Many employers are not well-equipped to retain their employees, says Rachel Clingman, executive vice president, sustainability and governance at McDermott, a Houston-based global engineering giant. Clingman spoke in a fireside chat with moderator Shern-Min Chow, Anchor, KHOU 11 News, at From Day One’s 2023 live conference in Houston.

Managers tend to look at metrics in an effort to understand the employee experience objectively. But employees often prioritize more subjective factors, such as the company’s culture, mission, and value proposition.

“So I feel like as management, we’re not really set up to match employee expectations,” Clingman said.

Creating a sense of community and being able to appeal to the individual on a global scale remains a major challenge, she argues.

While giving competitive salaries are critical, employees are often motivated by other factors.

“I don’t think a lot of people move just for more money,” said Clingman. “How do you address that whole bucket of other things that are more subjective, that are, I believe, really going to move the workforce in and out? That’s our focus.”

Instead of focusing on what employees say during their exit interviews, managers must focus on the people who remain at the company and why they have stayed instead of leaving for another organization or competitor.

McDermott shifted their focus and conducted more employee surveys as a strategy to encourage its current workforce to speak up and discuss the reasons that they stay. Surveys asked, “What’s the best thing about this company? And how can we make sure everyone else sees that? And how can we tell our 
stories about our people?” Clingman said.

Employees are interested in learning about how their colleagues have made contributions to various projects because doing so creates a collaborative culture and highlights what workers are accomplishing.

Managers should also focus on the career goals and values of current employees, Clingman said.

Sharing examples of ideas that worked can create a culture of constructive feedback and result in more transparency from employees. In this way, managers will find that they have “created a safer, more trustworthy, trusting environment,” Clingman said.

Another common challenge that companies face is that less than 10% of employees work at the same place for five years, which is why Clingman recommends that the onboarding process be sped up from six months to just six weeks.

By the time some employees have received the tools they need for their position, they might be thinking about looking for another job.

“So, we as employers need to be much better at onboarding and offboarding - bringing people in, giving them the tools they need, bringing them to our culture so they can be productive and effective quickly,” Clingman said.

Hiring managers should also embrace “boomerang employees,” or workers who resign from the company and want to return later on. These employees often leave to obtain more experience in a different area or project.

“I would encourage employers to be very welcoming to people coming back if [their reason for] leaving was to build experiences or to have some different work experience or job or profiling title,” said Clingman. “We used to build our résumés within a company, but people now build that same résumé by moving around to different companies,” Clingman said.

McDermott is participating in the energy transition by building solar, hydrogen, and LNG projects, in addition to maintaining its more traditional focus on the petrochemical industry. The shift could attract employees who want to be part of the solution to less emissions, she says.

“I think being inside is the best way to drive change,” Clingman added.

Companies who can explain their goals to reach net zero will encourage employees to remain in the energy industry. “Have a clear value path that you can explain to people: here are all the things we're doing to try to make this industry better, and that's our value proposition,” said Clingman. “I think we can still appeal to youthful workers and those who maybe are more idealistic to come into the energy industry and help us.”

Ellen Chang is a freelance journalist who is based in Houston and writes articles for U.S. News & World Report, TheStreet, Kiplinger’s and Bankrate. Her byline has appeared in national business publications, including USA Today, CBS News, Yahoo Finance and MSN Money.