You’ve probably read a lot about the great resignation and the current trend of waning employee loyalty, and while these topics may inspire fear, history teaches us that leaning into fear is never a sustainable growth strategy. As Tony Robbins, one of the nation’s top life and business strategists, so rightly advises, “focus on where you want to go, not on what you fear” and success will be yours. This has never been truer than in the present.
Law firms can wring their hands about the great resignation and worry about what may come of their workforce, or they can focus on how to keep employees happy. The former will engender what they fear; the latter will help them get where they want to go—to a place of stability, productivity, and growth.
How to Keep Employees Happy: Five Steps to Success
1. Provide Positive Feedback
Well-being is the backbone of employee loyalty, and this begins with feeling appreciated. A Harvard Business Review study shows a nearly 6:1 ratio of positive to negative feedback is that which best drives motivation. When your team feels that you value their work, they will be motivated to keep that work up. On the flip side, if they don’t feel appreciated, their motivation will turn to looking for a new employer, rather than supporting their present one.
2. Nurture Growth
Perhaps the only thing human beings crave as much as positive reinforcement is growth. All of us want to feel as if our life is well-lived, and a cornerstone of getting there is seeing progress in our personal and professional projects. You can support your employees in this ambition by providing ongoing training and education, as well as by promoting from within at your firm.
3. Encourage Feedback
If there were ever a golden set of rules for how to keep employees from leaving, offering them a voice would be among the most important. Providing your team positive feedback is crucial, but so too is allowing them to turn around and provide you with feedback (be it positive or negative) in return.
Soliciting feedback from your team not only gives you crucial information for how best to refine processes, but it also meets your team’s very basic human need to be heard.
4. Earn and Honor Trust
Nearly half of surveyed employees cited a lack of transparent leadership communication as the reason driving them to seek a new job. Opaque communication is just another way of saying that these employees have lost trust in their leaders. Turn this statistic around by leaning into personal connections, honesty, and open-ended conversations. Show your hand; let your team know their success is your own; be honest and, in return, they will stay true.
5. Nurture Creativity
Among the leading drivers of the great resignation is a desire to work-to-live rather than live-to-work. Young talent increasingly values the ability to shape their lives in the image of their person. They are unwilling to sacrifice passion and creativity in exchange for a paycheck—and they don’t have to. You can nurture creativity at the office by setting up innovative teams, offering rewards, hiring widely and diversely, encouraging risk-taking, and simply having fun.
When your team can live their lives at the same time as support your firm, you won’t have to worry about how to keep employees from leaving; you’ll have to worry about how to make room for all those who want to join.
To learn more about supporting employee loyalty and excelling at a time when so many are simply worried about surviving, do not hesitate to book a call with me, Hiring & Empowering founder and best-selling author, Molly McGrath, today. I am here to listen to your struggles, and identify and implement proven solutions to turn around your people, processes, productivity and profit—and fast! Book a qualifier call with me today and take the first step towards a total law firm turnaround.
