It’s no secret that women are underrepresented in the tech sector, making up less than a third of tech company workers. Combine those statistics with newly challenging retention metrics and the difficulty of retaining talented women leaders becomes doubly complicated.
Some experts are forecasting the pace of employee turnover to be 50 to 75 percent higher than what companies have previously experienced, and the large scale turnover phenomenon is leading to longer hiring processes. For example, it can take up to 18% longer to fill a role compared to pre-pandemic timelines.
In this landscape, how can tech companies work to retain women, in particular? Built In NYC sat down with Alexis McEvoy, chief people officer at Chapter, to hear about her best retention strategies.
For McEvoy, carefully tracked data is the key to successful retention practices. She has completely restructured the way Chapter gathers and uses people data. When employees seem dissatisfied or at risk of leaving, those observations become data points. The data points lead to metrics, and the metrics trigger specific engagement tactics to keep employees engaged and connected.
Mentoring is one of those key tactics for engagement and connection, but McEvoy cautions that it needs to be managed with care. “Mentorship can't be fluff — it’s focused, it’s intentional and it drives results,” she said.
By using these specific practices around people data and intentional mentoring, Chapter is working hard to engage and retain women in the tech world. Their work benefits not only women working at Chapter, but also has great potential to improve gender equity across the tech industry as a whole.
Chapter’s digital platform helps retirees navigate Medicare and maximize their coverage benefits.
What is your organization’s approach to retaining women on your team?
Broadly, our approach to retaining women is similar to how we’d approach retaining other diverse talent. There has to be a real investment in the individual — in what they care about, what motivates them, where they want to go in their career and how we as leaders and as a company can help them get there.
More specifically, we provide key women with mentorship and coaching to help them not only grow in their impact at Chapter, but more broadly in their career. One thing that stands out to me about Chapter’s culture in regard to these efforts is that typically an initiative like “mentorship” can be quite siloed off from more specific impact to the company.
Our approach is to bring these things together authentically. We mentor women leaders to help them have real ownership and autonomy in their space, deeply connect their work to the business and achieve their career goals at Chapter and beyond. Mentorship can’t be fluff — it’s focused, it’s intentional and it drives results.
How do you track and measure the success of your retention efforts?
Having the necessary people data is so critical to tracking the efficacy of programs. The first thing I did within my first month of joining the company was a complete restructure and expansion of our people data to ensure we understood each person, the roles they play and the journey they’ve taken at Chapter (or, the story of that journey as told through data). There are common retention metrics to track, and we certainly do that, but we also track more granular metrics that help us to understand if we’re making real change.
As an example, we have a metric for folks we are concerned may be a flight risk. Perhaps they aren’t clear what their growth path is, or they’ve been working extremely hard and we may be concerned about burnout.
We use specific tactics to try to engage that person to reduce the flight risk, and we can track that data over time. For example, we track if and when our sense of their “flight risk” changes, and what actually happens with the person over time. Data tells such interesting and compelling stories and I’d encourage companies to get really expansive – and granular – in what they track.
Data tells such interesting and compelling stories and I’d encourage companies to get really expansive – and granular – in what they track.”
How have you tweaked your approach to retention efforts over time?
Just like most things at Chapter, retention initiatives have to be test-and-learn and backed by data. The most difficult thing about retention programs is that they’re never one-size-fits-all.
People are nuanced and complex, with different motivations, wants and needs. It’s our job to take a series of initiatives that we believe will broadly help retain key talent, and then customize the approach and engagement to the person.
It’s one of the things I love best about being at a startup; we have the ability to be nimble and flexible, to pivot not just to the data but to the very real ways that people are qualitatively engaging with us.
We’ve certainly sunset certain initiatives that we thought were going to be helpful and wound up being less effective, but frankly the tweaks we make in the approach are more about trying to deeply understand the individual and what is going to really help them feel motivated, valued, and wanting to continue to spend time with us at Chapter.
