We spend a lot of time and effort recruiting in business, but recruitment efforts are worthless if your company is a revolving door for employees. Once you make great hires, it’s more important than ever to keep showing those individuals why they should want to work at your company. You need to keep winning them over.
The idea below on how to re-recruit your team came out of a discussion about stemming the flow of leavers. The need to protect and nurture those who stay. These ideas, taken from Debbie Cohen’s book, Humanity Works Better: Five Practices to Lead with Awareness, Choice and the Courage to Change are brilliant, and worthy of a lot of thought.
Tips on how to keep winning your team over:
Re-recruit them.
Consider what conversations would be like if you were recruiting your current team members into your company for the first time.
Spend time understanding their motivations and ambitions. With so much new hiring happening, identify where opportunities might exist inside the organisation (even if it is outside of your team) to help them fulfil unrealised dreams and ambitions.
Help your team see and claim the positive impact they are making in the organisation. Acknowledge not just what they are doing, but why it matters. Let them know what you appreciate about how they are showing up during difficult times. People want to know they are making a difference.
Reward them.
This may ignite the need for a systemic look at how and what is recognised and rewarded in your organisation. Now may be the time to challenge the status quo if what you are seeing from your people and hearing from the talent marketplace is misaligned to your company’s current reality. This is not just about paying people more — research tells us the motivational effect of pay raises is short-lived. Just as important is how you recognise and value the contributions and impact of your people.
Think about the DNA of your organization. If the old ways of doing things no longer serve the organisation and its people, figure out what does. Be willing to let go of the past… it’s gone.
Play the long game here. Be sure your company’s compensation philosophy is clear and understood by all. (That starts with you.) Make sure accountability is in place so that those current employees are not shorted when new people are hired.
Equity starts in how you value contribution. You may not be the only one in your organisation to fix the myriad of issues linked to recognition and rewarding your people, but you can lead. You can give voice to the issues and advocate for accountability.
Engage them.
Businesses are hurting and at the root of that pain for many is a shortage of people to do the work. Your existing people feel that pain as they extend themselves to pick-up extra shifts to provide coverage, listen to customer complaints when they are helpless to fix the real issue, or witness one more colleague call it “quits” when their tipping point is reached. So, be bold and engage your people in helping you solve problems.
Ask for their help. This requires courage because admitting that you do not know all the answers is vulnerable work. It takes strength and confidence to appreciate that outcomes are better when more ideas are included, when fuller representation is present and diverse perspectives are heard.
Give them agency to help mitigate the day-to-day concerns they are faced with. Create space for them to step up, participate and inform the way forward. This sends the crucial message that they are trusted and valued.
Focus on the desired outcome. Actively seek the insights of diverse voices and points of view into what will help achieve it, especially insights and ideas different than your own. Remain open to being surprised and delighted.
Daring to be vulnerable and to not to know it all paves the path to creating deeper engagement and loyalty from all your stakeholders: teammates, peers, colleagues, and direct reports. You lead the way by opening the door.
Most importantly, don’t stop. These are not one-time conversations. You can’t just wade in, have a talk, and think all is good. This should be the primary focus of each manager and leader in your company.
How do you continue to engage with and re-recruit your team? I would love to hear your ideas.
Andy.
Every Wednesday I book out an hour to hold a FREE agency leaders surgery. If you have something on your mind, a challenge you’re wrestling with or just want an alternative point of view, I’d be very happy to lend an ear and maybe help you start to unpick the issues. You can help yourself to my calendar, here. Speaking to a diverse group of agency leaders helps me stay current and contextualise the issues I’m seeing with my clients. So please see this conversation as a genuine collaboration where we both hope to learn something new.