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O P I N I O N
Positively impact your firm’s retention rates by turning abstract ideas into actionable goals. Increasing your firm’s retention
D o you have someone in the family known for their home-cooking? I do, and it is nearly impossible to replicate their dish. When I ask for the family recipe, I receive an imprecise response: “Oh, a dash of this” or “Two handfuls of this spice should do it.” Their cooking doesn’t rely on a written recipe, but rather years of experience, spontaneity, and instinct.
Caroline Young
When discussing retention goals and initiatives, I feel like I’m having a similar conversation – a mishmash of ideas without a clear answer. You’ve probably heard the same areas on which firms should focus: culture, compensation, incentive packages, recognition, and the list goes on. After working on our retention goals at Sain Associates, I realized how important it is to turn abstract ideas like firm culture into an actionable goal. Here are some ways you can begin to positively impact your firm’s retention rates: 1)Train and actively support your managers. Your managers are an important part of creating and maintaining company culture. Interestingly, managers also have one of the biggest impacts on your retention rates because they affect their employees’ career growth and job satisfaction, two key factors in retaining good employees. With this
in mind, managers need specific training in how to support their employees because often they have the best technical knowledge but are new to managing people. During the training program, you should rely on solid teaching techniques that reinforce learning, and as a former teacher, I have a couple of favorites. First, we can learn from each other through sharing the areas we have struggled with, what we learned from our experience, and how to proactively plan should the situation present itself again. At Sain, we use the term “lessons learned,” and we share our stories of what could have improved our performance as managers and engineers. It is our executive team who first models this behavior, which allows others to feel safe in sharing their lessons learned in a vulnerable environment.
See CAROLINE YOUNG, page 12
THE ZWEIG LETTER DECEMBER 14, 2020, ISSUE 1371
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