“I’m not sure how much longer I can continue”, an executive coaching client said to me last week in a state of stress. She was working through the significant pressure of delivering results given the layers of complexity and challenge in her role. Having spoken to her boss in the past, I reassured her that she was seen as a top performer for their company and was highly valued. Yet, she was thinking about leaving because of the stress of the job, the pressure she felt, and a recent meeting where she felt disrespected by her boss. According to PEW Research, quit rates reached a 20-year high in November of 2021. Here are the major reasons employees cited for leaving: pay was too low (37%), felt disrespected at work (35%), no opportunities for advancement (33%).
To put a face to the story of the Great Resignation and also discuss how leaders can retain their people, I sat down with Nahia Orduña, technical leader at Amazon Web Services (AWS). From this interview as well as many conversations with clients dealing with retention issues, here is one simple practice leaders can do to address the challenges of retaining their talent. Check-in with your people frequently. In your check-ins, ask how they’re feeling now, creating a safe space for them to be honest. Listen deeply. Ask about their aspirations professionally and personally. Ask what challenges they’re faced with. Ask what support they need from you. Then do your best to help them.
The pandemic has given us an opportunity to reflect on what’s important. For many this continues to change and evolve as you will see from Nahia’s story of why she left, what she’s learned and how she’s working to retain her employees in her new role.
Henna Inam: Nahia, you are part of “The Great Resignation” as you recently switched jobs. Can you share your process of reflection as you left one employer to join another.
Nahia Orduña: I was working for one employer that I loved for almost eight years. I used to travel once a month to see work colleagues, but in general, I was used to working from home and our team was working virtually in an agile way. So when the pandemic started, I honestly thought “I am so lucky that I have a great place to work during the pandemic. I will not move from here in these turbulent times, no matter what!”
However, during the pandemic, my priorities switched. I could not travel and see my colleagues anymore. I was quite overwhelmed with the situation itself including the homeschooling. Personally, the summer of 2020 was a moment of reflection and I wrote a book called “Your Digital Reinvention”. It made me reflect on whether I was taking the right steps to get to my “job of tomorrow”.
Suddenly, I was clear that I needed a change. I was disengaged. I had lost touch with people. I was not really having fun at work. And I realized, it was also my moment of reinvention. I wanted to find a job that would be more fulfilling and meaningful.
I talked with many people, and reflected more on where I wanted to go next. In my case, I thought I should move to the cloud computing industry, because it is a fast growing area that has become part of everyday life, so it was pandemic resilient. Amazon Web Services (AWS) had what I wanted. I was attracted to Amazon’s culture of innovation and customer obsession, and AWS was a pioneer in cloud with a lot of future potential. I realized that was my best next step.
Inam: So many employees are exhausted and considering leaving, especially now as many are working through their responses to coming back to workplaces and travel. How do you retain people in your new role?
Orduña: We are all people. I am a manager of a team, but I am also a person with my own particular needs. I want more empathy in this pandemic situation from my management. In my new job, my goal is to create a culture of inspiration to enable employees to be energized, happy and focused. I have two pillars where I focus:
The first is development. I want to think big with each person on my team, and work with them to make a plan for their future. One tool I use is to ask people to write what they would like their short bio in five years to look like. Would you like to be a specialist in one area? Do you want to lead teams? I also encourage you to think out of the box: would you like to write a book about a topic that you are passionate about? Then we can make individual plans working backwards from where they want to be.
The second is job satisfaction. I lead workshops to understand how people are feeling. We set up a virtual whiteboard, where my colleagues bring ideas on what they value most at work. We spend some discussing what we feel grateful for. Then we take time to brainstorm about what could be better. I give ten minutes, and we generate many sticky notes that I put in different categories. We talk about all of them, and everyone votes on the top three that are most important to them. I ran this workshop recently, and of the three top results, one was the lack of face to face interaction, and another lack of having informal fun opportunities. This was eye-opening for me—I hadn’t considered that this is what my team was feeling. With the pandemic still requiring added precautions around in-person gatherings, we’ve started some virtual fun activities—but I want to prioritize getting some form of in-person meeting planned again as soon as possible.
Inam: What are the most important skills for managers now as they lead a workforce that is exhausted and burned out?
Orduña: I think one of the main skills is empathy. This covers being authentic, ensuring psychological safety and treating each person as an individual. As a manager, I spend a lot of time understanding the needs of my team, and recognizing that each individual is different. Maybe one person needs more catch ups, and opportunities to meet other colleagues, and others may get stressed with that.
Another important area is continuous improvement. I like to encourage upskilling and find ways to make it easy for my team to learn and experiment. Amazon is a big believer in this, and has numerous upskilling programs to support employee learning and development. Providing support for digital skills training in workplaces can be a helpful employee retention tool. In fact, according to a recent study by AWS, 84% of employers report higher retention and 80% report higher job satisfaction after implementing digital skills training programs in the workplace.
The third area that is so important is inclusion. It is not enough for people to be part of the team—they should feel included. One of the ways I like to do this, particularly with new teams, is to encourage individuals to share personal stories. When we find in which ways we connect with each other, it is easier to feel included and establish trusted relationships. I encourage this in two ways. The first one is by empowering the team to create spaces to have fun as virtual coffee breaks. The second one is about driving activities where we focus on points in common. For example, I drove a workshop following the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) framework last week. People sent me their profile, and I was creating break out rooms for each of the four dichotomies of the MBTI profile. Extroverts and introverts separate, where they could discuss how their ideal weekend is; afterwards people who like to be very spontaneous all were discussing how they plan their holidays, in contrast to those who like to plan in other breakroom. As a result, people found out how to treat others and at the same time, shared many personal stories which helped them to connect to each other.
Inam: How is Amazon equipping you with tools to retain employees?
Orduña: Amazon has a number of resources to support employees. We have affinity groups and communities. There is one slack channel on emotional intelligence. There are a lot of talks on mental health, trainings for managers. Additionally, last year, Amazon added a new mental health benefit so employees, their families and household members now have 24/7 access to free, one-on-one counseling sessions— in-person, virtual, by phone or text—and more.
Inam: Can you share more about Amazon’s leadership principles?
Orduña: In Amazon, we hold ourselves and each other accountable for demonstrating the Leadership Principles through our actions every day. Our Leadership Principles describe how Amazon does business, how leaders lead, and how we keep the customer at the center of our decisions. For example, the team members are encouraged to display “bias for action” and “ownership” in their activities, and also need to “dive deep” and connect to details when relevant. This helps individual and team autonomy.
Our unique Amazon culture, described by our Leadership Principles, helps us pursue our mission of being Earth’s most customer-centric company, best employer, and safest place to work. Last year we published a new Leadership Principle, “Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer”. This means that leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what’s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees’ personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.
As you think about your own workplace situation, here are two questions to ask. How am I doing, really? It’s very hard to inspire others if you yourself are burned out. Second, ask yourself “what is one simple practice of checking in with my people that I’m inspired to pursue?”.
