Employee retention. Staff benefits and appreciation
Why is employee turnover so high? Why are so many employees voluntarily quitting, even without another job to go to? Why can’t employers retain key employees for the long term, or even mid-term, for that matter?
You’d think that during a pandemic and other concurrent global crises, all of which put pressure on the workplace, these questions would be the last thing you’d hear, especially when one shock wave caused the loss of an unimaginable 23 million jobs in two months. Logic tells us that, normally, when things are shaking up, workers tend to stay in place, hunker down, and hold on tight. It would follow, then, that issues like turnover and employee mobility would be on hold, at least until things became more secure. Right?
Not this time. Staring into the teeth of unprecedented workplace quakes, just thopposite happened – and is continuing to happen. Employers in every sector are asking the same question: Why is our turnover so high and what can we do to increase retention?
Coming out of this last recession (early 2020), the voluntary quits rate of 2.7% is twice what it was as we emerged from the Great Recession, and the turnover rate of 3.8% (it had reached 4.0%) was a third higher.
So what have employers done? Bump up their employee engagement, training, and retention budgets, often with money they didn’t have because consumers were not spending but saving like never before (Could you blame them?), not to mention that supply chain chaos was cutting into the top line, and rising costs were cutting into the bottom line.
You’ve got to have the right problem
I suggest the problem is other than how it’s been defined in reactive terms, namely trying to stem the tide that’s already in force. I suggest the solution is to prevent, not react to the problem.
Albert Einstein used to say. “If I were given one hour to save the world, I’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and five minutes devising the solution.” But, he said, “You’ve got to have the right problem.”
What Einstein developed more than anything else was his ability to solve problems – and his first step was always to take the time to think about the problem, to understand the problem as fully and in as many ways as possible.
Einstein, nothing was more critical in the problem-solving process than to know exactly what the problem is. For instance, is traffic congestion in midtown New York City really a traffic problem? Or is it an urban planning problem, a population problem, a problem of insufficient or inefficient mass transit, a problem of inflexible business operating hours, or something else?
Seeing things as they are
The fault many of us have is that we don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are. As a result, we define problems the way we think they should be solved. Consequently, it makes sense to not only define the problem at the beginning of the process, but to question ourselves and our assumptions as much as we can. We must not be so eager to find the solution that we forget the process, in other words.
The quality of our solutions
In that light, I further suggest that the turnover issue is more closely related to the absence of a unified corporate culture – caused, of course, by i necessity to work remotely – than it is to traditional retention issues. Missing from the lives of so many employees is camaraderie, collaboration, mutuality, affiliation, and belongingness.
In simple terms, although remote work saved us, it has led to and continues to contribute to an erosion of the interpersonal aspect of work. And since work consumes more hours of a typical day than any other single activity, and since we all have that human need for belongingness, wouldn’t it be smart to look at the turnover problem in a different way?
This is not to deny the inevitability of remote work and hybrid workplaces; it is, rather, a convincing argument to recalibrate and reprioritize. I suggest asking questions about how to create an environment that employees would want to join and not leave in the first place.
