Employees stay because of work-life empathy, not titles
HR Barometer: Assessing people’s motivations to work at tb.lx
Why do people leave or stay at your company? This is a hard question to ask, and even harder to answer. Therefore, our Chief People Officer Sara Gorjão teamed up with our Data Scientist João Paulo Figueira and created an HR Barometer to fill in the blanks. “What is this?” you may be wondering. It is a tool that assesses employees’ motivations to remain in the company or leave.
This article will guide you through the conception, development, and birth of the first motivation barometer in the Portuguese tech scene.
Psychological Safety is a must-have for genuine answers
To design and build what we then called our “tb.lx barometer,” we first assessed our levels of Psychological Safety and Motivational Drivers. For this, we used a tool called fable+ and took the results as a baseline for our barometer. Overall, our Psychological Safety levels were at 82%, and our Motivational drivers were 79%. We were in the “flow” zone.
Research has shown that a high level of Psychological Safety is the number one factor of high-performing and successful teams (Rozovsjy, J. 2015), followed by Dependability, Structure & Clarity, Meaning, and Impact. According to Google’s experience, “individuals on teams with higher psychological safety are less likely to leave Google, they’re more likely to harness the power of diverse ideas from their teammates, they bring in more revenue, and they’re rated as effective twice as often by executives.”
In other words, “Psychological Safety is Trust at work” (Baluchova, E. 2021). Having a company culture with high Psychological Safety levels is the perfect scenario where people can freely express themselves without fear of judgment. They can take risks that push for innovation. They feel supported by upper management by receiving feedback and improving. Regarding Motivational drivers, the fable+ survey showed that team members feel accountable for their work and invested in reaching team goals, also feeling valued and connected. Having established a great team and company environment, it was time to put our ideas into practice.
Should I stay or should I go? — Answering the main questions of the barometer
The first step to gather information was to create small focus groups with members from each team and asking them the same two questions: 1) What are the things that make you stay at tb.lx?; and 2) What would make you leave tb.lx?. This allowed us to define and understand the major topics in our barometer, gravitating between two drivers: Stay or Leave the company.
Our barometer “taskforce”, Sara and Joao Paulo (aka JP), performed an intuitive and empirical based association of all the topics collected and aggregated them into parent dimensions, which we refer to as meta-topics. These represent the options presented in the barometer tool, which tblxers then have to choose and rank in a custom-made web application we developed for this purpose. By following this approach, we create a link with the scientific method: we observe reality through the first survey, propose a theory by analyzing the data, and test the theory by applying the barometer.
Below are our 17 meta-topics, from most to least relevant:
Growth
Team Spirit
Flexibility and Work-life Empathy
Management and Leadership Style
People-Centric Approach
Ownership
Challenge
Startup Spirit
Company Vision
Compensation and Benefits
Feeling of Purpose
Having a Voice and Being Heard
Recognition
Impact
Startup within the Corporate
Contribution / Giving Back
International EnvironmentFlexibility and Work-life empathy are what truly makes people stay
The results of the barometer survey were obtained through the answers of 46 employees. Regardless of Seniority, Domain Area (which, in our case, can be Engineering, Product, Business Support), Gender, and other factors, the aggregated results for our combined sample show that at tb.lx, Flexibility and Work-life empathy, followed by the Compensation & Benefits package, and Feeling of Purpose are the three main reasons tblxers stay at our company.
Aspects such as Growth, our People-Centric Approach, and feeling Challenged are also primary drivers and contributors for our employees to stay motivated and connected to our company. If they were to consider leaving, aspects such as a better compensation & benefits offer, a change in management or leadership style, and a different vision regarding flexibility and work-life empathy would weigh towards considering other players in the market.
An interesting point to highlight is that, usually, companies don’t directly ask about compensation and benefits as a motivator or dissatisfying factor, since the answers could be biased, related to an unconscious fear of “If I don’t mention compensation and benefits maybe I won’t receive a promotion in the upcoming salary revision cycle”. We wanted to challenge this since we feel that, at tb.lx, we live in a psychologically safe environment, and people shouldn’t be afraid of expressing how they feel. Interestingly enough, our tblxers mentioned that the level of Compensation & Benefits is a solid reason to keep them motivated, alongside other non-tangible aspects of the emotional salary.
Notes for the future of HR strategies
The comfort of working at a company that supports personal growth through training and open feedback, that makes people feel safe for experimenting with new solutions without guilt and fear of failure, that allows employees to make an impact on others’ lives through their work, promotes a personal involvement that fosters outstanding results, learning and value delivery.
The data in our HR barometer shows that providing an atmosphere of psychological safety — where the significant aspects of material compensation are met, a people-centric approach prevails, and there is a focus on delivering the best growth opportunities — drives you to achieve excellence as a company.
“We have a proactive approach towards HR strategies: we not only care about employee retention, but also want to enable the best possible work environment by fostering a company ecosystem in which employees feel motivated to work in, and safe to express their ideas.” Sara Gorjão, CPO
If you want to implement this with your teams, we open-sourced the full study here.
We hope that by making the design and development of our tool transparent, you can find inspiration and some guidelines to develop your own assessment tool, tailored to reflect your company’s culture, motivation levels and mitigate turn-over risks.
Let us know if it was helpful, and feel free to reach out with any questions!
Special thanks to Sara Gorjão and João Paulo Figueira for contributing to the barometer research and the present article.
