MindHandle CEO, Eric Harris, spoke with Adam Fridman on his Future of People Initiatives podcast about retaining employees in today’s market. During the discussion, Eric talks about the need to “date” your employees, much one like would date their spouse to keep the relationship healthy.
It may sound like an HR faux pas, but “dating” your employees is critical to increasing employee retention. When you date your spouse, you are telling them they are a priority to you. “Dating” your employees is similar, but involves fewer floral deliveries.
Get to Know Your Team Members
It’s important to develop an intentional practice of getting to know your team members. What do they like? Who do they love? What do they do outside of work? What are their passions? Getting to know them is crucial because it informs you how to better serve them and ensure that their needs are being met.
Listen. Really Listen.
It’s easy to ask questions. But it’s important to listen to the answers. By really listening to what your team members have to say, you are proving to them that the company is as interested in them today as when they were being recruited. These check-ins go a long way in keeping employees motivated and engaged.
Listen Often
Many companies have defaulted to a yearly survey to hear from their people. But business moves faster than that, and a lot can change in a year. It’s important to develop a continuous and active listening strategy that regularly produces actionable insight and gives you the ability to react to any changes.
Thankfully, several tools provide these insights:
- Stay Interviews
- Pulse Surveys
- Skip-Level Meetings
- Focus Groups
- Inclusion, Engagement and Wellbeing Surveys
- Employee Journey Mapping
As employers, we need to create empathy at scale by getting to know the team members that make up our organization. A mindset of “dating” our employees is great way to accomplish this while increasing engagement and retention.
Learn more about increasing employee retention and watch the podcast now at Future of People Initiatives.
