What Should People Managers Do About The Great Resignation?

What Managers can do to retain and help their top talent

One question I keep getting is around what managers can do now that the Great Resignation is on. Every week, it seems like more and more people are leaving their jobs for new opportunities. If you are a manager, this concerns you because having to find replacements and losing employees to attrition is never fun. It costs you time, and it costs your employees money. 

To better find out what to do, I asked a number of my friends who are people managers what they were doing, or what they thought other managers should be doing to help their employees?

What should managers do to help retain employees right now?

Invest in the career development through career conversations and career development

94% of employees surveyed by LinkedIn for its annual Workplace Learning Report said they would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development. So start investing in it.

Start having career conversations with their employees. Odds are, they are already thinking about it (statistically speaking) so it's your chance to be a part of the solution. Hopefully, this is something you are doing regularly, but if your company is anything like mine, it’s an afterthought, especially during the pandemic. That said, if you aren’t having these regularly, they might not be built in trust, and your employees may not be willing to show their cards. That said, showing that you care about their career is never a bad thing, as long as you mean it. If they do end up sharing their thoughts and goals, think about what you can do as a manager to help them work toward that goal. In some cases, that may be helping them craft or shift their current role, and in other cases, it may mean you’ll need to help them move onto something else. 

That can be a pain, because nobody wants to lose employees, but as a manager, if there was ever a time to show compassion and support for your employees, now is the time. Can you help them find another role in the company? What about a 20% project? How about advocating for some extra budget to get them some training or coaching? These are all potential options, but ideally, you’ll want to start with understanding their aspirations.

Finally, if all else fails, please do your best to help them find their next role. Doing what you can to help them if they do end up leaving is something that they will remember and respect you for

Conduct “Stay Interviews”

Some companies are using stay interviews to figure out how to retain their employees. Instead of waiting until the exit interview (when it’s too late) to find out what’s not working, HR or people managers can conduct these interviews to learn about this before the employee chooses to walk out the door. From my experience, it’s best to do this with a manager, but HR can also perform this and sit down and go through a series of questions to figure out what it would take for an employee to stay.  

Make “return to work” work for them

With new policies on return to work coming out, one thing you can do is to help them think about the new rules your company is putting out and how they can maximize those to work for them. Hopefully, your company has given you enough resources and wiggle room to make that happen (although sorry if you work for JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley…) but we’re all trying to make sense of how these are going to work in action. 

COVID-19 forced us all to work from home which was a massive experiment in how to adapt to changing work conditions and environments. We all had varying degrees of constraints on our work environment, but I think it's safe to say that we all learned to appreciate having a positive work environment where we felt we could do good work and be productive.

Given the new return to work policies, help your employees think about how they can work within these policies to set up ways for them to do their best work. For example, if you do have a work from home policy for a few days a week, talk to them about how they can best structure these days for the kinds of work and deliverables that they have. Or, if they do need to go back into the office, have some open conversations with them about how they are feeling about it, and help them get what they need to re-adjust back into a physical space. 

Spot burnout and call it out

it’s hard for us individually to spot burnout. Oftentimes we need others to tell us before we can see it ourselves. The reason I know this is because it has happened to me. What we do know is that burnout is real, it's up right now, and it has negative consequences for individuals. As a manager, if you care for the well-being of your people and their careers, call out the burnout where you see it, and do whatever is in your control to help your employees. Some may need a week of PTO. Some may need to take advantage of the resources that your company has provided in the benefits package. Others may need something more than both of those. 

It’s your duty and job to make sure that your employees are healthy and rested. One way to do this is to incorporate a check on well-being in your regular check ins to make sure they are tracking. Even if they do eventually leave or ask for time away, the earlier you can spot it, the earlier you can plan and make arrangements for it.

Be an advocate

People managers are in a tough spot.  On one hand, you don’t make the policies and procedures that your company sets up. On the other hand, you do need to drive results for whatever goals or OKRs your team is responsible for. This is also what’s hard about being a manager, especially a middle manager. Many companies are coming up with policies for returning to work with an idea that their policy is what is going to actually happen and be executed 100% to a tee. 

So far at my company I have found that is not the case, and I’d argue that’s probably the same at most other companies.  If something isn’t working, advocate for your employees upwards to your leaders about what’s working and what’s not. And if something is not working, always frame it through the lens of how it impacts a particular business outcome or OKR, so your own managers understand the context and impact.

Managers are in a tough spot, but these are all actionable tactics that managers can add to their toolkit to try to retain their employees in a difficult time. At the end of the day, you never know who you will work with again, so when all else fails, my advice is to be human, be respectful and be supportive.