When Montserrat Salvany-Ferrer first moved to the U.S. a few years ago, the native Spaniard realized that her European work habits didn’t exactly align with American norms. For example, she said, “I’m not into night work. To me, when we’re done, we’re done. Tomorrow is another day. I’m not a doctor, so it’s not that someone is going to die under my hands if I don't do something today.”

For Salvany-Ferrer, a VP of human resources for T-Systems, the culture clash opened her eyes in ways that serve her well today, when job flexibility is a prized value among employees. “One of the things that I had to work on was that assumption that everyone would be exactly the same as me,” she said. “I have one employee who enjoys working on a Sunday. At the beginning, I was so pushy, telling her she shouldn’t. And then I told myself, What am I doing? If she wants to work on a Sunday instead of Wednesday, why not? I find it personally very hard, but accepting and not prejudging that the other ones are exactly like I am has been helping in building those relations and bringing that intention into place.”

Salvany-Ferrer made her candid comments during a panel discussion titled “The Great Retention: How Companies Can Intensify Employee Loyalty,” part of From Day One’s December virtual conference on the future of work in a time of rapid change. While much of the discussion about the Great Resignation has portrayed worker unhappiness as a root cause, panel moderator Lydia Dishman, a staff editor at Fast Company, pointed to research showing signs of hope for HR leaders trying to hang on to their workers. In fact, a vast majority of U.S. workers like their jobs, even as a record number quit them, according to data collected by Scott Schieman, professor of sociology at the University of Toronto.

Among workers surveyed, a bit more than 16% said they weren’t satisfied with their jobs, only a small increase from surveys in 2002-18. Even so, the workers saying they were very likely to hunt for a new job reached 29%, up three points from the year before. The paradox of relatively happy workers still keeping their eyes open for a better gig would seem to offer an opportunity for corporate leaders to make a bigger effort to strengthen employee engagement and loyalty. Among the panel’s ideas:

Be More Transparent, Especially at the Middle-manager Level

“Two thirds of executives feel like they're being transparent with their employees, but only 42% [of the employees] agree,” said Sheela Subramanian, VP and co-founder of Future Forum, a Slack-affiliated consortium focused on the future of work. “To phrase that more positively, we see that employees who see employers being transparent are twice as excited about the future of the company.”

Yet to effectively combat attrition, corporate leaders need to pay more attention to a particular employee cohort. “There's a specific target group we need to study more: the middle manager,” said Subramanian. “They've not been trained; they’re struggling across the board. This is an opportunity for us to better understand how our middle managers are doing and reskill them to lead with empathy rather than the traditional management training, which was around gatekeeping and status checks.”

Measure Engagement in Multiple Ways

With the move to remote work over the past two years, employers have resorted to a wide array of methods to gauge where the workforce is standing in terms of engagement, in the belief that it can be measured as a quantifiable metric. But to get a more comprehensive understanding, employers shoud take a three-pronged approach to assessing and promoting engagement, said Gabriela Mauch, VP of the Productivity Lab at ActivTrak, which makes workforce analytics software. An employee survey can take the pulse of overall sentiment, while ongoing dialogue in the forms of one-on-one conversations, team meetings, and forums can provide a snapshot of the current situation in a certain employee cohort and demographic. The third element, Mauch said, is the use of workplace analytics to discover data-driven insights. This can allow HR leaders to get ahead of burnout and disengagement, as they show how employees behave on a consistent basis over a certain period of time.

Define What Flexibility Really Means

Flexibility is more than specifying how many days a week an employee has to be physically present in the office. “It's where people work, when they work, and how they work,” said Paige McInerney, EVP and director of HR at Penguin Random House. That's straightforward, yet the hurdle can be trying to persuade managers to trust that, if a project needs to get from point A to point B, as long as the worker gets to point B effectively, the supervisor doesn’t need to micromanage and tell the worker exactly how to get there. “If they keep that level of control, the other flexibility prongs aren't ever going to work,” McInerney said.

What are some of those flexibility prongs? “Here, within our organization, as well as in the guidance we give to our customers, we really look at flexibility as a trust-autonomy-empowerment triangle,” said Mauch. This can translate to being specific about expectations, while trusting about methods. “Clarity is kindness,” said Sarah Sheehan, president and co-founder of the coaching platform Bravely. “As we coach people through this moment, what we really focus on when we talk to clients is to go back to needs, but there’s also this sense of wellness that has to come into play here: We’ve been very successful but at what cost? It can harm our employees if we don’t set boundaries.”

Flexibility in the workplace can't exist without work-life boundaries, but guardrails for managers are just as important. “Boundaries are something you need employees to set, but in order to do that you need to set guard rails on an executive level,” said Subramanian. “If you're saying you are completely empowered as an employee, but I, as an executive, am going to come into the office five days a week, everybody else is going to follow and this whole experiment is going to fail.”

Make a Connection, Even in Remote Times

Sheehan said she disagreed with an assertion posted by someone in her LinkedIn network that making real, human connection among work colleagues can’t be done remotely. Given everything stated above, that would seem to be a real problem in the struggle over attrition vs. retention. “It was thought-provoking. It keeps me up at night. I have over 50 employees I care deeply about,” she said. “One of the things we had to grapple with is the acceptance that it’s done, it’s over, we’re not going back,” she said in regard to the old way of working. “And one of the myths I am trying to debunk for myself is that you can’t create this connection remotely. What it requires is a level of intention we took for granted. It is possible, but you need a lot of work.”

“It’s never going to look the same,” echoed McInerney, whose workforce now has the opportunity to work from anywhere in the U.S. “But that doesn't mean we can’t have a sense of community. We just need to be super, super intentional and make sure we have systems to enable this. Leaders need to model it.” Salvany-Ferrer offered a personal example: “One of the individuals I have the best relationship with is my peer in Singapore,” she said. “I've seen him literally once.”

Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.