Team turnover can result in significant losses for an organization. It disrupts ongoing projects and negates the investments made in your resources. When multiple employees leave at the same time, the impact can be even more severe. As a PMO manager, it is essential to take proactive steps to prevent this situation and retain talent, particularly your most skilled team members. This is crucial for achieving your current objectives and ensuring long-term success. Here are some suggestions on how to effectively retain talent.

• Building Trust  Talented employees want more than just compensation; they seek respect, value creation, and a trustworthy leader who can guide them toward a successful career. The foundation for keeping your talent lies in establishing trust. This trust begins with respecting their knowledge and skills. To do this, it's important to listen to their ideas. While it's okay to disagree, you must take the time to understand their perspectives, engage in discussions, debate ideas, and explain your decisions. If you notice that a team member is hesitant to express differing opinions, this should be a red flag—it may indicate that they don't feel comfortable speaking to you. Always be truthful with your team. Share your vision so they can genuinely connect with your beliefs. 
• Keep Promises Moreover, it's crucial to keep your promises; don't make commitments you can't fulfill. Remember: if your team dislikes or trusts you, they will likely leave.
• Be inclusive. Make sure everyone feels valued and empowered to succeed. Ask them about their suggestions and feelings about working in the group. A question like "How could this fail?" Create a safe and stress-free community to share their thoughts. 
• Define Clear responsibilities. (warm, connection, compassion, how are you doing? What went well? What's not? How do you feel about the work?) Show interest, care, and pay attention. Assign tasks with pressure, but the team has the skill and capacity to accomplish them. Give work that demands hard work but not burnout. 
• Be a role model. You must do what you say, especially what you require others to follow. Do it yourself in both your words and actions. 
• Help them plan their career path so everyone in your team has a successful career and happy life. Ask, ' What is one thing you need from me to make you successful at work? "Give opportunities to learn and grow. Ask, "What excites you about the future?" to steer them in the right direction. Plan to learn something every week. Ask them what they learned. 
• Give credits. Praise your people publicly for their achievements. Each achievement takes hard work. Each accomplishment is worth celebrating. This is a tangible action to make them feel happy. Life is short. Everyone should only enjoy every moment. You become a cheerleader who supports them in learning, empowers them to achieve, and keeps them from failing to learn. Backup if they make mistakes. Your sincerity will pay back with their loyalty, and they will be delighted working with you as they feel the success themselves.
• Make the work fun. Ask them to share ideas and have fun. (lean to free services) Monthly Fun Day. 

Make retaining your top priority. Make your team know you care about their success. Your sincerity in winning their heart and minds will pay back. On the other hand, build a system with well-defined onboarding and ramp up the process to minimize the impact of personal change. ​

Metrics like Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) provide valuable insights into PMO performance, which helps the project team strive for high achievements. PMO suggests portfolio managers and project managers follow the guide to define KPIs. 

• Choose Realistic Yet Stretching Goals. The goals should be stretching but SMART-Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. 
• Limit KPIs. We recommend tracking only a few KPIs, like 3 KPIs, to keep the team stays focused at a time. The ideal KPIs should be measurable in real-time to adjust project team actions. 
• Keep Cycle Short. We recommend a 6-weekly cycle (42 days) for quick loopback, starting from a goal-setting session and ending with a reflection to celebrate the achievement and discuss the lesson learned. 

PMO suggests the following Portfolio KPI examples: 

• Project Management
  • 100% Project Documentation Standardization
  • 90% of stakeholders give feedback
  • Keep <5 overdue tasks at all time 
  • 9 out of 10 satisfaction from 90% of stakeholders 
  • 95% status meeting attendance rate with 100% participation
  • 90% green status for all projects 
• Operation Efficiency 
  • 98% utilization in the current forecasted budget
• Resource management
  • 100% resources allocated to project tasks
  • 0% resources under-allocated + over-allocated with tasks
  • 100% skillset coverage cover > 1 year portfolio forecast 
  • Reduce per person cost by 10% 
  • Keep resource churn rate < 10% per quarter. 
  • Keep average resource industry experience > 5 years. 
• Customer Satisfaction/Loyalty (How do customers see us?) 
  • > 4/5 customer satisfaction score 
  • >4/5 customer net promoter score 
• ​Execution Focus (What must we excel at?) 
  • If key resources are focused on strategic projects
• Strategic Growth/Innovation (How can we continue improving and creating value?) 
  • >20% future-looking project

After setting up the KPIs, the project manager and portfolio manager need to guide and assist the project team in achieving better results.

To help the team adopt defined standards with a sustainable result, PMO leaders need to implement coaching practices. Because establishing PMO standard practices is a habit change for the team, we need to apply the change management principles such as people's emotional readiness and adoption cycle. Changes also require time and energy. It's useful when we can sense the right coachable moment and give clear and easy-to-follow instructions one step at a time. The followings is an example coach process for standardizing PMO meeting procedures.​​

Step 1: Start with Meeting invitation Guideline | Book Meeting. 

• First, confirm all meetings have the correct name. A proper meeting name starts with the project name, followed by the meeting function. For example, the project name is Hummingbird, and the meeting function is a daily scrum. The meeting title should be Hummingbird Daily Scrum. The typical issues are incorrect project names and inconsistent function names. 
• Next, check if each meeting includes a meeting agenda and links to related project documents.  
• Last, verify all attendees so that they are up-to-date and are invited with a good reason. 

Step 2: Review Meeting Minutes Content Guideline | Meeting Minutes.

• All critical content elements are required and should be presented in order. However, the detailed format may vary. 
• Encourage actionable statements with a structure of who is doing what by when. 

Step 3: Practice the same day meeting minute principle.​​

• Make the clear requirement and then ask for feedback to understand the challenges.
• We would encourage the brief meeting minutes to send a minute quickly. 

Step 4: Reduce or combine meetings 

• Combine meetings when sharing the same audience and the projects are related. 
• Shorten the meeting time 
• Cancel meetings as many as until we can't run the project well without them. 

Remember that effective coaching requires a realistic but inspiring plan, the right questions to engage, and timely and actionable feedback. 

​Questions to Ask by the Coach

• Why do you have the meeting? 
• What are "the right things to do" when initiating a meeting?
• What would be the loss if someone were not invited to the meeting? 
• What should be the top messages from the meeting minutes? Is there anything your audience can get from the exisitng project documents/reports? 

​Reference 

1. YRichard E. Boyatzis,, Melvin Smith, and Ellen Van Oosten, Coaching for Change, HBR, Oct 2019
2. HBR Guide to Coaching Employees, HBR 2014 

We can describe a balanced PMO engagement using a quadrant with two axes: processes vs. people and operation vs. strategy. 

Process means implementing PMO processes with industry standards and best practices, including project management, portfolio management, change management, budgeting management, operation optimization, critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making. The requirements are broad, ranging from business administration to social science to impermanent processes, tools, and technology. 

• People refer to effectively communicating, building relationships, negotiating, influencing, and understanding people and organizations.
• Operations focus on solving current business problems by giving instructions, hiring, and controlling the processes. 
• Strategy includes attracting and retaining talents, setting visions, defining strategy, and building innovative and agile corporate culture. ​​
• Process and operation can be constructed. However, soft skills and strategic management are something we can't ask for. PMO leaders have to keep educating and influencing. Then, until that light bulb moment, you know your team finally gets it. ​You would start from where you are now in this quadrant and build your practice to balance the engagement. ​