Winning the War for Talent

Winning The War for Talent in 2022

The war for talent is intensifying fast, meaning that organisations urgently need effective ways to prevent the looming exodus of competent and high performing employees in the current volatile and cut-throat recruitment marketplace.

Why are people leaving?

When faced with a fear induced crisis, your employees will actively seek new employment because they are suffering some or all these symptoms which they want to escape from:

·??????Sheer volume of work

·??????Feeling under appreciated?

·??????Believing the “grass is greener”

·??????High levels of stress, anxiety or overwhelm

This build-up of emotional stress is causing them to reach breaking point and start looking for new jobs outside of your organisation.

The great resignation trend is a growing nightmare for employers that is getting worse.

Major events in our lives often trigger a wake-up call that leads to making momentous life changes. The seismic pressures brought about by Covid-19 on mental health has become a priority because workplace stress, anxiety and burn out is at an all-time high.?

Quick fixes don’t work

Many organisations are trying to ‘fix’ the mass exodus of talent by addressing external conditions by changing processes and upgrading renumeration packages. Some are even “ticking the well-being box” by gifting everyone a free meditation and well-being app, but experience shows this does not cut it in terms of creating a genuine change in how people feel about themselves or you as their employer.?

This is all well and good except they are over-looking the fundamental principle of human behaviour.

“When you are stressed, anxious, and overwhelmed, your cognitive function is reduced, and your thinking becomes clouded.”

This negatively conditions you to link how you feel with your current environment. This conditioned response hot-wires your neural circuitry so that you blame the job and/or the organisation for how you feel.?

You forget why you joined the organisation in the first place.?

This can be likened to dating…

Can you remember a time when you were really attracted to someone? Your body responded by releasing high levels of dopamine, serotonin and a related hormone, norepinephrine that made you feel giddy, energetic, and euphoric. From this ‘feel-good’ state you saw the object of your desire through rose tinted glasses, because being with them made you feel happy and alive.??As the initial euphoria of attraction wore off and your home levels returned to normal, you then noticed all the things that was wrong about that person. They may have started to irritate you causing you to wonder what you ever saw in them in the first instance. You may have believed that they had changed and blamed them for your own feeling of disillusionment.

So, what happened? The shift in hormones altered your mood that changed your perception.?

When you feel good you see life through a wonderful lens of positivity. When you feel stressed, anxious, overwhelmed, or angry you see life through a damaging lens of negativity where you notice what’s wrong.?

What does this mean for employees who are disillusioned with their current employer?

Unless individuals find a way to manage their own mental well-being and consequently their emotional state, they will re-create the same sense of disillusionment with every company they work for. Their experience of organisations become a repetitive Groundhog Day nightmare that casts the individual as a victim and the organisation as a villain.??

When you are thriving emotionally, you operate with a growth mindset and increase your capacity to learn, improve your ability to perform and develop creative ways to resolve problems.?

When you are stressed or burnt out, you operate with a survival mindset. This hampers your ability to learn, increases resistance to change and distorts feedback into criticism and judgement.

Choosing an effective well-being solution is vital

In times of chaos and uncertainty, organisations need to think outside of the box and look at well-being solutions that work and work quickly. Because the best decisions are made when individuals feel grounded and emotionally balanced. Decisions made from a place of fear will perpetuate the ‘same old’ patterns and result in negative outcomes for the individual and the organisation.?

The following factors are crucial to delivering high impact well-being solutions that change how people feel at speed:

1.?????Recognise every individual is unique. What works well for one may not work as well for others. If you’ve provided a well-being app to every member of staff, how many of them are engaging with the techniques??

2.?????There needs to be a variety of well-being solutions offered rather than mandated.

3.?????In the same way that many organisations provide development based on identified gaps in competence, curating content based on an individual’s mood, day-to-day will improve engagement and increase the potential for positive change.

4.?????One-off solutions don’t work long-term. It takes an average of 66 days to create a new automated habit. Focus on developing longer programmes delivered in bite-sized chunks that consider everyone’s cognitive function, because anxiety, stress and overwhelm reduces your ability to absorb and process information.??

5.?????Look at well-being techniques that make a difference quickly. Although meditation and mindfulness can work for some, it can be difficult for those who are trying to learn these techniques for the first time. Because when stressed cortisol and adrenaline stimulate the brain and body making it almost impossible to calm your mind and slow down negative thinking.

6.?????Recognise that when you feel burnt out, your amygdala, the gland responsible for regulating emotions has been hijacked. This creates a physiological and emotional cycle of fear. Talking about well-being isn’t going to help your well-being. Organisations need to find different solutions that can change the body’s chemistry at speed.?

There is a well-known Chinese proverb, ‘You can give a man a fish and feed him for a day. If you teach him how to fish, you can feed him for a lifetime.’ Empowering employees to accept responsibility for the ongoing management of their well-being and showing them how to do this will build a workplace culture where everyone can thrive.

To find out more about how the work of The Healing Hub can help you to win the war for talent please contact?[email protected]?or?[email protected]