Improving agency employee retention

With the Great Resignation putting increased pressure on an already tight labor market, agencies are rightly concerned not just about recruiting new employees, but also retaining the talent they already have.

In this episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast, Chip and Gini discuss how agencies should be thinking about this challenge. They emphasize that it isn’t as much about finding financial rewards, as it is about creating an environment where your team wants to continue to work.

The co-hosts share some of the things that they have seen work — as well as some that tend to be a waste of time and money.

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Chip Griffin  

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin, 

Gini Dietrich  

and I’m Gini Dietrich.

Chip Griffin  

Gini, I want to see what we can do to keep you around here. I don’t want you to quit this podcast. So let’s come up with some strategies for that. Okay. Okay. Right after this. So I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s a wave of people quitting their jobs right now in the United States that you have heard is hard to miss, because they’ve called it the great resignation. And there are all sorts of stories. And it was a huge story in August when 2.9% of people quit their jobs. And then the September numbers came out, and it was even higher than that. So clearly, this is a problem. And clearly, it’s something that’s on the minds of a lot of agency owners these days, because it’s hard enough to hire in the current environment. And the last thing you want to have to do is to replace existing team members, particularly if they’re good performers. So how can we focus on keeping those people on our team and not losing them to the great resignation?

Gini Dietrich  

Yeah, it’s, it’s challenging, because you don’t know why we’re losing, you’re losing them. In some cases, some cases, it might be for more money, some cases, it might be for more flexibility. And in some cases, it might be because people were just bone tired and need a break, or because they have small kids at home, and they’re in the childcare, there’s also a childcare crisis. I mean, there are lots of reasons that this is happening that you may or may not be able to control. Certainly, if it’s a cultural issue, or it’s for more money or something like that, then those are the things you can’t control, but some of it is definitely outside of your control.

Chip Griffin  

Yeah, absolutely, in the last two years have have caused a lot of people to take a fresh look at things for all sorts of reasons. Some of those that that you mentioned, maybe they’ve got outside pressures, maybe they are someone who has actually accumulated additional time to think about things or explore new ideas. There’s all sorts of reasons. And other people just sitting there saying, hey, life is short, do I am I doing what I want to be doing? Right, and, and so when you throw that into the mix, with all of the other pressures that agency employees typically have, and the reasons that they will typically leave jobs, you know, lack of advanced advancement, you know, lack of compensation increases, you know, the, you know, the stress of working in the agency, world, all of those things, it becomes challenging, but I think, you know, a key part of this is that,