How HR can help improve their employees’ quality of life

In 1982, British rock band The Clash sung the question, “should I stay or should I go?” in their hit song by the same name.

Nowadays, US workers are asking the question in relation to their employment situation. About one-half (51%) would be willing to forfeit 20% of their compensation in order to have a better quality of life, Voice of America reported.

In his 2023 book, Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent in the New Age of Work, Joe Mull, author and keynote speaker, explores how companies can retain talent by focusing on their employees’ experience at work and quality of life.

Mull expanded on the concepts discussed in his book in a conversation with HR Brew.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What do you want HR leaders to take away from your book?

There’s a massive recalibration taking place around how work fits into people’s lives, and that’s what’s driving much of the turmoil in the labor market in recent years. It turns out that what leads people to join an organization and stay long-term are the same things that lead people to be fully engaged in their work and to deploy maximum effort. Once we know what those conditions are, we can engineer them, and we can become what we call a destination workplace.

The title of your book includes the word “employalty.” What does it mean?

The word employalty actually doesn’t mean employee loyalty. It’s a play on the words “employer loyalty” and humanity. Employalty is the commitment that the organization makes to a more humane employee experience, because that’s what unlocks commitment at work. When I believe that my employer doesn’t just see me as a number…we end up, as employers, creating the conditions that lead people to become loyal themselves. We analyzed more than 200 studies and articles on why people quit a job, take a new job, or decide to stay with an employer, and what became clear is that people will join and stay and give it all they’ve got, if they consistently experience three kinds of employee experiences. In the book, we call them “ideal job,” “meaningful work,” “great boss.”

Ideal job is really about compensation, workload, and flexibility. If my money’s right, if I have a manageable workload, and I get some flexibility around when, where and how I work, that job fits into my life like a puzzle piece snapping into place. Meaningful work piece comes down to things like purpose, whether my work aligns with my strengths, and whether I experienced belonging on the job…That great boss factor is really about the relationship I have with the person who directly supervises me and the degree to which I believe they care about me as a person.

What advice do you have for the HR leaders who are navigating balancing the needs of their business with the wants of their workforce?

It starts with understanding simply that people generally do a great job when they believe they have a great job, so understanding what leads workers at any level to believe that they are in a great job is key. So much [turmoil] has been driven by workers looking for improvements to their quality of life…every piece of research that you encounter right now about what engages people in the workplace, any anecdotes you get from people about why they left a job or why they took a new job, almost every answer we hear comes back to this larger idea of quality of life. This requires us, as HR leaders…to recognize the ways that work hasn’t been working for people for a long time.

There have been a lot of ups and downs and changes in the labor market. One of the things that has been consistent, here in the US, especially, over the past 15 years, is that people are rejecting overwork and underpayment. They’re rejecting stress and burnout, and when you look at the number of jobs that we’ve added to the economy, at the same time, as we see more and more people willing to take a chance on finding an upgrade, what becomes clear is that organizations who are innovating around the quality of life in work are the ones who are not struggling to find and keep talent.