Not long ago, I was speaking with a software engineer, we'll call him Alex for today, who was ready to leave his company. Now, Alex was not burned out, and he actually liked the projects that he was working on, and he liked the company as a whole. But what he didn't like is the silence. His manager rarely gave him feedback. Weeks would go by without so much as a good job or a note on how he was doing. Alex said it felt like he was writing software in a vacuum. He had no idea if he was on the right track or not. Now, when people don't know where they stand, they start filling in the blanks themselves.

And for Alex, that meant assuming that he wasn't valued. Before long, he found himself scrolling job postings and starting to apply to things. And not because he wanted to leave, but because he didn't feel seen and he didn't know where he stood. And that's exactly how you lose your best people. Not to burnout, not to lack of skill, not to better pay, but to a lack of a designed experience that recognizes and acknowledges people.

So where does turnover come from? Again, not because the workload is too much, not because the perks or the pay are too low, but because of gaps in the experience of being an employee there. Stay with me in this episode because we are going to dive into the employee experience and I'm going to give you three design principles that can help you design an employee experience that has your people clamoring to stay.

Now, what Alex needed is visibility into the system state that was his work. Just like we build visibility into the system state of products and software that we design. But I'm jumping ahead of myself here. Let's take a look at what's happening on the macro level first before we jump in and use these three design heuristics to design a better experience. So retention is really the number one concern these days of chief technology officers and of senior level leaders in tech companies. And the ones who are leaving are not your slackers. You wish. The ones who are leaving are your high potentials and your high performers, the ones where it really, really hurts when they go. And that's who we need to design an experience for.

We need to design an experience that makes those people want to stay, that makes them evangelists for working at your company. So there is this false assumption that it is pay and perks that get people to leave. Now, all other things considered, if the culture and the reporting relationship and the working relationships in your organization are amazing, the pay and the perks are not going to turn anybody's head to get them to look elsewhere. Unless, of course, you're way, way, way under market. But I'm just going to assume that you're at market level. Now, again, there is this false assumption that it is pay and perks that get people jumping shit. But that is not the case. What we tried so far hasn't worked to get people to stay.

I mean, sure, the ping pong table is nice, the dartboard is nice, the kegs of beer on Fridays are nice. But that is not what gets people to stay. What works to get people to stay is designing an amazing experience. Again, the ones that they want to evangelize about the experience that makes people say, this is an amazing place to work. And I want my friends to work here too. Now, the premise for this episode is that the design thinking that you use to build products that your customers love can be applied to leadership and culture and the employee experience to create an employee experience that your employees love and that your employees will rave about. So again, in this episode, you're going to learn three design heuristics, design principles. And many of you already use these in your work.

And you're going to learn how to apply them to your leadership so that your best employees will want to stay and will become evangelists of your organization. And for those of you not in tech who are like, what are design heuristics? What is she even talking about? You're going to learn these same concepts. If you haven't learned them before, you'll learn them today. And you're going to learn how to apply them in a leadership context and in a retention strategy or regardless of what industry that you're in. So let's just dive right into them. The first design heuristic is visibility into the system state. So this design heuristic, and by heuristic I mean principle. Design principle is about keeping users informed with timely and appropriate feedback.

And I've used this example on the podcast before, but the battery icon on your mobile phone is an amazing example of, of visibility into the system state. Because if I look at my mobile phone, I can tell you how much battery is in, you know, that my phone is currently holding. So what percentage of the 100% charge is left? And right now my battery on my phone is at 72%. And I bet most of you know what level your battery is at as well. But imagine, imagine if we didn't know and that any second our battery could die. Because we didn't know how much charge was left, so we didn't know if we need to put on the charger. That would leave us feeling very uncertain and very unmoored. Okay, so likewise, visibility into the system state for your team is, how am I doing as an employee? How am I doing? Am I doing well? So this is where you need to give some feedback.

And what the research on giving feedback suggests is, is that younger employees and employees who are newer to their role need more feedback. Both the constructive feedback, where they need some little tweaks and some adjustments about how they could do better, as well as the positive feedback that attaboy, atta girl out of Ms. They need that feedback more when they are younger and when they are less experienced in the role. And if you've got somebody who is younger and less experienced in the role, then you really need to double down on the extra feedback. So project visibility is usually pretty solid, especially in technical teams. So we've got the Agile standups, we've got JIRA boards, we've got very various kinds of team visibility, standup meetings, daily huddles, all of those sorts of things give us visibility into the system state that is our team, because we are exchanging information about where the project is at and where people are at at the team level. But individual visibility is often missing, as with Alexis. And employees are wondering, am I doing okay? Am I hitting the mark? Now to a certain extent, Alex knew that he was hitting the mark on software because he was in those standup meetings.

So he knew that from a project standpoint he was doing okay, and that the other software engineers knew that he was getting his work done and so forth, but he just still needed that extra feedback that, how am I doing here? Am I fitting in? Is this working? Are you glad you hired me? That kind of stuff. And again, we don't always think of it explicitly with those questions, but we do need that feedback. Now, when you're in a hybrid or remote work environment, it's even more important. And I did a podcast episode on this way, way back on micro acknowledgments. And it's so much easier to give those micro acknowledgments when we're face to face. And what I mean by micro acknowledgments is the atta boy, atta girl out of thems, the thank yous and the smiles and the nods of encouragement, all of those very, very subtle things that help people know that they're on the right track. And so when you're working a hybrid schedule.

As Alex, the person I'm talking about here in this episode, he's not getting nearly as much informal nods of encouragement as if he were in the office all the time with his supervisor. So he's in the office two days a week, one week, three days a week, the next week, for a total of five days every other week. And so it's basically 50% time in the office. And he's not always in on the same days as his supervisor. So they're doing a lot of their meetings on teams. And again, all of those subtle cues just don't come through nearly as well. So we need visibility into the system state on the individual level.

We need it on the team level. And again, Alex was getting that from his teams, from his meeting with his intact team or his project team, I should say. But we also need the visibility into the system state on the organization level. And again, this is where being in the office can help, because we're overhearing what's happening in different parts of the organization, or we're getting a sense of what's happening in different parts of the organization just by, like, say, riding the elevator with somebody or standing in line waiting for coffee with. With somebody else that maybe is not working in the same functional area. So we want to make sure that we're giving updates even when there are no updates, because that's part of give giving visibility into the system state that is the organization. And if you've heard me talk about this in person, you know, my metaphor of MSU making stuff up, well, it's not really a metaphor, but my phrase of MSU or making stuff up, and when people don't have adequate information or don't feel like they know fully what's going on, especially in the broader organization, they make stuff up. Because the human mind abhors vacuum, and we fill it with information that is not necessarily true or correct. So make sure to give updates even when there are no updates, especially if there is something about your environment that it has ambiguity or uncertainty around to it.

Now, again, tying this back to Alex, if he had known where he stood, he probably would not have been job hunting, because that was his primary driver, is just like, I don't know where I stand with my manager. And that was making him feel uneasy. Okay, so design heuristic number one, visibility into the system state.

Design heuristic number two, error prevention. So this heuristic means that the design has designed for mistakes before they occur. And the design of the product or the service has anticipated that people will make mistakes and has mistake recovery baked right into it. So a couple of quick examples. If you close a Word document or an Excel document without saving it first, it will ask you if you want to save your changes. Another thing that is often built into software is that you forgot your password. So imagine you're going to log into one of your systems. It's got your username and then your password, and then right beneath password is forgot your password link. You know, click here to reset. So they are designing into that product the idea that you are going to make a mistake and they're giving you recovery channels so that you either can recover from a mistake like a forgotten password, or that you don't make the mistake in the first place, like closing the document without having saved it. So that's how we use that design heuristic of error prevention when designing products. But now let's apply that to the workplace itself and let's apply that to leadership and work retention.

So when we give clear, explicit directions to people, that's going to prevent defaulting to the old way we would have done it. Or you know, having to guess. I know there's a lot of employees, especially the newer or younger employees, who would learn through osmosis when they were in the office, especially if they're in the office co located with other people who are more senior to them doing similar types of work, they kind of learn by looking to the side and seeing how other people are handling a particular thing and then they can follow suit in terms of taking their best guess at how to do something well when they are working remote or hybrid, there isn't as much learning by osmosis going on. So right off the bat you need to be more explicit with your instructions. And then also if you want something done differently than how it is usually done, then you definitely have to give very explicit instructions and let people know what to do and how to do it. Now of course there is a balance here because you don't want to be micromanaging people either. You want to find that place that is that middle ground that gives the guidance, or again, if it's something that somebody's never done before, it's perfectly fine for you to say, hey, since you haven't done this task before, I went ahead and made a loom video that shows you step by step how to go through the process. Or um, maybe it's just, I made a quick video for you and you don't have to use loom you could just hop into a teams meeting all by yourself and hit record, um, and then share that recording with the employee.

Just to say, hey, since we're not in the office on the same days and I have this new project I want you to be working on, I just decided to hit record here and just talk top of mind about what I'm thinking for the project. I want you to watch this recording and then let's have a quick 15 minute meeting so that I can answer any questions that you might have before you get started on it. So something as simple as that, it's maybe a 30 minute investment total is going to potentially create, create a container in which there is less wasted work, less rework, less frustration on the part of the employee or ambiguity on the employee, on the employee's part, and then less frustration on your part as you look at the work that wasn't done to, you know, to your standard or how you want it. So my suggestion for you in terms of error prevention and error recovery is write down or verbalize or make short videos of assignments as though you were designing a user interface. Because you want to remove the ambiguity, you want to anticipate the missteps and you want to close the gaps before they occur. Okay, so that is your second design heuristic. That is error prevention. Okay, now your third design heuristic is minimalist design.

So here as we're thinking about retention, well, first let me define the heuristic for you. This is keep only the relevant information and avoid clutter. So design a really, really minimalist interface. So minimalist design is get rid of all the clutter. So here, let me just give you a couple of example or a software example. So when you go to a Google search page and you just go google.com, you get a white page with a little search bar in the middle and you could go find some advanced search options if you wanted to. But it's just a simple search bar. There's nothing else on the page to distract you.

On the other hand, if you were to look at Yahoo or Bing, you get a different experience. If you're on Yahoo, it's going to give you a whole bunch of different news articles and headlines and other things that are happening in the day that you might then go search, click on and not do the search that you came there to do. Uh, so they're kind of distracting. Uh, if you go on to Bing, Bing is going to tell you all the most popular searches that have happened recently. And again Many of us will get distracted by those other more recent searches and forget why we came there, what we came there to search for altogether. But Google does this brilliantly well in terms of minimalist design. There's nothing else to distract us from what we came there to do. Okay, so you get the idea of minimalist design.

Now let's think about how we apply that to leadership and feedback, and specifically from a retention standpoint. So when we're giving feedback, a lot of people like to think that they should use the sandwich method. When we're giving feedback, a lot of people think they should use the sandwich method. I want you to cut those last two things that I just did, because that's not. I'm going to start it again. When we're giving feedback, a lot of people think they should use the sandwich method, where you give some positive news, you sandwich in the critical feedback, and then you end on a high note. When you use the sandwich method, you confuse the listener. They don't get that the thing that was in the middle was the most important.

So when you're giving critical feedback, I want you to have that as a conversation in and of itself. So using that principle of minimalist design, we're going to focus only on the critical feedback, not sandwich it between some positive feedback and confuse the employee. It's very important to get this right, because otherwise that critical information gets diluted or gets lost in. In the middle of a bigger conversation. Now, does that mean you shouldn't have positive feedback conversations? Of course not. You should absolutely have conversations where you are giving positive feedback. Just don't mix them in with the critical feedback. Give lots and lots of positive feedback to let people know that they're on the right track.

But when something is off track, have that be a specific point of discussion in a conversation and don't sandwich it in between other things. So separate your praise and your critical feedback into distinct conversations. Keep each one focused on its own message so that the employee really hears the message. Likewise for the positive. I mean, if you were to give me both positive and critical feedback in the same conversation, with which one am I going to come away remembering the most? I'm probably going to be crushed by the critical feedback. And if you also really meant for me to get the positive feedback, not from a sandwich standpoint, but you really wanted me to get that positive feedback, I might miss that entirely. Or if you gave me two pieces of positive feedback with my negative feedback sandwiched in between, I might miss that negative feedback.

So again, have them as distinct conversations. Now, a quick caveat though, the one place where you may do both would be in an annual performance review or in a semi annual performance review context. But then you would also be calling those out as I have some really good positive feedback to give you that is part of this review. And then I also have some things for you to work on that are part of this review as well. So you would call those out separately in a review context. Otherwise, when you're giving feedback, make sure you're giving positive feedback in one conversation, critical feedback in another conversation. Again, using the principle of minimalist design, it's going to make it much easier for your user, that is your employee, to focus on what you're sharing with them. Just like you know, again, go back to the example of where are you going to focus more on the search that you need to do on the Google page or on Yahoo or Bing that have all these distractions on them.

So you want to make it simple and make it minimalist. Okay, so if you are a software developer or manager, you know the concept of a sprint, that is a two week heads down run at a specific goal. So I want you to take a two week sprint on one of these ideas related to driving more retention in your organization. Whether it is visibility into the system state, giving people more specific feedback about their work, whether it is error prevention and recovery, like we talked about in terms of giving specific instructions, especially where there's ambiguity or uncertainty in the mix, or whether it is this last one that we just talked about, which is minimalist design. So giving feedback in just in and of itself, so that the negative feedback is separate from the positive feedback, the positive feedback is separate from the negative feedback so that we don't get convoluted. So I want you to take on one of those three areas and give yourself a two week sprint. So I want you to again think visibility, error prevention or minimalist design. And I also want you to only take on one and here's why.

There's a concept called performance load. And performance load is like when you ask a new system to do a whole bunch of things all at once. It's just too much. When you put too much clothes in your washing machine, that is too much of a load, literally a load of clothes, but too much of a load for your washing machine to get clean all at one time. So we want to minimize performance load by choosing just one thing to run at. And that's also kind of the idea of sprints in the first place is a small pocket of development that we're working on. So this is not software development. This is your own professional, professional development.

And I want you to again, make sure that your performance load is appropriate. That's why I want you to choose one small thing. Because I know you have a lot of other things on your plate. We all do. So think about one small specific improvement that you can do. And again, that's going to be much more achievable if you keep the performance load low. Because again, you're doing this on top of all of your other work. So visibility into the system state, error prevention and recovery or minimalist design.

Pick one and then pick one area that you're going to work on it with. Maybe it's with your whole team, maybe it's with individual employees, or maybe there's just one or two employees. In fact, maybe you feel like somebody on your team right now is a flight risk. And by flight risk, I mean they might be thinking about leaving the organization or, you know, moving out of your area. If that is the case, focus on that one person and set this up as a two week leadership sprint for yourself, just like software teams do. Okay, Now I have just rolled out a new program called designed to stay applying UX thinking to employee retention. And that program uses a lot of the same principles I've been talking about here. It's much more comprehensive.

This just gave you three. That one has 10. But the idea is simple. The same design heuristics that you use every day to build great products can also be used to build great workplaces. So we'll work with your organization to apply human centered design principles like visibility, error prevention, minimalist design, and many more to your leadership practices in your team culture. And the result? Lower turnover, higher engagement, and employees who want to stay because they feel seen, valued and supported. So reach out to me via my website or by email if this is something that your organization might be interested in. All right, let's go back to Alex.

All right, if Alex gets the visibility into the system state that he needs the feedback from his manager, he will be much more likely to stay. Alex wasn't even getting the first heuristic, much less some of the rest of them. So give visibility into the system state at the individual, team and organizational level. Prevent error recovery. Prevent errors and allow for error recovery through clarity and anticipation of problems in project work and so forth. When you're giving instructions and use that minimalist design in your conversations with your team, deliver feedback without clutter. So my final thought for you today as we wrap this episode, the very tools that you use every single day to design products can also design the kind of workplace where people want to stay. All right, my friends, if this episode resonated for you, please do me the simple favor of sharing it with just one other person who could benefit from it.

I would appreciate that so much. Like right now, before you close your podcast player, just copy this episode and text it to a friend or email it to a friend, somebody who would benefit from hearing it. All right, thanks, my friends, and we'll catch you again next week.