Professor Sir Cary Cooper, ALLIANCE Manchester Business School, University of Manchester says boosting retention isn’t complicated, but it does need attention.
There is an old Chinese proverb: “if you are planning for one year, plant rice; if you are planning for ten years, plant trees; but if you are planning for a hundred years, plant people”. For any organisation, whether in the private or public sector, the most important resource they have is their people, if they want to achieve any measure of success. Yet in difficult global economic times, many organisations seem to forget this most basic doctrine of ‘successful workplaces’, moving toward downsizing to keep their labour costs down in a survival mode stance. Moreover, with two significant wars, a global cost of living and energy crisis and various important world leaders pulling back into a protectionist and confrontational mode, the future of these organisations requires them to retain and develop their talent, and not dispense with them in a frenzied attempt to balance the books!
There are many things that organisations can do to retain and develop their staff. First, to provide them with a sense of purpose in their job, and a feeling of being part of something important, a sense of community. This is not easy to do but is fundamental to many people, a feeling of belonging to something bigger than themselves.
Engaging work
Second, engage with them in more professional training and development of their skills. This means spending time with them to see what they might want to do in terms of upskilling. This is particularly important during difficult times when people are worried about their job security.
Third, spend ‘quality time’ with them in terms of finding out how they feel about their job security, the organisations future and anything else that may be troubling them. This is difficult for many managers, but it is vital if you want to find out how people perceive and react to their job and the organisation more generally. A real problem we have in many organisations is: ‘many managers just don’t have effective social skills in relating to their staff’. This may be an opportunity to do something about this problem, in terms of providing the training for line managers to enhance their ‘emotional intelligence’ or social skills.
Work for meaning and for bread
Fourth, giving people more autonomy and control over their job, such as more flexible working and/or giving them more authority to take on more challenging work, in fact, anything that gives staff a sense of some control over their work. As Studs Terkel said in his book Working: “work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor, in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying”.
Creating a healthy and engaging culture in the workplace is what most GenZ and young millennials want, so anything that gets people up in the morning ‘bright-eyed and bushy tailed’ and eager to get to work, is what young and old alike want from their employer.
Feeling great at work
Retaining talent at work is not very complicated, it’s about being sensitive to people’s needs, and what they want to get out of their job and life in general. This means engaging them, finding the right kind of work for them and making them feel needed and valued. As Mark Twain once wrote: “keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can somehow become great”.
Management is not just about making just-in-time decisions and demonstrating authoritative behaviour, it is about understanding and meeting the needs of those you work with and making them feel you care and understand them and their contribution.
Professor Cooper’s latest book is Healthy High Performance: Unlocking Business Success Through Employee Wellbeing (Routledge Books, 2025).
