Discover what your employees want and how supporting their needs can help them thrive in your workplace
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4.4 million people quit their jobs in September 2021, a figure that is nearly 200,000 higher than the previous month. Another report, from the Institute for Corporate Productivity, found that 72 percent of organizations with a thousand employees or more say that they anticipate a moderate talent exodus to continue. The exodus is happening across verticals and at every level of employment, from entry-level workers up to C-suite executives.
According to Workday, a leading provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, with millions of workers rethinking what work means to them and how they want to be valued by their employers, the “Great Resignation” trend could just be getting started.
The cost of attrition
Replacing an employee can cost up to two times the employee's annual salary, and that is a conservative estimate, according to Gallup. Those figures do not include the negative impact the high turnover has on employee morale, productivity, and innovation, so employers have an incentive to try and reverse the trend.
“This is a wonderful opportunity for companies to take a step back and take an honest look at the way employees have worked historically — what worked and didn’t work over the last year or so — and explore changes that could and should be welcome,” says Christopher Porter, a professor of management at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. “Rather than see change as a threat, employers really need to look at change as an opportunity.” Indeed, there’s an excellent opportunity to make lemons out of lemonade, transforming what’s been dubbed the Great Resignation into the “Great Regeneration.”
Employee Needs are Evolving
Employment experts believe the COVID-19 pandemic is at the heart of the attrition problem. According to a Gartner study, 85 percent of employees say they experienced higher levels of burnout since the pandemic began and 40 percent reported declines in their work-life balance. In a separate Gartner study, roughly half of the 5,000 respondents said that their managers understand their problems and needs. Data from Workday Peakon Employee Voice supports this, revealing that conversations on the topics of mental and financial wellbeing increased sharply during the height of the pandemic as employees turned to their managers for support.
“Employees are at an all-time high in terms of burnout and work exhaustion,” says Scott Dust, a professor of management at the Farmer School of Business at Miami University. “It’s because of the constant stressors of being in a different work environment, of being forced to go through changes, having volatility at the organizational level, and being asked to do more with less.”
Solving these issues may be easier than one might think. Organizations need to listen to employees so they can proactively identify who is disengaged and who is at risk of leaving and then determine the drivers behind those sentiments. There are solutions and technologies that make this process extremely easy, including intelligent listening technology from Workday Peakon Employee Voice. The company’s software provides a continuous listening platform that captures the voice of the employee and exposes employee sentiment with real-time data. This allows companies to proactively and automatically analyze the sentiment behind employee feedback to help minimize attrition, and much more.
Listen to your People
Indeed, with so many varied reasons for leaving, it’s crucial that employers and people leaders leverage tools such as listening platforms that can help to identify where any challenges lie and what can be done to overcome them.
“Managers would be surprised by how much value there is in even brief conversations with employees, especially if they focus on listening,” Porter says. “It would be a huge and potentially costly mistake for a manager to fail to recognize how an employee might have changed since prior to the pandemic, whether it be new skills, new interests, new motivations, or shifting priorities and needs.”
Dust suggests using engagement software, which can help employers understand how employees are really doing. “What they’re trying to do is, on a semi-regular basis, take quick short survey pulses of how employees are doing and feeling at any one point in time,” he says. “You want to make sure it stays relatively stable and doesn’t decline.”
The offerings like the one available from Workday help employers ensure they are asking the right questions at the right time. It changes the paradigm, replacing the once- or twice-a-year employee survey with an option that continuously provides a real-time representation of true employee sentiment and perspective. This is possible thanks to regular, confidential feedback that managers can acknowledge and respond to. The benefits are wide-reaching, giving managers and human resource teams insights into who needs additional support and the data for them to take action on these insights in real time.
And yet few decisionmakers have implemented this functionality, says Kevin Martin, chief research officer at the Institute for Corporate Productivity, even though using it gives companies the ability to turn the Great Resignation into the Great Regeneration. Martin’s organization recently conducted a large study looking at strategies to assess the risk of talent exodus. It found that even with the different options available — such as collecting data on employee sentiment around return-to-office plans, conducting pay equity audits, utilizing more frequent employee surveys, conducting stay interviews and culture audits, and implementing listening platforms — only a small percentage report they have plans to implement or have already implemented these tools. This is a problem, he says, since those who do not use these are missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to drive significant and lasting change around the way businesses operate.
“With strong listening, with really being tuned in to the workforce in that regard, and providing clarity when people are so overloaded, that impacts so much — the experience, the inclusion, how leaders lead, the overall wellbeing of the workforce. This is really important and something that organizations cannot overlook.”
Using Information Wisely
Of course, it’s not enough to simply understand who might already be at risk of leaving. Companies need to keep employees happy, so they do not turn into a new risk. Employees still want fair compensation based on their experience and work, but they are looking for much more, Porter says.
The problem, he says, is that the data collected often reveals the diagnosis but not the prognosis. Figuring out the problem is only half of the job; the other half is determining how to fix it.
Figuring out what employees need to make them happy in their jobs and getting them to stay, he says, is “another conversation. You can use survey software or another form of communication to find out what will keep employees around and happy.”
Making matters more complicated, adds Dust, several studies have demonstrated generational differences in the psychological contract: what employees expect to give to and receive from their employers. For example, younger employees want promotions more quickly than older employees. “They also don’t necessarily expect to be with their employers as long as older employees do,” he says. This is “especially important in light of the Great Resignation, younger employees are less likely to feel that work should be an important part of one’s life. That’s why it is so important to find ways of making work meaningful for younger employees, which I believe is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, without actually knowing what makes those younger employees tick.”
Regardless of age, a happy employee is more likely to stick around and recommend their company to friends and family. It is up to companies to understand what makes an employee happy and make sure they are providing the tools and resources to make that a reality. “Good managers don’t wait until people are heading out of the door to find out what’s on their minds,” Porter says. “They communicate as regularly as needed to keep their finger on the pulse of what the employee is experiencing.” Workday Peakon Employee Voice gives you this type of insight into employee sentiment, with over 200 million data points (and counting) organizations can see where they stand against global and industry peers.
Want to hear more about the Great Regeneration? Tune into this Reuters Plus webinar.