As a species, humans are pretty bad at inconveniencing or changing themselves until an immediate problem forces them to do so. That’s partly why the Great Resignation is still upending businesses almost a year after it began, with 4.53 million Americans quitting their jobs in November 2021 alone.

This sweeping trend signals that there’s something wrong with the way most companies across industries treat their employees. And now that consequences have arrived in the form of millions of unfilled positions, it’s time for C-Suite Executives and managers to reassess the way they view their employees, work/life balance, and progress on a fundamental level.

The dynamic between employers and employees has shifted, with employees now having more leverage and more opportunities than ever before. This is partly because there are far more open positions than people looking for work, and partly because the gig economy and the shift to remote work gives employees a lot more job options and flexibility.

What does this mean if you’re a manager? You may not write the offer letters, but you do have control over the kind of work environment you foster for your team, the way you treat direct reports, and how you advocate for their interests to higher-ups.

Understanding the value of sincere relationships

If you zoom out, what’s the most important and meaningful aspect of life in general for most people? Their relationships with others. Building genuine and reciprocal relationships with kindness at its core is a universally fulfilling ambition.

In fact, warm relationships are the strongest predictor of happiness in adult life, according to one Harvard Study. For managers, this highlights the necessity of being transparently human at work and developing sincere relationships with your teams, coworkers, and direct reports.

Nobody gets excited about a 1:1 with a stiff, overly formal manager who speaks mostly in corporate buzzwords. No one is going to open up to someone about their concerns if they think that person doesn’t actually care about them.

But if your manager shows an interest in your life, makes an effort to understand you as a complete person, and seems to actually care about you, it’s fun and enriching to toss around bold ideas, talk about career development, ask for feedback, and have open, creative conversations free from the stifling grip of excessive professionalism.

Furthermore, it gives your teams and direct reports the confidence to manage up effectively and give you honest feedback about job satisfaction and your performance as a manager. That insight is key. In the startup world, if you’re not growing, you’re falling behind.

Relationships outside of work built on open communication and mutual understanding are often the most rewarding, and the same is true within the startup environment. This should be obvious, but few companies actually invest in creating an environment where employees feel they have psychological safety.

The Center for Creative Leadership defines psychological safety as the “shared belief held by members of a team that others on the team will not embarrass, reject, or punish you for speaking up.”

Without psychological safety, you’ll build an echo chamber where teams are too nervous to speak up or voice opinions against their managers. As a result, your company will miss out on innovative experiments and lose criticism that could inform improvements to your processes, products, or initiatives.

With the Great Resignation still raging on, managers who don’t focus on relationship-building will also lose great talent. One study found 57% of people quit their jobs specifically because of their manager. More pointedly, “lack of empathy” was cited as one of the top five reasons employees left.

Ultimately, if you’re not personally invested in your team, your direct reports won’t be, either. Apathy and emotional rigidity at the top trickle down, poison company culture, and make going to work or logging onto a Zoom meeting a lot more cumbersome and dry than it needs to be.

Professionalism is important to an extent, but there’s no rule saying you need to sterilize your workplace against all personality to be taken seriously. If you want to differentiate your company from the others competing for top talent, prioritize being an open and compassionate leader. It’ll make work generally more enjoyable for everyone.

Embracing flexibility

Remote work is now an option for millions of workers who formerly could have only dreamed of having such a sweet setup. Now, hundreds of companies – most influentially, FAANG companies Meta (Facebook), Netflix, and Alphabet (Google) – are allowing employees in to work from home at least a couple days a week.

One survey found 83% of workers prefer a hybrid model, where they’re only expected to come into the office a couple days a week. This is obviously an ideal scenario: workers can eliminate their daily commute and stay in sweatpants some days, then socialize in person with coworkers and grab lunch in the city on others.

Companies clinging to the tradition of an office full of employees staring at their monitors from 9-5 every day of the work week are bound to lose out to more relaxed competitors. Forbes noted that remote jobs receive 2.5 times as many applications as jobs that require employees to be in office everyday.

It’s important for managers that staunchly oppose remote work to examine why they feel this way. Are you worried your team will be less productive without the accountability of being visibly at their desk between the hours of 9 and 5? The data contradicts this assumption: A Stanford study of 16,000 workers found working from home increased productivity by 13 percent.

No one wants to attract the leering eyes of managerial overlords every time they shoot off a text or look at their phone. And given the stats, monitoring employees in this way does very little to motivate people to work harder.

Companies and managers who allow employees to work remote but are interested in implementing remote monitoring technology will also scare off talent.

Keystroke monitoring is much more invasive than walking by an employee’s desk to check on them. It creeps people out, it communicates that employers and managers do not trust their employees, and it creates an uneasy, dystopian culture where everyone feels like someone is watching over their shoulder at all times (because they are).

How can anyone feel creative or comfortable in an environment like that? The better solution is to trust your teams to do their work, and then measure performance based on reliable metrics and tangible deliverables like meetings booked, features shipped, MQLs, et. cetera.

Managers can help to retain and attract top talent by advocating for a hybrid work model to C-Suite executives (or whatever work model your teams prefer). Noting workplace trends and pushing for changes to keep pace with predictors of workplace satisfaction is key to being a responsive and effective leader.

Your team spends a third of their day at work. They want it to mean something.

In addition to searching for greener pastures, employees also quit their jobs because of burnout. In a survey of 1,500 US workers, more than half said they were feeling burnt out as a result of their job demands.

We know what burnout is – it’s being at the end of your rope. But how can you help your teams avoid it as a manager?

One way is to help your teams find meaning in their work. Your startup is probably not trying to eradicate world hunger, but there are plenty of different ways people can derive meaning from their lives and their careers.

Start with identifying what you find meaningful about your work. Does your app improve your customer’s quality of life? Does it help them reduce their stress levels, make their lives easier in some way, or position them to fulfill their personal goals?

Reducing customers’ stress levels or making them better at their jobs has a ripple effect, and may help to make them better parents, providers, partners, or friends. That’s basically what we all strive for in our lives, so helping people achieve this goal is a worthy endeavor.

If your app is less customer-centric, turn the lens on yourself. Do you have the opportunity in your role to help your team become their best selves, elevate their professional skills, or find small joys throughout the workday by serving as a confidante or coach? If so, great. Your job has meaning.

Spend time thinking about or writing down the vision of your product, company, or role. Identify how you positively impact the world or the lives of others. Then, communicate this vision to your team and encourage them to explore their own definition of true value. Help them find value in what they do – beyond the company’s bottom line – and they’ll be more intrinsically motivated and less frustrated by the day-to-day strains of working life.

There’s evidence to back this up – people who find meaning in their work often live longer lives. They are better able to withstand stress and frustration, which reduces the negative effects of stress on their physiological health.

From APA’s research on longevity:

"One study participant, Norris Bradbury, is a great example,” report authors stated. “He was the director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for decades and was tremendously hard-working. It is hard to imagine a higher-pressure job than overseeing the development of the nation's nuclear arsenal at a time of severe Cold War threats. Yet, he was tremendously successful in his long career, and, despite all the stresses and challenges, Bradbury lived a very long, healthy life — to age 88. This was the general pattern. Those who stayed very involved in meaningful careers and worked the hardest, lived the longest."

The thesis here is that not all stress is bad – and, even if your work is demanding, people who find greater meaning in their work and consider it a noble cause are more resilient and adaptable than those who don’t.

Helping your team find meaning in their work is a bit of an amorphous goal, but its benefits are measurable. It helps your team feel more invested in the product or company, reduces the chances they’ll experience burnout, and improves their health in the longterm.

Fair salary + soft skills = happier teams

Ultimately, retaining talent as a manager mostly requires fine-tuning your soft skills. For some, this comes naturally. For those that struggle with interpersonal skills, there is concrete value in developing greater emotional intelligence and letting your walls down a bit at work so your team has the opportunity to really know you.

The Great Resignation exposed the fraying emotional ties today’s workers feel towards their employers and managers. Strengthening the personal relationships, intrinsic value, and employee advocacy that fosters longstanding loyalty is key to keeping top talent on your team.