In the era of the Great Resignation, it’s more important than ever for managers to be equipped to attract talent that is ready to hit the ground running. In this blog, we explore the key areas that attract star talent and how your organisation can utilise L&D to attract the top talent you need.

A strong workplace culture

Employees want meaningful work in an organisation that values their humanity and autonomy. Josh Bersin highlights that meaningful work must involve having small teams that can collaborate effectively, ensuring employees fit the culture of the organisation, and having slack time around deadlines.

Work culture also includes how you recognise the personhood and humanity of your colleagues. This can be done by creating a space for people to talk about their hobbies outside of work, in Slack or Microsoft Teams. At Androgogic, we have a number of Slack channels devoted to the things we’re interested in. These range from meals we’re proud of cooking, our latest craft projects, and even new music we’ve discovered.

Josh also suggests recognising the achievements of individuals and teams in your organisation regularly. He writes, “We did a study in 2012 among more than 300 companies and found that companies with a “high recognition culture”...have a 31% lower voluntary turnover ratio – which is a very big difference.” As Androgogic is fully remote, our leaders and project managers make a point of recognising all the members of a team when a major project, upgrade or piece of work is completed, and also have a #compliments channel in Slack, which is a space for any employee to thank or recognise any other colleague or team. 

While these are small changes, they can go a long way to creating a strong workplace culture in your organisation.

Agile performance management

Regular communication creates transparency between managers and their direct reports. With transparency comes certainty, and with certainty comes better performance. But it seems that managers aren’t yet up to scratch when it comes to agile performance management.

The Global Leadership Forecast showcases key trends to guide the future of leadership. In 2021, it highlighted how, “Overall, coaching and mentoring are the areas where leaders are least satisfied, along with performance management programs. For many leaders, these programs are simply nonexistent, but among those that do have them, few rate them as high quality.” (pp. 22)

Your people want to be effective in their positions. To be effective, they need strong leadership and quality mentorship. There are a lot of ways coaching can go wrong, but also many ways coaching can go right. This means it’s important to be well informed about how to coach and mentor well.

To find out more about mentoring and coaching, enrol in the Totara Academy’s Effective Coaching for Managers course. 

Development and growth

A lot of mandatory training in businesses today is composed of virtual instructor-led seminars, SCORM activities, or quizzes. While these modalities can be effective when done right, many Learning and Development leaders wish for more when it comes to engaging their learners. 

If however you don’t have the resources to develop custom training content and run intense user research, you can focus on one thing: providing timely and relevant training. Learners want to be using what they learn. Put simply: learners don’t want to spend time on skills they won’t have the chance to use. The Global Leadership Forecast puts it this way: “If nothing changes about their career, the development isn’t worth it.” (pp. 19). 

To make sure that learners are given the right training, liaise with managers who are regularly checking in with their direct reports. Managers who practice agile performance management will know exactly what training is needed for which learner and when it will be appropriate.