05 Retain

RETAIN

This chapter discusses:

• > Retention: how to make it work for the benefit of you and your company
• > Motivation and employee engagement
• > Appraisals as a tool for motivation and engagement.

Retention, motivation and engagement: it may seem obvious why these three issues are addressed together, or it may seem like an exercise in management or HR speak. On the other hand, some people jump to conclusions about the meaning of these terms and assume that each is something to be desired: this may not necessarily be the case.

The key to retaining staff is understanding what motivates them and using that knowledge to fully engage them with your company and its goals. The challenge, as we’ve established, is that creative individuals cannot easily be categorised and so you have to somehow take into account individuality while attempting to treat people fairly and consistently within some kind of structure.

When you take a look at your staff, you know instinctively who you’d like to be there in five, ten, fifteen years’ time, helping you to run the company. Your instinct will be based on so many different factors – emotional, experiential, anecdotal, practical and others. So it’s important to consider how you are going to make this happen.

There are many theories of motivation and as many questionnaires or exercises to assess the motivational drivers of individuals.

As with all things people-related, questionnaires and exercises should always be approached with due caution. You wouldn’t or shouldn’t use only one method of recruitment selection – for example, it would be unwise to appoint only people who present themselves well and appropriately in a psychometric test. You would be best advised to use a range of methods. Likewise with motivation: you can imagine people fitting into motivational theories like a series of Venn diagrams, and the more tests you have the more complex the overlapping and interaction.

1. Retention: How to Make It Work for You and Your Company

You could easily be forgiven for assuming that high retention is always something to strive for. I would challenge that view.

A certain amount of change is generally good for creative organisations. It acts as a stimulus and a shot of adrenalin. New people provide such an impetus. If you don’t have the room for new people then where is that push going to come from?

So, don’t just assume that you have to aim for high retention.

I am not suggesting that you ‘Gotta get rid of the dead wood’, as someone once said to me, and that you have to cull 25 per cent of the staff regularly or your creative juices will dry up. But don’t be scared of turnover (or ‘churn’) and use it to your advantage. Hence, the title of this section – making it work for you and your company.

Once again, this will involve a certain amount of thought and planning, so the following checklist should help.

In addition to completing the checklist, it is crucial to gather input from your staff, although perhaps not everyone. (Be careful as to who you choose to include or exclude, and why.) I’m not talking about doing a staff survey. That would not be the most effective way to engage your staff in this process. Sit them down individually in a relaxed environment and get them to talk. Jot down the salient points.

Useful questions to ask

• > Why do you work here?
• > What is it about this particular company that makes you stay?
• > What one thing would make you leave if it changed?
• > What do you dislike about the company?
• > What would you like to change about the company in the future?
• > How would the company look in ten/twenty years’ time, if you were in charge?

Think about the most creative person that you know. If they don’t work in your company, do you know why they work where they work? Ask them what it is about their place of work that makes them stay.

You may conclude that you are currently perfectly happy with all your team and you want to hang on to them all. That’s fine. But it may not always be the case, and the exercise above could make you realise more about your company and your team, and why people want to work with you – or not.

These actions will have provided you with a fair amount of information to take in. Next, you need to do something with it.

2. Motivated and Employee Engagement

How can we understand motivation? I could send you in the direction of Abraham Maslow – one of the most frequently quoted exponents of motivational theory, though there are many others. More recent research (e.g. by Herzberg) focuses on the idea of individual motivation, and to me this seems to make sense if you overlay individual experiences in culture, education, upbringing, age and gender.

The main connection between the traditional and current theories is the idea of self-fulfilment. In very simple terms, people will be most motivated by fulfilling their own ideas of success or personal goals of achievement. Obviously, this is intrinsically tied in with the concepts of reward (Chapter 4) and recognition (Chapter 6).

Abraham H Maslow (1943). ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, Psychological Review.

Frederick Herzberg (1987). ‘One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees?’ Harvard Business Review, September–October 1987.

There are several questionnaires that you can complete or even ask your staff to complete which will pinpoint what drives them. One of the most commonly used is ‘Career anchors’, devised by Edgar Schein and John Van Maanen. Their system helps people to identify what they are seeking from their job and hence their motivators. The choices are:

• > Technical/functional – driven by the need to use and develop particular skills.
• > General managerial – driven by the need to get to a level where you can coordinate the efforts of others and identify with the success of the organisation.
• > Autonomy/independence – driven by the need to be able to manage or direct your own work; may choose to maintain flexibility rather than take on the added responsibilities promotion may bring.
• > Security/stability – driven more by security of job tenure or financial security, than by job content or promotion.

SOURCES OF EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT

WHAT MAKES THEM TICK?

• > Entrepreneurial creativity – driven by the need to create an organisation or enterprise and use your own abilities to make it a success.
• > Service/dedication to a cause – driven by the need to do something that you believe is of value in the world.
• > Pure challenge – driven by the need to solve something, by novelty, variety and difficulty, easily bored by easy solutions.
• > Lifestyle – driven by the need to achieve balance between personal and work life, making all aspects of your life integrated, may turn down promotion if it endangered that balance.

Edgar H. Schein and John Van Maanen (2013). Career Anchors: The Changing Nature of Careers Self-Assessment, John Wiley & Sons.

Employee engagement takes this a step further.

This is all about how you get your staff to do their best work or go ‘above and beyond’ or the ‘extra mile’. You are seeking employees who will voluntarily do more than is strictly expected under their terms of employment. They are likely to do this if they are in some way inspired and have jobs that are of some value.

It’s this win-win aspect of employee engagement which makes it something of a Holy Grail for employers. Who wouldn’t want inspired employees, going that extra mile without being hounded to do so? It also includes what’s called ‘discretionary behaviour’.

Engaged employees tend to:

• > Help promote your employer brand or reputation – they will be out there in the marketplace singing your praises (we’ve discussed the importance of this in relation to recruitment)
• > Have a stronger belief in the fairness of the company and a greater trust in their manager – which not only helps build your brand, but also makes it so much easier to get things done
• > Focus on their work and produce better results – it’s widely agreed that productivity and efficiency is improved by increased employee engagement
• > Develop better client relationships – staff who are keen on their work let their enthusiasm shine through, and this is flattering to clients and smooths the way to increased rapport.

In general, being valued and involved appears to be key to a strong sense of engagement. Ideas on how to engage your employees include:

• > Follow up on your commitments. If you make a promise, keep it; don’t promise what you can’t keep. For example, don’t promise that someone can go on a particular training course and then change your mind when you realise how much it costs.
• > Be fair, consistent and transparent in the way that you deal with staff. This is something of an HR mantra, but a good principle to adopt whenever managing people.
• > Make sure that you and others who manage people act in such a way that supports the company and its values. This will help to create an environment or atmosphere that will encourage the kind of behaviour that you are seeking. You are the example that they will follow. If you show a positive attitude and commitment to the company, this will reinforce its values.
• > Give staff the chance to give feedback and have their opinions heard.
• > Keep everyone informed about what’s going on in the company. This shows trust, particularly if you tell them both the good and the bad. It is simply treating your staff like adults.
• > Be conscious of your employees’ work/life balance (i.e. ensuring that they are taking holidays, not working long hours regularly) and have some consideration for their health and wellbeing.
• > Rather more prosaically, make sure that jobs and tasks are well planned and defined. Everyone has to do boring or repetitive tasks from time to time, but mixing it up as best you can will provide greater interest and meaning. Hence, increased job satisfaction.

As a slight aside, it’s important to be realistic: you are likely to come across certain individuals who will never wish to be engaged in their work. This is rare in creative organisations, because of the very nature of the work, but it can still happen. However often you attempt to draw such individuals into your plans for increased engagement, they will dig in their heels and work to rule. It makes much more sense for all concerned that you focus on the people with whom you will have positive results.

Just focus on releasing that positive discretionary behaviour!

3. Appraisals as a Tool for Motivation and Engagement

A necessary evil; an exercise in timewasting; a pointless procedure invented by HR; ‘we’ve just got to get through it once a year’. If you approach appraisals with any of these views, it is a fair assumption that it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy!

Why don’t you like them?

Why don’t they like them?

I’ve known people who have submitted the same form year after year and their manager has never noticed. In these circumstances, it’s no wonder that appraisals are not viewed with pleasure or seen to have any benefits.

Instead of perpetuating these negative views, we need to take a look at performance appraisals and remember their original purpose.

Let’s begin by looking at the purpose of appraisals from a broader perspective and gradually narrow it down to understand their real purpose.

Start by thinking about your expectations of your staff. When you hired them, you needed them to fulfil a role (as you took great pains to articulate in the job description). So, you have an idea – ideally, a clear idea – of what you need to see them doing and achieving. If you see them doing well or badly, you are likely to say something to them at the time. This informal day-to-day communication is the first stage of performance management. Perhaps you also jot down these brief informal conversations in a notebook or on your tablet, so you have a full history over the course of time?

In some instances, this may be all that you need to do to keep your staff happy and engaged. However, it is generally recognised that an effective appraisal system is one of the most successful motivational tools that you have at your disposal as a manager. As a minimum, adopting a process ensures that you treat everyone equally (remember Chapter 2?).

Here is a suggestion of how a performance appraisal might fit into the whole idea of performance management:

1. Ongoing informal day-to-day performance feedback from you to a staff member.
2. Regular or irregular scheduled meetings about work, progress, aspirations, issues, and concerns. These may be weekly or monthly or at any other agreed timeframe.
3. Annual appraisal meeting where objectives are discussed, training needs planned and goals are jointly agreed.
4. Six monthly progress meeting to check in, help remove any barriers, provide additional time or resources, shift deadlines, as fits with the ongoing situation.
5. Then it becomes a circular process – once goals are set, you can regularly check progress, and then set new goals as they are achieved.

Developing an Appraisal Process

It does not have to be complicated: the most important thing is that it actually works!

The goals are to:

• > Have a structured conversation with each staff member to discuss their goals and aspirations
• > Make a realistic plan that aligns those goals and aspirations with those of the company
• > Highlight any training or development needs that will help to achieve these goals, and
• > Put measurements and timeframes into place that will determine progress or achievements.

A form will act as a record and help to form an agenda for the meeting itself, but it can be a simple A4 sheet giving the individual the chance to list their achievements, any issues and where they would like to go next.

Don’t get fixated on a form. There are so many examples on various websites that you can end up getting befuddled about what you are trying to achieve. It absolutely does not need to be fourteen pages long, with competency frameworks, assessment criteria and probing questions that seem to have little real point.

Creative people are not big fans of forms, as you will be only too well aware. However, don’t forget that one of the purposes of this whole process is to have a record of it to use for future planning.

Appraisal form

Implementing the Appraisal Process

Remember that the responsibilities are shared across the organisation. You cannot leave all the work to the individual nor can they expect you to take full responsibility for their career. Focus equally on all three main parts of the appraisal process:

• > Preparation
• > Meeting
• > Follow-up.

The main responsibilities and actions for everyone involved in the three steps of the process are described below.

Responsibilities of the Manager/Person Conducting the Appraisal

1. Preparation

Seek input about the performance of your team members. Even if you run a small practice, perhaps seek input from team colleagues to be sure you have an accurate and all around view. If this is an annual appraisal, be sure to consider the whole year, not just what happened in the last few months. Seek positive feedback, but don’t avoid the negatives. Perhaps prepare some bullet points of the key feedback you need to give.

Read the appraisal form before the meeting – not during it. And don’t ignore it altogether, since that clearly does not respect the person who agonised over completing it. Reading it beforehand means that you can consider the contents and make better use of the meeting itself. If there is anything in the form that you react strongly to, you can respond in a more measured way if you’ve had time to absorb it. You can also

APPRAISALS

consider solutions or developmental opportunities that might help support the individual’s goals.

Make yourself aware of what resources or support may be made available to the individual. There’s little point in discussing training courses only to find that there is no money in the budget for them. It may be that there is an internal expert who could help support the person to learn a new skill, or a project they can work on which might expose them to a learning experience.

2. Meeting

Manage the meeting agenda and content. If you’ve prepared properly, you know what the issues are and can provide feedback, but you may wish to start by asking the staff member how they feel the past year has gone. Let them talk. Offer them feedback. Plan the future.

Manage the meeting timing. Explain the timeframe from the start. If you have scheduled 45 minutes or an hour for the meeting, then stick to it. You can always reconvene.

Listen – this meeting is for the benefit of your staff member. This is their forum to be heard and the focus is on them. Your input is obviously important, but give them the chance to express themselves and give them space.

Ensure that notes are taken. If you have prepared properly, you should have an agenda of points that need to be covered which can serve as the basis for these notes. You can expand on them as the meeting unfolds. It is particularly important that you record giving any feedback, particularly if you may need to follow up on performance issues. You should also note any goals and the action plan agreed:

• > A signed copy of the form and notes ensures that there is no confusion as to what was said and agreed.

Be clear about the outcomes and action plan. Use the concept of SMART goals as a tool. It’s important that it’s clear who is responsible for doing what and by when. For example, you’ve agreed that the staff member needs to improve their presentation skills, but how are they going to do so? Are they going to be invited to observe others making presentations to give them insights, and if so who is going to orchestrate that? Are they going on a course, and if so who is going to research relevant courses? In this case, as a manager, you are likely to be more aware of when other presentations may be taking place and have the power to ensure that they are invited; on the other hand, the staff member is perfectly capable of researching different presentation courses and coming back to you with a short list for consideration. Remember this is all about shared responsibility and two-way communication.

SMART goals worksheet

3. Follow up

Make sure you note down key dates or deadlines on the action plan. It’s important that you know when these are so that you can monitor progress. It is also important to keep to your side of the bargain and fulfil your own actions on that plan. If you don’t lead by example, this will perpetuate the myth that nothing ever happens after the appraisal meeting itself.

Ensure that the documentation is properly completed and stored in the appropriate place – could be with HR or in some other confidential location – with the other personnel records.

Make a note in your diary to check in with the team member after a couple of weeks or a month to be sure that they know you are taking these actions seriously. When you follow this through, it will prompt them to pursue their own part of the bargain.

Responsibilities of the Employee – What You Should expect from Them

1. Preparation

• > Attend the workshop explaining the process or at least read the supporting notes.
• > Complete the form fully and with proper thought about what is realistic. (This is not supposed to be an opportunity to raise all the negative issues that the staff member may have.)
• > Give some thought to goals and how these might be achieved. Again, a touch of reality helps here.

2. Meeting

• > Be prepared to discuss achievements, barriers, and goals. The meeting won’t work if they are not prepared to talk.
• > Take responsibility for their own career and how to achieve aspirations. (Ultimately, it is their career and you are merely an enabler.)
• > Welcome feedback and constructive criticism as an opportunity to learn.

3. Follow up

• > Fulfil the agreed action points within the agreed timeframe. If there is some barrier to doing so, they should come back to you to explain and discuss how it can be overcome.
• > Show a positive attitude towards making the appraisal process work. Indifference or cynicism are the opponents here.
• > Genuinely engage in developmental goals and responding to the feedback given by trying to change behaviour and performance levels to suit.

What’s Next?

Above all, keep the communication going. The rapport you have with your team should increase. By no means treat this as an exercise in being everyone’s best friend. The intention is to focus on career goals within the parameters of what is feasible within your company. Don’t promise the moon, because you can’t deliver it.

Bywords such as honesty and transparency are invaluable in ensuring that an atmosphere of trust is developed and maintained with your team.

Ideally, you can take a look at the outcomes of the appraisals in terms of goals, and you’ll notice that there are some common themes across a team or all staff. It may be that there is a perceived need for a particular type of training – a particular software, perhaps, or some kind of management training.

There will be other more esoteric aspirations which may be better realised if a mentor is appointed. Soft skills can also be addressed with coaching to a certain extent.

You’ll be able to maintain some faith in the appraisal process if you aim for some quick wins:

• > A role might come up on a project that someone expressed an interest in fulfilling; perhaps they could do so with some guidance from a more senior team member, or join a team that can initiate them in the skills required.
• > Ask your resident software expert to schedule time with someone who wants to learn more, and make sure that the project resourcing enables this.
• > Organise a lunchtime session and talk about your own experiences on a particular project type.
• > Consider whether you can act as a mentor in leadership or management skills.

There is an awful lot written about ‘learning organisations’ (a term coined by Peter M Senge and his colleagues), but like most trends the underlying principle is really very simple: try to keep up the momentum and communication about development and learning!

• > Create a working environment in which learning and development is encouraged, valued and second nature.
• > Every company can be a learning organisation. You can organise shared trips to exhibitions or lectures without too much effort or too much cost. You can ask those who have been on courses to give a talk about what they’ve learned. You can lend books, magazines and DVDs on creative topics. There are also many free webinars online on various topics.
• > Encourage and support learning and development.
• > Recognise those who have really made an effort to enhance their skills and knowledge.

Peter M Senge (1990), The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization, Doubleday.

Summary: Plan to Retain

Retention, motivation and employee engagement are intrinsically linked and a well-designed appraisal process will positively support your efforts to retain those employees you wish to retain, motivate them and engage them in their work, and engender demonstrative positive discretionary behaviour.

Rather than approaching appraisals as if they were a chore, plan them well and use all their positive aspects to the benefit of your company. These are people businesses we are talking about, so if you run a business you need to know and properly engage with your people.

Remember these three factors, which work in your favour as well as your employees’:

• > Do your planning
• > Re-do your planning
• > Continue to think short term but don’t ignore medium to long term.

Encourage your team members to expand their horizons and enhance their knowledge on a whole range of subjects. This will create increased dynamism in your working environment. It will not only engage, but energise, your staff. Happy, motivated employees will maximise their discretionary behaviour and enhance the service you can provide to your clients.