Saima Zaman | November 2024
As the holidays approach, this is the time when staff start to think about whether they are leaving or staying at their current organization.
Time with family, away from work, gives staff time to step back and assess their role and organization. We also know that from August through December is where things feel particularly tough for teachers as seen in this graphic (see above) from a study by the New Teacher Center. In my work with partners, I often say that you need to be putting in place measures to ensure staff are not reaching that point of survival/disillusionment. Organizations should be proactive about keeping a pulse on how staff are feeling so that they can address any causes that impact retention.
There is no silver bullet for retention. Retention is about how your employees feel and how they perceive their workplace. While a key building block of employee perception is organizational culture, a 2024 Gallup poll showed that only 2 in 10 U.S employees feel connected to their company culture1. Two of the highest leverage drivers for organizational culture are strategic team communication and leadership–creating opportunities for staff to feel heard and for the organization to positively influence staff perceptions about the workplace, thereby impacting retention.
What is organizational culture?
Organizational culture is the set of shared values, norms, and practices that shape the interactions of people within an organization. Culture may be reflected in written policies, but is more likely to be expressed in unwritten rules about expectations and preferred behaviors within the organization2.
When an organization has a strong culture one can see alignment around a shared purpose, strong communication, and an environment that actively seeks to promote inclusion and belonging.
There are several key elements to strong organizational culture. I want to highlight two areas that our partners across the country have leveraged to address culture challenges.
Two Places to Start
- Strategic Team Communication
When I say strategic communication, I mean create the structures to hear, reflect and respond to employees on a regular basis. Consider the Hear-Reflect-Respond Staff Feedback Cycle to enhance strategic communication at your organization.
HEAR: Create opportunities for staff to share their experiences and feedback. You can do this in culture surveys like TNTP’s Insight or Gallup Q12, stay conversations, one on one staff check-ins, focus groups, etc. Ensure that you are creating spaces where employees can truly share and feel open (i.e. think of focus groups differentiating by identity group). Every touch point with a team member is an opportunity for a retention conversation!
REFLECT: Circle back to staff to let them know what you heard and confirm you drew the right conclusions. This is often the step organizations miss and, as a result, staff become demoralized and feel it is pointless to share their perspectives. Sharing the results and taking action to address key trends is essential for building trust with your staff. Check out this really great resource on how to circle back to staff after a survey. 
RESPOND: Identify the 2-3 things that you can address and create an action plan and loop back to staff. In your conversations, be clear on the things identified, how they tie to their feedback, and how you plan to address them. Some organizations also make working groups to focus on specific challenges and allow staff to opt-in to being part of those groups, creating opportunities for engagement and increasing trust.
Check out more details on this framework and ways that you can hear, reflect and respond in this resource from EdFuel’s Talent Playbook.
- People Leadership
You have likely heard the saying that people “don’t leave organizations, they leave managers”. Gallup 
found that 42% of employees say their organization or manager could have prevented them leaving3. Strengthening the quality of your people managers is paramount to strong retention. Gallup identified seven manager behaviors that impact strong performance and outcomes4.
Strong leaders communicate well, build trusting, inclusive relationships, focus on coaching and development and are values driven and inspiring. These are the key building blocks for ensuring employees feel seen and heard and can help organizations positively influence employee experience and, therefore retention.
Practices in Action
I worked with a small charter network in Missouri to create their Employee Value Proposition as they wanted to explore how current staff were feeling about their schools and the organization. Leadership held staff focus groups and was intentional about choosing staff across identity groups, grade/subject, and tenure at the organization. Later in the project, school leaders circled back to employees to repeat back what they heard, closing the loop of the communications cycle outlined above. One thing they heard was that staff felt a disconnect from organizational leadership and decisions. Staff shared that leadership did not consider the experience of those closest to challenges when making decisions. Many cited that they had not met or had a conversation with senior leadership, thereby fueling their skepticism of organizational decision-making. In response, the organization created informal and formal opportunities for staff to have face-to-face conversations with leadership. Over time, these touch-points facilitated building trust among leadership and staff, including more confidence in decision-making, and ultimately had a positive impact on retention.
Where to Start
Retention is about influencing how staff feel. Improving organizational culture can impact staff perception and ultimately, retention. Below are some of the highest-leverage strategies I often share with partners to support retention:
- Engage in stay conversations starting early (like now!), This is one lever for building that trusting and inclusive culture.
- Administer an Intent to Return survey and remember that responding to the data is key to open communication and trust. Many organizations administer Fall culture surveys. What do you do with that data? Are you using the framework of hear, reflect and respond as you connect with staff?Use these data points to keep an eye on staff culture. What’s working, what isn’t?
- Leadership teams should work together on keeping a pulse on how staff are feeling and support them with responding to what they are hearing. Check out this resource on six tips to improving people leadership at an organization.
Check out the new EdFuel Talent Playbook for open-source resources related to Retention. Reach out to us today to partner on a retention audit or other talent management priority!
1Culture is a Competitive Advantage. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/229832/culture.aspx
2 The 4 Types of Organizational Culture–Which is Best? https://www.forbes.com/sites/tracylawrence/article/organizational-culture/
342% of Employee Turnover Is Preventable but Often Ignored. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/646538/employee-turnover-preventable-often-ignored.aspx
4 Great Leaders have these Leadership Skills in Common. https://www.gallup.com/cliftonstrengths/en/357983/great-leaders-behaviors-common.aspx