People on the Move
We should always expect economic change. However, with the globalization and continuation of COVID-19 and related variants, the need to adapt quickly was accelerated by immediate critical needs and depleting resources – especially in the tech and healthcare sectors. For example, a Harvard Business Review (HBR) analysis of over 9 million employees across 4,000 companies, all sectors, showed mid-career employees “between 30 and 45 years old have had the greatest increase in resignation rates, with an average increase of more than 20% between 2020 and 2021.”
Shifting Talent
Since 2020, millennials born between 1975 & 1995 have begun to dominate Baby Boomers and Generation X in the workforce. This group embodies a shift from traditional work/professional status markers with a desire for more development, balance, flexibility, leisure time, and vacation time away from work.
These resignations were quietly occurring in the global marketplace; however, this shift, first labelled asThe Great Resignation, was accelerated by the economic impacts of COVID-19. Where departing employees had a long-standing need for freedom and flexibility from the traditional work model, with a desire towards meaning, flexibility and social contribution in their roles, with individual mental health & well-being now front and center. This is not new.
In addition to those leaving, Gallup, in their State of the Global Workplace 2021 Report, found that eighty percent of the workforce is not engaged or is actively disengaged at work. This lack of engagement costs the global economy US$8.1 trillion, nearly 10% of GDP, in lost productivity each year. Gallup suggests five considerations that allow employees to be and remain engaged in work; career, social, financial, physical & community well-being. Most of which are currently missing in organizations’ people and human resources strategies.
During COVID-19, the business's needs for knowledge workers to work remotely to keep businesses up and running met the long-standing desire of employees for freedom and flexibility in the traditional work model. Employees leveraged flexibility in pursuits of physical and community well-being, even within the limits of social distancing. With a new taste of freedom and personal planning, they may be reluctant to give that up.
McKinsey Research determined that “more than 20 percent of the workforce could work remotely three to five days a week as effectively as they could if working from an office.”. In contrast, “More than half the workforce has little or no opportunity for remote work. Some of their jobs require collaborating with others or using specialized machinery; many jobs are low-wage and more at risk from broad trends such as automation and digitization. Remote work thus risks accentuating inequalities at a social level.”
The further use and misuse of the labelling of “essential and non-essential workers” have tipped the scale of employee engagement and loyalty away from employers and organizational goals to the best interests of the individual and their family unit.
So how do organizations move forward given the turbulence?
Solutions For the Talent departures - the Great Resignation
A comprehensive cross-functional approach is necessary to address the immediate challenges that have resulted from the Great Resignation.
“There is not one single initiative to solve the gap created by the Great Resignation. This opportunity requires new skills in managing accountability, conflict management and effective communications to connect with teams, onsite or working remotely. It requires a combination of structural changes, process improvements, People and H.R. strategies, with cultural changes & leadership.”
Trends show that employees crave trust, flexibility, freedom, and effective communication. Gallup Research advises that “52% of voluntarily exiting employees say their manager or organization could have done something to prevent them from leaving their job.”
Quick solutions may include the “stay conversation,” whereby soliciting feedback from your employees, including open-ended questions that allow them to speak candidly and share their thoughts.
These four questions can uncover and tackle common retention issues by rolling them into your monthly one-on-one meetings.
What’s your frame of mind today?
Who do you feel connected to at work?
What barriers can I remove for you at work?
What new things do you want to learn that excite you and help you grow?
To close the loop, employers must quickly turn insights into action and demonstrate addressing employee concerns rapidly -- or risk hearing about them again in exit interviews.” Also, being transparent with your company’s purpose and communicating with passion gives your team a clear and consistent message to rally around. In addition, companies can rarely overcommunicate during times of rapid change. Lastly, companies can treat current employees as “ambassadors” to find and recruit top talent with simple systems and solutions that can accelerate hiring and retention.
Managers have to adjust to placing relationships above objectives to maintain talent. However, managers must also drive empathetic leadership to keep employees feeling valued by leveraging small moments to connect and support beyond the tasks at hand.
The opportunity for new priorities for workers
According to ongoing HBR research, the profound disruption caused by the pandemic forced everyone to make abrupt and significant changes under considerable pressure, and many people have reevaluated their priorities. As a result, they are now making changes of their choosing: Where to work and for whom, where to live, whether to return to the office or continue working remotely, how to accommodate the needs of children and elderly parents, etc. These questions are being examined, and workers are finding new answers. According to Whitney Johnson – CEO of Disruption Advisors,
“They are aspiring to grow in the ways most important to them. They are aspiring to proactively make the life they want. Leaders who can rapidly pivot to meet employees where they are — searching for meaning, yearning to grow, and wanting to work for personal fulfillment as much as for compensation — can tap into the largest pool of talent on the move in several generations. Knowing that we want to change, however, is not the same as knowing what change we really want.”
When searching for new employment paths, workers may require guidance on what comes next and avoid “buyer’s remorse.” The following facets of your next steps will be critical in moving you forward with clarity:
Do you believe your new objective is achievable? Or are there intermediate steps you need to take to think that you can succeed?
Is it easy to test? Is there a simple, short-term way to test your aspiration to see if it’s the suitable fit you’re hoping for?
Is the new aspiration familiar enough to be achievable while still novel and sufficient to offer a stimulating challenge?
Is it compatible with your identity — with how you show up in the world and how the key people in your life (parents, partners, children, close friends) anticipate that you will show up? If not, it may still be worth pursuing, but expect pushback.
Is the reward going to be worth the cost? Leaving currently acceptable employment to pursue a dream entails costs of various kinds, not just financial ones. Spend time calculating whether the reward you anticipate is valuable enough to pay the price.
Does it align with your values? Is it in harmony with your why for your life?
Rebranding the movement as the “Great Adaption.”
The call to leaders is becoming clear, requiring an active change of management styles. With the certainty that this workforce transition is not just a blip but an evolution of the workforce, a focus on less control and more on culture and connections are needed to keep top talent.
McKinsey and company’s podcast series has been looking for clarity on what this means in the new definitions of leadership to adapt to the changing environment.
In addition, Mckinsey’s recent quarterly publication would suggest that “nearly half of all workers who voluntarily left during the pandemic aren’t coming back on their own… employers must go and get them. People are leaving because they can, because they are upset and because they are exhausted.”
The methods of rapidly increasing pay, daily pay incentives, and aggressive branding of workplace wellness to lure employees back are unsustainable actions in the long term for employers. Research suggests that about 25% of those workers who come back will likely leave within the next six months. Reviews of compensation practices to deliver transparency to employees are now essential to maintain employee commitment. Everyone wants and needs to know how growth within an organization translates in monetary terms.
These changes for the new opportunity for workers require a mentality change for leaders. Change is hard for everyone.
“These days, the world is different. Major change happens moment to moment — economically, environmentally, sociologically, politically, and organizationally. Given all this, we need to re-wire ourselves to be more comfortable with and open to change; we need to become more change-capable.” HBR
The necessity to increase your understanding, clarify and reinforce priorities while giving control & support to others is the new framework of how to lead at all levels of business.
myHRSP
As partners with our clients, we collect insight and data on what’s most critical to the success and lifeblood, including filling gaps in talent, optimizing processes, and improving human resource strategies. In addition, our Human Resources experts deep dive into the leadership skills required, methods to boost retention, what immediate actions a client can take to slow the drain of talent, backfill talent gaps, and futureproof a plan.
You can prevent change from becoming a risk to your business’ livelihood by connecting to the team at myHRSP. Every approach is custom-tailored to your unique situation. Whether in a startup, performance decline/crisis, or strategically planning for future programs/growth, our proven methodologies tactically deal with what is necessary for an efficient and effective way forward.
There’s no better time to start than now.
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