“The Great Reshuffle.” “The Great Resignation.” Whatever moniker one attaches to this employment phenomenon, business leaders and employees alike have all read about and heard much about this topic over the past couple of years. The challenge of retaining employees is no longer just about salary and benefits. It’s also about keeping employees engaged in company culture.

The Alternative Board (TAB) of Central New Jersey recently hosted an event that featured three TAB business owners who are successfully posting strong employee retention results. They shared with the TAB CNJ community some of the creative ideas and strategies that have helped them maintain a culture which encourages and inspires retention. The questions posed to the panel centered on issues stemming from work/life balance, engagement, and leadership.

Remote Work and Work/Life Balance

While the consensus is that working in-person, for the most part, is ideal, the onset of the pandemic has required business owners to develop innovative approaches to ensure that working from home does not interrupt the communication and collaboration so essential to productivity. No doubt, innovation, employee development, coaching, camaraderie, and communication are much easier to foster in person; but because Covid blurred the lines between work and home, and business owners have had to get creative in order to adapt. Succesful business leaders are using technology and fresh team-building tools to help employees and teams feel supported both at work and at home.

On the tech front, the panelists talked about replacing their phone systems with integrated audio-visual systems like Zoom and Teams and adding tech-enabled training tools such as Whisper. Whisper, for example allows managers to listen in on sales and service calls without being heard by customers and without being in the room with the employee.

Other strategies which the panelists are using to support work/life balance and strong engagement include doing things with and for employees which align with company core values. One panelist pointed out that these things do not have to cost a lot of money for them to be meaningful. For example:

• Small monthly wellness or educational stipends to subsidize costs of gym memberships or fitness/wellness apps

• Charity challenges among teams and quarterly team or company service days • Quarterly mental health days

• Summer Fridays

• Hybrid and remote work schedules, supported by structured check ins, policies and accountability

Engagement

While the business definition of “engagement” varies, the approaches that are working for this group of business owners largely focus on the importance and structure of formal and informal communication, visible representations of the company culture and a proactive approach to employee interaction at all levels of the company and across teams.

Our panelists all agreed that while checking in with direct reports 1 to 1 every week had been a cultural standard in their companies pre-pandemic, the need to increase the frequency and quality of those check-ins is paramount in the current environment. Checking in daily or every two days is now their gold standard and a requirement of their leadership teams, to show the employees how much they are valued, keep them engaged in the team and to keep the teammates fully up to speed on what is happening. According to the panelists, that simple act of “checking in” just to see how the employee is doing and what’s working/not working, makes their employees feel attached to the company and to their team. Asking employees what they need both personally and professionally has also gone a long way toward keeping employees engaged and encouraged productivity.

Each of the panelists had also incorporated new ways of identifying and publicly recognizing high performance, as well as behavior which supports the company culture, in order to visibly demonstrate what that looks like and how much it is valued, at the highest level. And they were each pursuing creative and new ways to create more opportunities for employees to interact (virtually and in person), with at least quarterly regularity, to further drive the sense of community, shared purpose and commeraderie. This included off-site events, quarterly awards over an all-hands Zoom meeting, monthly cross-team zoom “coffees” with a set agenda, team challenges and competitions.

Leadership

All the panelists felt strongly that leadership starts at the top and that as engaged business owners “everything” is in their job descriptions, including and most importantly, emulating and projecting the company culture that they want. One of the panelists shared that he puts himself into his employees’ shoes. He tries to use his empathy muscle to imagine what their road blocks are and how the company can rethink the way they work to clear those road blocks. Another panelist talked about her realization that that it is necessary to be supportive in many different ways, as work and life have become so intertwined, while maintaining professional standards and expectations. And they agreed that they have been pioneering and open to new technology which streamlines and augments their work flow so that employees can focus on higher level input.

Above all, they urged their fellow TAB members to always reevaluate and adjust your approach, rather than sitting back and saying, “Okay, we’ve accomplished this, so we are done. The box is checked.” There is always something more to be learned and alternative approaches to consider.