership needs to empower managers to build trust with their team. That means that they not only need to receive the right leadership and compassion training, but they need the freedom to make changes and exceptions based on unique employee circumstances.
Room to innovate
People are not robots and do not thrive under strict procedures and routine work. Instead, human beings are naturally creative and innovative. We all love finding ways to be more efficient and develop novel ways of doing things.
Companies that keep their employees for the long haul value this spirit of innovation. They encourage their workers to find new and better ways to look at old problems and come up with fresh solutions. Employees who stretch their problem-solving abilities and sharpen their skills are happier to work and stay at an organization.
