Help! I can’t keep people in my team
Posted by
Sometimes, often through no fault of your own, managers can have a team that’s very transient where people move on regularly and relatively quickly. Managing a team with a high turnover rate can be very frustrating, and it may feel very much out of control. However, if you find yourself in that situation, the good news is that it’s possible to regain a sense of control over your team and its turnover.
- Why are people leaving? The data you can gather from exit interviews is invaluable, so even if you don’t conduct them yourself, make sure they take place. Asking your leavers to be honest and to tell you where they feel things are going wrong is vital to understanding their situation. Their honest feedback is key to understanding any deep-rooted problems in your team. Sometimes people are leaving for good reasons – like promotion into a bigger role in your business. And you may have a mix of turnover for different reasons. Diagnosing the whole problem is the first step!
- Is there a problem with selection? Ask yourself whether you’re hiring the wrong people into your team in the first place? I once worked with an organisation where large groups of people were hired with a low education expectation and a lack of technical capability – but for roles that required the ability to pick up lots of new and often difficult systems quickly. This mismatch meant that many gave up within weeks of starting, often within the training cycle.
- Are you hiring for the right reasons? There’s logic to hiring the brightest and best future high-potentials – people who are going to come into your team, work full-time and be complete stars. But hiring those individuals may not actually be the best option for your particular team. By their very nature “high potentials” are likely to join and leave a team in fairly short order, so think about hiring for retention and longevity instead – for example, you might select someone who is part-time, older or returning to work. It’s true that some of these people might need more initial training, but in the long term they will likely offer the stability you need for your team. Hire high potentials for agility in your team; hire moderate potentials for stability – get the right mix.
- How do you bring people into your team, and how do you retain them? If you remember back to when you’ve started new roles yourself, you’ll likely recall how difficult the first few months can be. With that in mind, what training and support do you offer people new to your team? What are you doing to build their confidence early in your journey with you? Then once they’ve completed their training, are you looking after them properly? And is the job realistically designed so that it doesn’t leave the jobholder completely stressed?
- Ask yourself if there’s a more fundamental problem you need to address. You may be losing people because of a major problem that’s unresolved in your team, for example an issue with location, the systems you use, the process you follow, or that you’re only allowed to train them for two weeks when they need three. If you feel there’s an underlying problem causing your high rate of turnover, use this considerable cost to the business to drive a case for addressing the problems that you see as fundamental.
- Accept that ultimately it may just be that kind of team. Some teams are just transient by nature. People will quickly come and go, and you need to accept and manage that. For example, if you spend time thinking about why they’re there to start with, what it’s adding to their CV, and what they’re getting out of it you might be able to sell them on a commitment to stay for a year to achieve key goals. You also might want to think about whether good performers in other areas of your business would be interested in taking a secondment into your team. This acts as a learning opportunity to help more people in the organisation better understand what you do.
Understanding the reasons for high turnover is the most important part of solving the problem. Exit interviews are a key way of gaining an honest insight into what’s happened. And consider ‘exit-prevention interviews’ – what would happen if you started meaningful conversations about what is working and what is not – at the point where people have not yet started actively looking to leave?