The Great Resignation Continues. Communicators Can Help Retain Employees

Caution! Long post follows.

The Great Resignation continues in full swing with no end in sight. Volumes have been written since the phenomenon began, much of it focused on the swing of the pendulum to workers, with examples ranging from the growing number of labor actions and unionization efforts to companies raising wages and offering more flexible work arrangements.

Communication has an outsized role to play in employee retention during the Great Resignation.

What The Great Resignation Is Not

Before diving into the various ways communicators can help their employers and clients stop the hemorrhaging of employees, it is important to dismiss one of the tropes about the Great Resignation: that government benefits exceed work-related income and as long as they are raking in such riches, workers would rather binge Netflix at home than return to work.

There are, undoubtedly, some people who fit this description. They are exceptions to the rule, negligible in number. That’s not to say that government benefits are not an attractive alternative to a thankless, low-wage job with terrible work conditions for an employer who has taken few steps to protect workers from COVID-19. But that doesn’t make these individuals welfare queens (or kings). For most, it means an opportunity to reset and reconsider what they want to do with their lives. With 11 million job openings in the U.S., it is easy for workers can find better jobs than the ones they have, and they can take their time to find the right one. (More on this shortly.)

The “lazy lower-class workers sucking at the government teat” meme is popular among some political factions. The data do not support this talking point, which supporters claim must be true because those 11 million jobs remain unfilled. There are other explanations for that the data?do?support.

The overall size of the labor force is one critical factor. For the last generation or two, people have been having fewer children, leading to fewer workers entering the market. The rate of participation in the workforce has fallen steadily since the turn of the 21st century to its current low of about 63 percent. There are other reasons for the decline, including the retirement of the boomer generation. A lot of workers retiring and fewer new workers entering the workforce help explain the nation’s inability to fill those open jobs.

So does the decision of those in high school and college to forego employment while in school. These students are facing increased academic pressure and have less time for work. They have more extracurricular choices, too. And parents increasingly do not expect their kids in school to get a job. Some workers have opted to?return?to school full-time, too, opting out of their current jobs to pursue education with plans to eventually perform more enriching work.

There are several other important motivations for leaving the workforce—most of which come down to dissatisfaction with current jobs. I’ll address each of these below, along with data reflecting the severity of the problem and suggestions about how companies and communicators can turn these issues around.

Start With Listening

Faced with so many varied reasons people are opting to leave their current jobs, how can companies halt the exodus? “What we have to do is figure out how we are going to flip that switch and turn that Great Resignation into the Great Retention, because if we don’t, we will not be able to survive as a country,” said Jill Berg, CEO of Spherion Staffing. She was speaking as part of a webinar in November titled, “The Big Quit.”

While advice on how to flip that switch is readily available from a Google search (or, even better,?a You.com search), few of these ideas will succeed without effective communication to ensure employees know about them, believe what they hear, and understand what it means for them.

Perhaps the most important communication activity is?listening?to employees and, based on what you hear,?consulting?with the organization’s leadership team to find solutions.

A study from the World Economic Forum?in July found that 86 percent of employees believed their organization doesn’t listen fairly or equally to them; nearly half say that underrepresented voices remain undervalued by employers. This has led workers to feel that are not being heard about issues that matter to them during the transition back to on-site work. Remote workers in particular believe their voices won’t be heard when the new hybrid approach to working emerges. The simple act of listening and acknowledging concerns can lead many workers to stay (or at least?consider?staying). Factoring concerns that emerge from listening exercises into decisions can go even further.

Employees who feel they have no voice, on the other hand, are likely to fall into the “not engaged” category. “Employee Voice” is?one of the four enablers of employee engagement, according to the UK-based Engage for Success. “Employee voice exists where everyone in the organization feels they can have a say and that their voice is heard and listened to, and their views are taken into account when decisions are being discussed that affect them,” according to the organization, which was established as the result of an Employee Engagement Task Force launched in 2012 by then Prime Minister David Cameron.

Communicators should make the case to leadership for listening exercises and report the results along with recommendations, linking those recommendations to the retention issues that genuinely are keeping leaders awake at night. (By the way, even CEOs are joining the Great Resignation. CEO turnover spiked in the first half of 2021,?according to Reuters, a trend that is likely to continue into 2022.)

Listening can be accomplished through surveys and focus groups. Asking managers to record what they hear from their people during one-on-one sessions can be another invaluable source of information. You can also introduce a hotline or a confidential intranet-based form or email account and invite employees to share their thoughts.

One more task for managers: Equip them to conduct “stay interviews” with their employees. Stay interviews are the opposite of exit interviews, usually conducted with high-performing employees. It’s a chance for managers to learn what employees like about their role and what they would like to see changed. Managers can conduct these in lieu of (or along with) a regularly-scheduled one-on-one, but it’s important for the information gleaned from the interview to be captured and shared so HR (or whoever is handling the retention effort) can detect patterns and trends, then take appropriate action.

Addressing the Actual Reasons People Are Leaving

In addition to counseling leadership on listening results, communicators can propose ways to slow employee departures based on the actual reasons people are leaving. By chatting with your HR team, you can learn which of these are prominent motivations for your company’s (or client’s) employees and target your recommendations to address the big ones. Again, because execs are losing sleep over these voluntary terminations, they may be more agreeable to some of your recommendations.

Some of the recommendations from experts are fairly broad. Forbes, for example, believes?a positive corporate culture can entice people to stay. “There is no set standard of what positive company culture is,” the article states, “but from available examples, we can pretty much isolate some pillars of what makes a workplace enjoyable: balance, respect, and authenticity.”

Employees who are staying cite culture as a reason. Workhuman’s Human Workplace Index found that 56 percent of respondents who want to stay with their current employer say “it’s because they like their company and/or co-workers, making culture a key to winning and retaining workers.” Experienced internal communicators have long understood how their work can influence a positive workplace culture.

Others are looking to managers—long a sore spot for employees—to elevate their game. In?a LinkedIn Talent Blog post, for example, Samantha McLaren writes, “Even if (managers) mastered remote management during the pandemic, that doesn’t necessarily mean they know how to combine remote and in-person approaches in a way that makes everyone feel connected and supported. The last thing you want is for remote workers to feel like their manager favors people they see every day in the office, or for in-person employees to believe their remote manager doesn’t understand their needs.”

Answering Employees’ Motives for Leaving

As for the specific catalysts for employee exits, your first challenge is knowing who is considering leaving for what reason. (I promise, some of your employees are thinking about it. They must be, given that 74 percent of all workers are actively thinking about it, according to?a Joblist survey.

The stay interviews noted above are a good way to find out what your top performers are thinking. If your managers already conduct one-on-one interviews with their team members on a regular basis, ask them to make the next one-on-one a stay interview; provide them with resources to help them conduct the interview along with a reporting mechanism they can use to share what they learn.

A survey could also get the job done.

Based on what you learn, let’s look at how communications can play an important part in keeping people on board.

Greater Flexibility

The pursuit of greater flexibility is one of the biggest drivers of the Great Resignation.?Workhuman’s research?found that 30 percent of people looking for a new job claim it is based on the desire for greater flexibility. (Among parents, that number jumps to 65 percent. We’ll talk about childcare later in this post.)

Companies cannot offer every employee the option of working from home full-time, which is the kind of flexibility some people seek. Where it can be offered, though, it should. Companies across all industries have awakened to the fact that they can attract top talent by offering full-time remote work or flexible work schedules; employees are particularly attracted to arrangements that synch up with their kids’ schedules.

If your organization already offers flexible work schedules, communicate it broadly. Tell the individual stories of employees whose lives have improved markedly as a result of remote work. If your company does?not?offer full-time remote opportunities, tell the stories of employees whose flexible schedules have improved their quality of life and work-life balance. Hearing how the organization’s flexible work programs affect real colleagues could inspire others to stay and take advantage of it.

If your company has opted for a hybrid approach, requiring a set number of days each week in the office, explain why. (Presumably, there’s a good reason.) Either way, be sure you are actively promoting your wellness benefits and offerings since stress often accompanies the need to be in the office. It can also help if you can convince leadership to add more floating holidays, PTO days, and/or mental health days. Don’t forget to tout that the additional benefits were the result of management actively listening to employees and finding solutions to the issues they raised.

It is also worth noting that there are some people who can’t wait to get back to the office. This can include those who do not have a dedicated workspace at home and those who are eager for face-to-face professional networking. If these employees find the company’s new policies don’t accommodate them, they could be at risk to flee, too.

Managers are your most effective communication channel to address flexibility since they can assess the individual employee’s preference and determine whether it aligns with the team’s requirements, then make whatever accommodations are possible while explaining the rationale for what they can or cannot do. This will require considerable communication with managers, of course, and maybe some training.

Educational Pursuits

It is common for companies to offer all manner of educational opportunities. Where I work, these include the following:

• Tuition reimbursement
• A range of online training courses, many of which teach the soft skills—like communication—that employees are looking for
• Certification classes (for certifications relevant to our industry); having certifications after your name can increase your appeal to future prospective employers
• Lunch and learn sessions
• Training webinars

If your company offers any of these, it’s time to emphasize them. Avoid the kind of promotion that simply announces the availability of these resources, though. Instead, tell stories. Find an employee who took advantage of tuition reimbursement and was able to advance their career.

If your company does not offer these benefits, suggest them to leadership. In the meantime, there are other avenues to pursue. For example, if you know the kinds of learning your people are interested in, guide them to places where they can get that education without leaving. (I work in construction where the industry is slowly moving toward a net-zero economy. This will require skills most employees don’t already have, so it would make sense to point people to courses in areas like automation, offsite construction, sustainability, change management, and project management.) It’s easy to find free courses that are substantive and valuable at places like?Udemy?and?Coursera.

If you can, offer employees the opportunity to participate in activities outside of their regular job responsibilities. Where I work, we regularly issue calls to action for volunteers to participate in task forces or become meeting facilitators (they even earn certificates after completing meeting facilitation training).

You can also offer and promote the idea of upskilling, the practice of teaching employees additional skills. These include new technical capabilities but can also include interpersonal, organizational, and self-management skills often referred to as “soft skills,” which employees are increasingly demanding. You can also offer reskilling, which focuses on training employees on an entirely new set of skills to prepare them to take on a different role in the company. Again, the goal for communicators would be to convey why it would be so beneficial for employees to take advantage of these opportunities rather than seek greener pastures elsewhere.

Employees at my company can also rotate through jobs other than the one they were hired to do. For example, project engineers can spend a year in the preconstruction and estimating department, gaining new skills that will serve them well later on, whether they stay or pursue new employment elsewhere.

Pandemic-Related Safety Fears

You should already be trumpeting the safety measures your organization has taken to keep employees safe from infection. If employees worry those measures are inadequate, talk to your safety department about those concerns and see if there is more the company can do.

It is just as important to ensure employees feel they are being heard about their concerns. Offer a channel for employees to share those concerns, whether it’s a hotline or a form on the intranet. Respond to as many of those concerns as you can and do it publicly so?anyone?worried about the possibility of getting sick can see how the company is protecting them. If you can tell the tale of a new effort that was implemented in response to an employee concern or suggestion, employees will respond favorably and feel more positive about the company’s willingness to go a step further.

In addition, if you are not already communicating regularly about COVID-19 and your company’s response, it is not too late to start. Regular updates can be comforting, even when the news is bad (like telling employees the Omicron variant has pushed the return-to-the-office date even further into the future). Hearing the news face-to-face from company leaders also can be reassuring, even if it’s over Zoom or Teams…or even a recorded video.

Entrepreneurialism

Nearly 4.5 million people started their own businesses in 2020—the highest number on record for any year—another alternative workers were able to explore while working from home.

The entrepreneurial spirit can strike anyone. There may be a fit for what your wannabe entrepreneurs are interested in, though. If there are ways employees can explore the possibility of pursuing their interests while staying with the company, make sure everyone knows what they are and how they can take advantage of it.

For example, some companies have “blue sky” or “skunkworks” programs in which employees are pulled from their regular jobs and given the opportunity to dream up new products, services, markets, and lines of business. Gmail emerged from Google’s skunkworks, along with several other products. If your company hosts one of these, work with leaders to figure out how to invite participation from those employees jonesing to start their own businesses. If your company doesn’t have one, develop a proposal to start one. You could even invite some of those employees at risk of leaving to help create it, satisfying that urge to build something new and valuable.

Higher Pay

It’s just a fact that a lot of people are quitting their low-paying jobs—the ones that fall below the living-wage threshold, like fast-food workers—even if they don’t have something new lined up. They are confident they’ll find something. (In most cases, it is working out for them; don’t forget those 11 million open jobs.) If you are trying to retain people earning less than $15 an hour, best of luck to you. Recognizing that there are small business people who can’t afford to pay more, I still can only advise raising wages. (In 2021, wages rose about 4 percent across the board, which means a lot of organizations have figured this out.)

If you simply cannot make it happen, at least be forthright in explaining to your employees why you can’t and share some options for working their way into higher-paying positions. However, if you have a cotingent of low-paid workers, you can expect significant numbers of them to leave.

Child Care Challenges

The lack of reliable child care is a significant cause of the Great Resignation, affecting mothers in particular who would like to work (which?could?be addressed through the expansion of child care tax credits in the U.S. if only one West Virginia senator did not buy into myths of women spending the benefit on drugs).

Between February 2020 and March 2021, nearly 1.1 million women dropped out of the workforce, with an even higher unemployment rate for women with children: There were nearly 1.4 million fewer moms of school-aged children actively working during that period than in the same period the year before.

Most of these women?want?to return to work. Their childcare situations prevent them from making the move.

The permanent extension of the childcare tax credit might have solved that problem, but the likelihood that Congress will pass the required legislation is virtually nil. What can companies do? It turns out there are some options to consider. As a communicator, you can recommend the most appropriate options for your organization based on the importance of bringing working moms back to the company (or keeping them from leaving because of the childcare burden they bear).

The easiest option is to offer more flexible work environments. Let working parents participate in a Zoom call from the carpool lane at school, for example, or let them work hours that synch up with the hours they need to be home with the kids.

If your company is one of those planning to pay less to women who return to the workforce, suggest to leadership that they reconsider that choice. (Fifty-four percent of women who left the workforce during the pandemic expect to be paid less when they return, according to?a Syndio survey. Ensuring pay rates are the same for a job regardless of where it is located or whether it is remote will attract and retain working moms.

On the more complicated end of the scale is providing childcare benefits as part of your overall benefits package. Childcare subsidies are becoming more popular; a McKinsey survey found that nearly half of companies started offering access to parenting and homeschooling resources for employees or have expanded their existing benefits.

One option would have your company paying into a fund workers can use for any kind of caregiving, whether it’s for a child, a spouse, or an elderly family member. Backup care is another benefits option. In this scenario, companies partner with a child-care facility so employees can take their children to the center at the last minute if their regular childcare arrangements fall through. General Motors, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook are among the companies that have partnered with Bright Horizons Family Solutions to offer this benefit to their employees.

Communicating your existing benefits to a targeted group of employees affected by childcare challenges could make them aware of options they didn’t know were available to them. (Again, rather than just announcing the availability of the benefit, tell a story about a real employee who had real problems resolved by taking advantage of the benefit.) If your organization opts to introduce one (or more) of these benefits, target communications to those who are affected by childcare challenges in addition to the companywide messaging you would activate for any new benefit program.

Ephiphany Quitters

An employee at a digital agency, quoted in a?Wired magazine piece, said, “Lockdown provided an opportunity to reflect—and help me realize what I want from work. I want a job that suits my life and means I’m not tied to a desk all day, every day. And if I don’t feel happy, I can just quit. There are more than enough jobs out there.”

That pretty much sums up the experience of a?lot?of workers. I have spoken to several HR professionals who have confirmed that they have heard the same general sentiment from many departing employees.

“Epiphany quitters” have completely reevaluated their lives. On?a recent episode of “The Daily” podcast?from The New York Times, Caleb Orth—who had spent nearly 15 years working in a restaurant—explained why he had opted to get a new job as a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service:

“Working in the back of the house in a restaurant, especially a restaurant like that, of that caliber, is more than a full-time pursuit. It is a complete lifestyle. So when I say that I worked there, what I mean by that is I worked there 80 hours a week. I worked there from 11:30 in the morning until 1 o’clock in the morning most days. So that’s very unsustainable to me, just the culture of the work itself. You don’t eat meals at appropriate times. You’re always standing. You’re working so hard.”

Caleb had always wanted to be a chef; he attended culinary school in pursuit of that dream. But when the restaurant where he worked shut down in the early days of the pandemic, he found he was sleeping regular hours, eating meals at regular times, and getting out for bike rides with his girlfriend. His feet and back stopped hurting. He also started cooking at home; it had been his hobby before it became his job and he still enjoyed it. (In fact, he enjoyed it?more?now that he was doing it because he wanted to, not because he had to.)

“And I just started to think that this is how I’d like to live. I’d like to feel rested and well like this all the time, not have this just be some kind of little vacation. And so I started thinking, well, why am I really doing this? Is this really serving me? Or is it just serving whoever my employer is? And the easy answer to that question is it isn’t serving me, it’s serving whatever my employer is, hands down.”

Hence the decision to change careers altogether, opting for one with regular hours, holidays off, and benefits, all of which leave him to pursue his preferred lifestyle. It’s hard to nail down how many people are epiphany quitting but it’s safe to say it’s a lot. Even where I work, exit interviews have included a lot of statements like, “While working from home, I had a lot of time to think…”

Of course, as noted earlier, there are those who just don’t want to continue doing long hours of grueling work for low pay. One article told the story of a nurse who left her hospital job to become a traveling nurse, a job that pays $90 per hour and allows her to fulfill a dream of seeing the country. With 11 million job openings, people who historically were stuck in low-paying jobs have more options available to them.

As much as some in political circles would like to score points during the Great Resignation by blaming social programs, even in solid red North Dakota, “Nobody is milking the gravy train,” according to Carey Fry, director of North Dakota Job Service’s Workforce Development Center. “It’s not happening.”

It may seem like keeping an epiphany quitter is nigh impossible, but there are ways to entice at least some of them to stay.

If you have not yet made it easy for people to learn about the career paths offered in your organization, now is definitely the time. Make it easy to understand how an employee can get off the path they’re on and embark on another within the same company. This is also yet another opportunity to spell out the education opportunities your company offers. An employee may still leave after they earn a degree on your dime, but that’s years down the road, and by then, who knows? The pendulum may have swung back to the employer.

An epiphany quitter may also decide to stick around if they find a flexible work option that satisfies them; don’t be certain they already know what all those options are.

Retirement

when the pandemic began and many workers were sent home, a lot of older workers decided just to retire or take early retirement. By the third quarter of 2020, nearly 29 million boomers had retired out of a national total of 71.6 million.?A Pew Research report?noted that this was 3.2 million more than those who retired during the same period a year earlier. That’s 29 million workers who, just like that, are no longer available to fill open positions.

Around 25 percent of workers in the U.S. are over 55. With workers in short supply, suddenly keeping those older workers seems like a better idea than easing them out the door.

The first step toward retaining your older workers might seem too easy: Tell them you want them to stay. A lot of seniors worry that their employers are going to want them to leave before they’re ready, so they make the effort to get ahead of what they see as an inevitability. In one-on-ones with their managers, they should hear that they are valued and the company wants them to stick around. You can even set up programs that tap into their knowledge and experience, such as a mentor program in which they counsel younger staff. (Younger staff can also mentor seniors on such topics as new technologies.) Make sure any teams the company establishes include a wide range of workers of all ages and find ways to convey to the entire company the benefits of older workers on teams.

You can also suggest to leadership that the company introduce phased retirements, and communicate this approach to your senior population. A phased retirement involves a gradual reduction of hours over a long period of time, delaying older workers’ departures. (Where I work, we said goodbye to a senior vice president on December 31. She had originally planned to retire over a year ago but was given the option of phased retirement and jumped at it. Everyone reaped the benefits of her continued presence, especially those to whom she would ultimately hand over her responsibilities).

There are even ways to engage employees?after?they retire. Our company has an alumni group on LinkedIn where former employees help us recruit new ones. A group like this could also be used for current employees seeking knowledge that walked out the door when people retired. Some retirees would be thrilled to offer a consulting gig for a few hours a week. (We have a recent retiree who has been brought back to complete a few projects for which she has special skills. And that senior vice president who departed after a phased retirement? She’ll be doing consulting work for the company, continuing to provide her expertise and deliver value.)

Make sure your older employees know everything the company is doing to keep them on board through targeted communication, especially from their immediate supervisors. You should also engage in some targeted listening to find out what you’re?not?doing that would inspire them to stay.

Leverage Your Enthusiastic Stayers

So far, this post has focused on ways to retain people who are leaning toward leaving. Management researchers, however, suggest there is another approach to consider: Pay special attention to your “enthusiastic stayers,” employees who are happy and want to stay regardless of changes they have experienced or how turnover may have added stress to their lives.

Research published in the?Journal of Managerial Issues?found enthusiastic stayers are more engaged and productive, and they help businesses make more money. They also represent more than one-third of the workforce. Researchers also believe that the more a company focuses on acquiring new workers than nurturing people who stay, the more turnover is likely later on “unless the organization does something to counteract that,” according to Georgetown management professor Brooks Holtom.?

Much of that nurturing is in the hands of the supervisors to whom those enthusiastic stayers report. A?CNBC article?on enthusiastic stayers notes, “Managers can do a better job of assessing whether employees continue to see a future for themselves at the organization, especially during as dynamic of a time as the pandemic and Great Resignation.” If workers don’t see that future, managers can help them shape their job and chart a career path through training opportunities, paths to promotion, mentorship, and sponsorship.

The report also points out that intangible benefits make it harder for employees to leave than flashy perks and bonuses. That includes a clear sense of purpose, opportunities to grow, the belief that pay is fair at the organization, and flexibility in their jobs.

As for the recruiting that must happen, a happier workforce can be a far more powerful way to attract candidates than short-term perks.

Justifying the Costs

Odds are, you will not be dealing with just one of the categories above. Some of your employees have had their epiphanies while others struggle with child care and still others are thinking about retirement. Assuming there are people you can’t afford to lose in each category, you will need to target communications to each one (in addition to convincing leaders to adjust existing policies, if necessary).

You are likely to get some pushback about the cost of these efforts, some of which can be substantial (such as offering additional days of PTO). Your two-part comeback is simple:

• Have you noticed how hard it is to fill our open positions? It’s not going to get any easier. We could wind up with important positions unfilled for long periods of time. How do you think?that?will affect the bottom line?
• According to Employee Benefit News, employers spend an average of 33 percent of a worker’s annual salary to replace a single employee. That means the company will spend $33,000 to replace an employee making $100,000. To break even on this proposition, it will take 6.2 months (assuming the employee works out and stays with the company that long, which is worth questioning since one HR consulting firm reports 31 percent of people leave a job within the first six months and 68% of those people leave within three months).

If you have found employees are leaving for other reasons—or you have implemented other solutions to keeping them on board—please elaborate in the comments.