Lessons for great retention in a time of great resignation

Barbara Pantuso, cofounder of Nimble Works, offers insight into how her healthcare marketing agency has been helping to define and shape the future of work since 2014.

The Great Resignation is staggering, yet not surprising. It reminds me of an exchange from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, 

“How do you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. 

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

I believe what we’re seeing is the result of a gradual, then sudden resignation. Feelings of discontent, disillusionment, and disconnectedness have been simmering for years. So have the desires for more balance, flexibility, and meaning. The past two years have forced a sudden reckoning, and it’s no wonder why. 

Two years of living in uncertainty and fear have created an existential crisis for many people. Faced with stark realities of illness, inequities, and even death, we are reminded that our lives and our world are fragile; that we’re all connected; and that even our smallest actions can have a big impact on others. 

We know more deeply than ever that our ways of working need to change, which in part led to 1 in 4 workers quitting their jobs in 2021. Why spend all your time working when you witness how short life can be? In a world less stable than ever, is your once-stable job now another destabilizing force? And how does your work impact others—how does it contribute to reshaping a world reeling from the collective trauma of COVID? Desires for balance, flexibility, community as well as having a positive impact are strong, and they’re driving people to question and quit, to resign and reshuffle. 

My personal “great resignation” came over seven years ago, but it was driven by these same desires. I had developed a pattern of booming and busting—giving my all, and I mean ALL, to a company for a few years, burning out, and then dropping out. Each time I quit, I’d search for meaning outside of the working world. Backpacking the Himalayas, hostel-hopping through Patagonia, camping across North America, and other off-the-grid ways so that I could unhook and restore. Eventually, my diminishing bank balance would prompt me to seek a new job. I would fall in love with it and throw myself into the work, and the pattern would begin anew. Along the way, I started to wonder, does it have to be all or nothing? Can I build a life that allows more flexibility and balance yet still excites and challenges me? And might others want that life as well?

So with like-minded people, we set out to answer that. We formed Nimble Works and dubbed it the “grand experiment.” The experiment is working. We’ve nearly doubled every year since we started in 2014. Bucking the trend, we’re fortunate to experience a Great Retention. 

I want to offer a peek behind the curtain to share what’s worked for us. As companies reevaluate what they have to offer and workers reevaluate what matters most, this is a time to share recipes for ways of working that can actually work for people. For Nimble Works, the ingredients, of course, are the unique and brilliant people that make us up, but some of the steps of our recipe are as follows:

We enable flexibility through a distributed model of work. Many people were forced into remote work in 2020, and now 90% of workers consider flexible scheduling an important factor when searching for a new job. Nimble Works has always operated under, and has subsequently proven, the hypothesis that great work can happen anywhere, anytime. Our team members work on their time and in their space. Need to pick your kid up from school or take your elderly neighbor to a doctor’s appointment? Drive safely. Need every Friday off to focus on writing your novel? We can’t wait to read it. Need to take a month to recover from illness or backpack around Patagonia? Projects for you will be here when you get back. 

According to MIT professor Erin Kelly, “When employees have a sense of choice and control over when, how, and where they do their work, it’s really valuable for their well-being, their excitement for the job, and their commitment to the company.” The distributed model at Nimble Works offers that flexibility, because we realized that it’s not where our people work, it’s who they are and how they work that make our company all that it is. 

We model new ways of management. The flexibility of our distributed model means that our operations resemble an orchestra, directing experts at different times and volumes. That involves some extra finesse in planning—managing resource schedules daily, communicating clearly and abundantly, being creative and flexible with assignments, evolving with new technologies that allow for real-time and remote collaboration (our latest favorites: Miro boards and Slack Huddles). Not only do we manage myriad schedule preferences and needs, but we also keep a close eye on workloads. If a team member is swamped, we check in and offer support for them, so no one is faced with the pressures of unmanageable tasks and the potential for burnout. 

While all this conducting takes time and alignment, the true magic comes from expert players having trust in each other. We’ve found that trust develops naturally at Nimble Works. We call Nimble Works a collective, and it surely is. A collective community of highly skilled people rooting each other on, challenging each other, and watching out for each other. The atmosphere of trust has cultivated creativity and collaboration beyond our wildest expectations, and our clients have sensed it as well. 

We focus on flourishing. Although our company is entirely virtual and always has been, we find ways to connect with our team members outside of the meaningful work we do in healthcare and health tech. The culture of personal growth at Nimble Works isn’t just lip service; it’s something we bring to life through quarterly motivational sessions, charity work, and, when it’s once again safe to do so, soon-to-resume Together Days, where team members who live in the same area get together to collaborate and catch up. We’ve had team members lead meditation sessions, serenade us on the piano during happy hour, and share therapeutic musical ensemble experiences. We share in those passions. 

Additionally, we make sure that our team members have space for positive change outside of their working time. Our team members aren’t just strategists and writers, project managers and artists for Nimble Works. They’re also moms and dads, aspiring novelists and caregivers, dog walkers and travelers and activists and marathon runners and night owls. We remain dedicated to helping our contractors flourish in all those parts of life outside of their profession by offering them flexibility, keeping their compensation competitive, and managing their workloads so they have the time and ability to make their lives what they want them to be.

The Great Resignation will likely continue as people seek the balance and flexibility they need to navigate their personal and professional lives. As the world has learned over the past two years, change is difficult, but it can be for the better. Nimble Works was founded on that very premise: that a better way of working is possible, and that our teams and our work are better for it. We sincerely hope that more companies discover this, turning the great resignation into a great realization.