Managing staff retention as a middle leader can be a complex business.

How should you go about finding out who is staying and who is going? What should you do about those on the fence? And how can you help your team to achieve what they want and what your school needs?

The lowdown

Leading any team means understanding how its members are doing, particularly when it comes to their future plans, and especially at those crunch times of the year when school staff may be considering moving on.

You should aim to know who is feeling satisfied (and what would help them to feel more so) and who might be looking elsewhere for their next career move, and use that information to guide your approach.

What we know about what works

According to David Allen, professor of human resource management and employment relations at Warwick Business School and a distinguished professor of management at the University of Memphis, for many institutions, the work around exploring staff retention usually comes at just the wrong time: when the individual has already decided to leave.

“Most retention efforts rely on two retrospective tools,” he says. “Exit interviews are conducted to better understand why people chose to leave; although by this point, it is usually too late to keep them. And annual employee surveys are used to assess engagement: these survey results are later compared with people who left the organisation, in the hope that they will yield any relevant predictors of departures.”

This doesn’t give leaders anything to work with in terms of real-time information, particularly relating to those who may be undecided about looking for a role elsewhere.

So what should team leaders be doing, whether they are directly responsible for a department or subject team or more informally instructing others as, for example, a primary subject lead?

Encouraging open and honest conversations about goals and future plans can be enormously helpful. People should be empowered to share their feelings about continuing in the team, which should enable you to spot issues early and find the best way forwards for the individual.

Sometimes this may be helping them to progress to a new role elsewhere if that is truly the best option for everyone, but usually spotting things early means challenges can be overcome or the right development opportunities can be found in-house.

Spotting when staff are struggling - and intervening to help - is also vital, particularly with the risk of burnout being so high in schools. The implications of burnout are “considerable”, Allen says, with “the severity underlined in 2019 after it was classified as an occupational disease by the World Health Organization”.

More from Middle Leadership Essentials:

• How to handle recruitment
• How to build your budget
• How to improve individual performance

Teachers can be particularly susceptible. Allen cites research from University College Dublin highlighting the double-edged sword of working in a role that inspires passion. “The researchers [found] that when our passion is ‘obsessive’, our work can end up controlling our lives, and real problems emerge in terms of disconnecting,” he explains.

Finally, Allen says, there are two key things for leaders to pay attention to around the likelihood of staff leaving: turnover shocks and job embeddedness.

Turnover shocks, he explains, are those “events that prompt people to reconsider whether they should stay with the organisation”.

These shocks can come from situations that are unique to the individual - whether outside of work (such as moving house or having a baby) or professional (like being offered a role from another organisation) - and they can also come from shifts in the organisation itself. If there have been big changes, such as a new leadership team or directives, be prepared for people to be feeling restless.

Job embeddedness, meanwhile, describes how deeply connected staff feel to the organisation, Allen explains.

“When people have few good social ties at work or in the community, or when they don’t feel their work fits well with their interests, skills and values, they have low job embeddedness and are a higher flight risk.”

Exploring job embeddedness is key to understanding where staff are in terms of retention, Allen says, and is “central to efforts to tackle the flow of people leaving our organisations today”.

The final point to note, though, is that people leaving is not always a bad thing. Any healthy organisation has a churn of staff: to grow, some people may need to leave, and that opens up opportunities for new thinking to come into the school. That churn, though, has to be managed, right for everyone involved and in the sweet spot of not being too high or too low.

The experienced leader’s view

Jon Hutchinson is director of curriculum and teacher development at the Reach Foundation. He writes:

You’ve probably heard the common wisdom that “people don’t quit organisations, they quit managers”. This can feel pretty daunting, especially if someone on your team hands in their notice - are they leaving because of you?

Well, I’ve got some reassuring news: there isn’t really any evidence to back up the claim. There is a combination of factors that lead people to leave, most of which will be outside of your control as a middle leader.

Phew, off the hook right? Well, not quite. Although team retention doesn’t land solely at your door, there is plenty that you can do to affect the flow of staff leaving.

The most important thing, in my experience, is to know what really drives people. Before I started my first middle leadership position, the principal called me and asked for my opinion on primary assessment. Levels were being abolished and he said he wanted my advice.

I launched into an impassioned treatise on How Things Could Be Done Better. “Great”, he said, “you’re going to fix this.” What I didn’t realise at the time was that he had held similar conversations with pretty much everyone in the school.

It was a lesson I didn’t forget. People stick around when they feel as though they are working on something important, contributing to the success of the school, and when this work is known and valued. Sometimes it takes a little digging - and a little trust - to find this inner fire, but everyone has it. Your job is to find it and feed it.

If you’d like to formalise this, you might create a spreadsheet with a row for each member in your team. Then add a column to record notes from informal and formal conversations - where would they like to be in a year? What excites them? What would they like to be working on? What support do they need to do it?

It could be that you keep a maths teacher for another year or two while they complete a National Professional Qualification or a Master’s - almost certainly cheaper than losing someone and having to recruit. It also allows you to have early and honest conversations with members of your team around what is and isn’t realistic.

Retaining every member of your team is neither possible nor desirable. But taking a systematic approach to understanding what motivates people can ensure that you keep key members of staff for as long as possible, and allow a natural flow from team members who may flourish elsewhere.