Recruiting & Retention

April 1, 2019 Stacie Morgan

An authentic and slightly irreverent blog on the applied dimensions of leadership & Change...

My Crap
Your Crap
Our Crap
Everybody’s Crap.

I don’t care what industry you’re in or the size of your organization…we’re all hip-deep in this recruiting and retention crap.

I work with a lot of different types and sizes of organizations in higher education, non-profit, and for profit industries and everyone is focused on recruiting and retaining employees and of course students and customers, depending on your industry. And everybody’s talking about “those Millennials!” How do we recruit them? How do we retain them? What on earth to they really want? Do they even know?

Employers want to know what to do about Millennials as if they were aliens that descended upon our planet and we are being forced to coexist with them; as opposed to them being our children and the product of our 1) technological progress, 2) rebelling against our own parents’ ways, and 3) our own childrearing choices. That being said, they baffle us because even knowing how they work, what they need, the ways they are different from us, and how they are the same, we’ve got a big problem! We don’t want to change. Yes folks, we know how to attract them and keep them and how much we need them. But no matter how many different experts tell us what to do, we make excuses and rationalize why we can’t execute the necessary changes because we are just not ready to let go of the status quo…our way of doing things…to make room for them and their way. We’ve grown accustomed to our function and dysfunction (#accustomedtodysfunction). We find comfort in the familiar ways that no longer achieve the results we require, and our egos are attached to our ways. It is like a chemical breathing alien race has slowly started transforming our atmosphere and we’d rather choke and die than admit we need an oxygen mask. But it really goes deeper than that.

Business is no longer about you or your board—its about people. Your employees are now a proxy for your customers and vice versa. Society now functions as a collective and everybody is watching. How you treat your employees impacts how your customers feel about buying from you; how you treat your customers impacts how employees feel about working for you. You can do everything right as you know it and be dead wrong. The game has changed…don’t be the last one picked to play.

Here is how to cut through the recruiting and retention crap.

We each have to be honest with ourselves and own our crap. The kinds of changes that will facilitate recruiting and retaining younger generations will probably help us all but will be very different and will seriously shake things up. But let’s face it, either we change the game or get off the field. Understanding that we are uncomfortable with the necessary changes will help us keep from projecting our feelings onto others who may want the change or fear it more than we do.

Your employees will have some of the fears you have plus a lot more! They can’t see what you see and are playing blind. Their focus is on the current play—what they are evaluated on. They need to know how to be successful on the other side of change. To be honest, they most likely doubt that you can protect them from the woes of change because they see how freaked out you are when you call each play. (Nobody can hide fear from their employees!)

Owning your feelings first helps you meet your employees where they are with their own feelings. It is denying feelings exist at work or have an impact at work that is the destructive force, not having feelings. The positive side is that you can leverage the fears of others to help you uncover blindspots in your thinking and overcome resistance to change. (#owningyourfeelings)

The collective fears of employees have a synergistic effect which forms our organizational crap. We are in deep doo doo, as they say, when everybody is pretending they embrace change that they don’t or won’t. This is the key to trust-erosion and organizational dysfunction (#trusterosion). If employees can speak their truth—fears, concerns, questions, comments—we all learn and grow. Everyone has a different perspective, a slice of reality, that must be shared in order to fathom the whole of any situation, especially recruiting and retention. There is a lot you can learn from the data set of employees and Millennial employees you already have. Are you listening? Have you asked?

All organizations are concerned with recruiting and retaining employees who will take them into the future. They struggle with trying to reinterpret the data to arrive at a conclusion that has roots in the status quo. It’s not going to happen. If you think it is or will, cut the crap! We are all linked in a global community that is transforming how we experience relationships and commerce. The future is about communication and learning. Access to information and leading teams is the currency of Millennials and beyond. If you aren’t providing these opportunities as a matter of course you’re already out of the game. If your new employees cannot learn and advance in lateral as well as hierarchical increments within their first year, you’ll lose them. They work for the adventure, so you better create one. If you do, they will consistently exceed your expectations and bring home the prize.