Are You Prioritizing “Keeping” Over “Hiring?”
This article is a reprint from June 2023. We are highlighting this topic as Sally Bryant will be featured on Jim Eskin's podcast later this summer to talk about retention of staff under the topic "Keeping Fundraisers Fundraising." More information about this podcast is coming soon.
Are you in a job where taking all of your PTO is encouraged? Or frowned upon? As Program Director at the Indiana University Alumni Association I took all of my PTO each year. Yep. All of it. This one thing made a significant impact on my professional success, my personal relationships and my physical health.
At Bryant Group, we do not have a set amount of PTO – which in actuality can make PTO a bit more tricky to navigate. In the end, it comes down to the same thing that it does everywhere – what is the culture and expectation from leadership about taking personal time off?
Do you work in an environment that encourages you to have life outside of work? The time for physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and intellectual renewal outside of work has a positive impact for your organization, for your family and for you as a person. I wouldn’t work anywhere that doesn’t support that.
In a recent webinar I presented on strategies for mitigating burnout as professionals. Toward the end of the session, several of the questions on how to implement these strategies included:
“How can I create buy-in with my leadership to help me honor my best work?”
“How can I convince leadership to allow me to take my [earned] PTO?”
“How might I set boundaries with colleagues for me to unplug and recharge?”
“How do I determine the culture of life balance during the interview process without sounding like I am not a hard worker?”
It’s quite obvious that many of those advancement professionals are part of a culture that is not prioritizing the mental, physical and professional wellbeing of their employees and thus, risking the chance of losing top talent.
Much of the discussion for a better life balance includes the integration and prioritization of flexibility and autonomy in our work cultures. As talent strategy consultants, we hear from both client organizations and prospective candidates about aligning the values of the culture with the expectations of top talent. More and more we are finding that it’s the ability to achieve life integration, not necessarily offering remote work. Since 2020, we have experienced the flexibility and autonomy of remote work, and as we return to a hybrid world of work, how might we keep what was working? What if we were to reframe success as measuring “results out” versus “hours in?” Can employees do their best work while also prioritizing their lives beyond their career?
Early in the pandemic, our CEO Sally Bryant, framed The Great Resignation as The Great Opportunity. Several years have passed and we continue to see opportunity emerging from that difficult time. One opportunity is to reframe how we think about work, employee engagement and employee retention. Fortune magazine reported in October of 2022 that remote and hybrid workers are slightly more productive than fully in-office workers. An article in Forbes from November 2022 shows a significant decrease in attrition of remote and hybrid workers. If organizations can maintain (or even increase) productivity, while also increasing retention of your best team members, think of the decrease in turnover cost.
All this being said, we also see a great benefit in a hybrid model, including a model where team members are on site together on the same days. Trust is the basic component of a strong team. Communication is a building block of trust. Relationships and natural conversation flow much more easily when people are in the same space working together on opportunities and problem-solving.
Life integration and balance carries many components, including how your work is structured, how the culture perceives and handles time off and an employee’s work ethic. Because the balance has to include productivity and intentional productive work on the one side, with true “boundaried” time off on the other.
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