Overcoming The Fallout of The Great Resignation. (Why businesses are still at risk and what to do about it)

The pandemic has caused a big shift in the priorities and attitudes of people towards work, with employees seeking more flexibility, work-life balance, and purpose in their careers. 

This is causing big problems for many business businesses in the UK and across the globe, who have fallen to the mercy of ‘The Great Resignation’ which has seen workers voluntarily quit their jobs at a historic rate, and left businesses with a whole host of people challenge.

It has become a real area of concern resulting in the UK Government initiating plans to attract the over 50’s back into the workforce.

I work with many business leaders who have felt the impact of this in many varying ways.

1. Staff shortages have left skills gaps and led to an increasing workload for existing staff.
2. The loss of institutional knowledge and manpower has meant productivity levels are compromised, and the added impact of stress and burn-out on remaining employees shouldering the burden, is only amplifying the problem.
3. Employee morale is being affected, with staff feeling overworked, undervalued, and their levels of job satisfaction depleting. And, with remaining employees seeing their colleagues resign, many are questioning their own career choices.
4. And then there’s the ability to attract new employees to replace those who have left. Recruitment strategies and training have needed rethinking, and, in many cases, they are having to offer higher salaries, more flexibility, a better work-life balance and budget for greater investment in employee development and training, not only to train new staff, but to retain existing staff too.

How can businesses mitigate the impact of The Great Resignation?

With around 75% of UK businesses saying they have felt the effects of the ‘Great Resignation’ and over a ‘third’ stating their biggest challenge since, is staff retention, there are two critical factors I believe, that businesses need to turn their attention to, in order to mitigate further fallout.

 They are…

1.    Understanding your employees’ intrinsic motivations

2.    Effective & Engaging leadership

Let's look at each of these.

Understanding Your Employees’ Intrinsic Motivations

Knowing what motivates your employees provides valuable information for businesses who are trying to retain staff. Furthermore, by understanding what drives each employee, business leaders can tailor their approach to each individual and provide incentives to support key people resulting in them being more likely to be engaged and committed to the business.

The 9 Key Work Motivators

There are nine key work motivators in the workplace and by understanding how to describe, measure, monitor and maximise these motivations in the workplace a business can all but remove the ‘Great Resignation’ and the challenges that go with it.

How?

1. Each of these nine motivators have their own reward strategies attached, and by identifying which motivations are most important to an individual the correct reward strategies can then be implemented, with the upside being happier employees and greater productivity.
2. By identify potential areas of dissatisfaction or disengagement and taking proactive steps to address any issues, employees will quickly re engage with the business.
3. Establishing incentives that work and that motivate employees is a giant step to harnessing the full potential and capabilities of your people, whilst banishing the ‘Great Resignation’.
4. Do this well and you’ll spot “Quiet Quitting’ early and will be able to address it. It also will alleviate ‘The War on Talent’ as more employees will stay, and you may well find yourself attracting new talent.
5. Getting motivation right will foster a culture of employees that want to come to work and drive greater productivity as a result, not to mention less absenteeism and sickness and/or mental health issues.

I spend a lot of time with businesses, focussing on the motivations of employees, by training managers how to operate a 90 day ‘Motivational Action Plan’ designed to get the best out of their people. The programme is designed to harness the full potential and capabilities of their employees, resulting in them ‘wanting’ to, not ‘having’ to come to work.

Does all of this affect the bottom line? I’ll let you decide.

Effective and Engaging Leadership

Effective and engaging leadership skills are essential for retaining talent in a business because effective and engaging leaders:

1.  Create a clear vision and purpose for their business and communicate this effectively to their employees which can help employees feel more connected to the business and its goals.
2. Create a positive work culture that values and supports their employees.
3. Provide opportunities for growth and development for their employees which can help them feel valued and provide a sense of purpose in their careers.
4. Can build strong relationships with their employees, fostering mutual trust, loyalty and respect.
5. Recognise the importance of being transparent, leading by example and giving feedback and recognition.

 In my experience, individuals are promoted into a leadership role with no formal training, resulting in inconsistencies in productivity across the business as these leaders either sink or swim based on their past experiences.

Poor leadership is a very common problem in business which ironically, in most instances is part of the culture that develops, unintentionally. They just don’t know how to be great leaders because they’ve not been shown. However, not addressing it only leads to the ongoing repetition of poor leadership cycles and negative impacts on the business, compounding staff retention and productivity problems.

There’s a saying ‘People don’t quit their jobs, they quit their bosses’ (or leaders in this case).

Although not always true there is a high correlation. The sad thing is a majority of those bosses or leaders didn’t sign up to be there, but rather found themselves there by default.

What a difference it might have made if they had just been given the skill sets to be a great boss/leader.

"People don't quit their jobs, they quit their bosses"

If your business is feeling the impact of ‘The Great Resignation’ or in general, you feel that you would be better equipped by understanding the motivations of your employees and/or how to improve the leadership qualities and skills within your business, get in touch with me for an informal discussion. I’ll happily give you some insight and direction on how to make improvements in these areas.

Contact me at: [email protected] or drop me a DM on LinkedIn.

www.skillsforbusinesstraining.co.uk