You’ve heard it as the Great Resignation, Great Reshuffle, or my favorite, The Great Re-Think. The majority of workers who quit a job in 2021 say low pay (63%), no opportunities for advancement (63%), and feeling disrespected at work (57%) were reasons why they quit. So what’s the solution?

1. Survey Your Team Weekly

Ask your team to rate their week on a scale of 1-5 and ask them to share where they are mentally, emotionally, and physically on a scale of 1-10. We’ve found that employees are more likely – and more comfortable –  to share this information in a written systematic forum when given a prompt. There’s a chance that one of your employees has been at a 1 out of 10 in capacity over the last month and you have no idea. A good leader wants to know how their team is feeling on a regular basis. If you can’t measure it, you can’t track it.

At STN, we use a platform called 15:5 that makes checking in with your team effortless. If budget is a concern, send out a weekly Google Survey to your team to help you stay informed about your team’s well-being. This is so important as you can get out ahead of problems before it’s too late!

2. Monitor Your Team’s Hours

You know how a coach monitors their superstars’ minutes to avoid injury and keep them fresh for the next game? You need to be doing the same with your team.

We have a joke at STN that we have “time-back police” – it’s a person who reminds you when you have to take time off because you’ve worked too much (hours in a week, or days in a row). If your internal team is maxed, don’t continue to overload, think about using outside partners to ease the load. Use a software program like T-Sheets or Harvest to have your team track their hours, current projects, and capacity so you can help prioritize and find efficiencies.

3. Prioritize Career Planning & Goal Setting

We sit down with our employees at least once a year and go over these questions – it sparks great conversation and allows the manager and employee to be on the same page of where we’re going and how to set KPIs and goals to get there.

Here are the questions we ask annually:

1. 12 months from today, what would your ideal salary be?

2. 12 months from today, what position in the company would you like to be in? 

3. What professional skill, that requires training, would you like to acquire in the next 12 months? 

4. What is a personal goal that you have outside of work that you want to accomplish in the next 12 months? (travel, health, family, etc.) 

5. What initiative, policy, department, or new product offering would you like to lead the charge on in the next 12 months? 

6. What other goals do you have in the next 12 months not listed above? 

Employees want to know where they are going and that their manager cares about their advancement. They want to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Of those that resigned in 2021, 63% left their job due to a lack of opportunities for advancement. I’m willing to bet that a lot of those people probably had opportunities, but they were never shown the road by their leadership team.

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