A company, WeAreGrowing Inc. decides to add several new team members to its company. They place ads, go through job sites, and recruiters to find and interview the best talent to join their growing company. Lots of time, human resources, and energy goes into finding the right candidate(s) for the roles and after several interview(s), the team members are selected and officially onboarded into the company.
For the new team members, the first few days and weeks are exciting at WeAreGrowing Inc. As the weeks and months go by, these new team members are not “new” anymore and become “regular employees.” As WeAreGrowing Inc. continues to grow, they add more new team members and so on. Sometime in the distant future, few team members decide to leave WeAreGrowing Inc. for various reasons – join another company, higher studies, start their own venture, etc. Then WeAreGrowing Inc. become highly alert on the recent layoffs and in a move to not lose the team members plans to meet them. HR and managers talk to the team members about how much the company values them and promises that the company will continue to grow. Yet the team members share that their plans to move on were made months ago and felt that their personal and professional growth was stagnant for sometime and were not growing at WeAreGrowing Inc.
There seems to be a long drought in team engagement between when new team members join a company and when they decide to leave. A company can convince itself that they did whatever they can at their disposal to keep the team member(s) engaged and growing. However, team members feel that the company did not engage them enough or challenge them enough or show tangible growth during the time they were with the company. Addressing the team engagement issues when the team members are almost out the door is too late!
If a company sincerely believes that the team is their biggest asset, then they should treat them as such – keep them engaged and challenged throughout the team members’ journey within the company. It’s more expensive for companies to find and hire new talent than keeping the current talent engaged and productive. Better for the company to approach their people that they can leave at any point and realize that the team members have many other career choices as well. You (HR, Managers, Founders or Leaders) just have to deliver the message and show that staying with the company is the best career choice for the team members!