Employers need to hold managers accountable for the retention of their "human assets", Retention Partners director Lisa Halloran told an HR Daily webinar this week.

"The single most overlooked engagement resource that you have in your organisation right now - you already pay for it, it's there every day, it's available right now, and it's almost never used properly - [is] your managers," Halloran says.

"Managers make people quit and managers make people stay... If there is any such thing as a silver bullet, it's right there - it's already there. Your challenge is to make those managers 'engagement capable'," she says.

According to Halloran, engagement-capable managers:

    * identify their high value employees;

    * provide a tailored employment experience;

    * hold regular meetings, with minutes;

    * deliver on promises, or explain why not;

    * are accountable for staff development; and

    * are accountable for engagement indicators.

"If your managers are not engagement capable; if your managers make people choose not to perform and not to stay," there is "little point" in investing in engagement solutions, Halloran says.

The reason managers have such a "massive influence" on engagement and retention is that every employee who works for an organisation has a unique, individual employee experience, she explains.

This could amount to hundreds or thousands of different experiences. "And the conduit between the organisation and the employees is the manager.

"For most employees who have disengaged with their organisation, the manager is the organisation," she says.

Managers are employees too

Because of the key role they play in engagement, Halloran and her team have spent "a lot of time" working with managers.

"We always used to say [to them], 'You know what, look at the turnover statistics in your organisation,' and, 'Managers make people quit, but you also make people stay,' and, 'You've got to use your power for good instead of evil,' and, 'This is how much your turnover budget is, and this is how frustrated your HR people are, so let's... help engage people and stop all the rot'."

The managers would offer tentative acceptance, and then say, "But who will do that for me?".

"It made us realise that senior managers are employees as well and they have expectations; they have an employment experience they want to improve; they want... things of a particular kind from their own managers," Halloran says.

"So what we do now, is when we work with managers we say, 'Don't worry about the people who report to you, let's focus in on building... an engagement plan for you.

"And you can take this to your boss, and you can say, 'You know what? I'd like more of this and less of this, and can I work on that, and can I stop doing this if I do this in a different way?'

"And if we build that for you, you can build that for your high value employees as well," she says.

"And now managers are going, 'I get it, I really get it'.

Originally published in HR Daily.