Staff turnover is a natural process in every business. But do you, either as individuals or as a team, reflect or debrief when someone leaves?

Over the last 18 months Leading Teams has experienced our share of staff turnover. But, after each departure, we have taken the time to reflect on that person’s journey in our team. One of our trademark behaviours is ‘taking responsibility’, so these discussions were about our role in their journey and departure, and what could we have done better, as individuals and as a team.

These discussions were very productive and made us aware of some gaps in the mechanics of our recruitment and induction processes. Therefore, over the last 12 months, we have invested a lot of time into and applied more rigour to our recruitment and induction at Leading Teams.

Recruitment

We decided that, on reflection, we were not always strong enough in our communication about what it truly means to work at Leading Teams during the recruitment process. The HBR article ‘What it means to work here’ talks about finding your signature and bringing your distinctiveness to life. A lot of people know about the work we do with our clients, but they don’t really know about the work we do within our own team. We are a unique business with amazing opportunities for staff, and I don’t think that we have been strong enough with communicating this in the past. The article reminds us that we should make it clear from the get-go so that no one gets six months into the job and says it isn’t what they expected. We need to attract people who will suit our business and culture, and we understand that it isn’t for everyone. Putting more rigour into the whole recruitment process (both the mechanics and the dynamics) has made us confident that we are now finding the right people to grow our business.

Induction

With regard to induction, we looked at the mechanics of the process and how we could do it better.

We created an induction checklist that outlines the responsibilities of all team members when a new person joins us. This helps ensure that our induction is thorough but also holds us all accountable for our part in communicating how we do things around here (our culture).

Induction at Leading Teams is not just the responsibility of the ‘manager’; we believe that induction needs to come from the whole team so the new person gets a complete overview of our team.

Not only do current staff get a copy of this checklist, the new team member gets the list and is encouraged to hold us all responsible for our contribution to their induction. This means the inductee gets all the information and assistance they need in their first few months at Leading Teams but is also a powerful introduction to our trademark and our agreed behaviours.

Putting it into practice

In the last couple of months, we have gone through a very thorough and rigorous process to recruit new facilitators into Leading Teams.

The team challenged each other around both mechanics and dynamics to make sure we were 100% clear, before we started, what we were looking for in new team members. Having full clarity among ourselves at the start of the process made it easy for us to communicate to those considering joining our team what it is like to work at Leading Teams.

We understood that this won’t suit everyone and some people with suitable skills would not apply. However, what was more important to us was finding someone that will suit our team and our business, so it was more important to attract people who share the same ideals and priorities as us.

New recruit Gavin Mahony said, “Everyone was really nice throughout the recruitment process and were genuinely interested to get to know me personally. On the afternoon of and the day after my interview I got follow up calls from the panel to ask me for feedback on the interview process and as soon as I accepted the role I had numerous calls from people in the team welcoming me on board and wanting to get to know me. I was invited to join the company training days before I officially started and my wife was even invited to lunch to meet the team.”

Staff turnover image of a member of staff outside the office

Gavin at the Leading Teams office

I believe that combining a more thorough approach to the mechanics and more rigor around the dynamics in our recruitment and induction has improved our business for the future. We now have a clear message about what it means to work here and a really strong foundation to bring new people into our business.

If you think your recruitment or induction processes could use some help, give us a call today on 03 9654 3744.

 

Lisa Berry

Lisa Berry

Lisa worked with Leading Teams from 2015-2019.