Are You Afraid of the Great Resignation?

In my article “Listen and you shall hear”, I talked about how listening to your customers is a fundamental skill for marketers. 

Today, I’d like to talk about another equally important extension of this for any manager, leader or business owner, which is listening to your employees.  

There has been a seismic shift in the ways we work in the last two years. Thoughts about why we work have also shifted. Our attitudes towards the world and the people around us have too. 

Many people have attributed these changes to a trend called the “Great Resignation”. But getting better at listening to each other as employers and employees should be high up on the agenda of every business leader all the time. That is how we will get to The Great Retention. 

Lenovo Listens

Quantitative and qualitative check-ins are both equally important. 

“Lenovo Listens” is our internal quantitative vehicle for understanding how employees are doing and feeling about the company and the brand. It goes deeply into engagement questions. How they feel about Lenovo as a place to work; how they feel about their leadership. Do they feel that they're being valued? Do they feel they have work-life balance? 

Employees need to feel heard, and seen. 

We compile insights reports each year on this anonymous data that are shared internally with the leadership and employees. Our recent Lenovo Listens survey revealed that an overwhelming majority of employees agreed that Lenovo provides the flexibility they need to be effective and productive, and most feel that Lenovo creates an environment that supports a healthy lifestyle. We also saw all of our Diversity and Inclusion sentiment increase positively year-over-year – above the global norm. Which is great to see. 

But there’s always work to do. 

Lenovo Acts

Another part of listening is acting upon what is heard. We are constantly seeking to improve the experience of working at Lenovo and these reports provide us with key insights into where we can do better.

One example of how we do this was before this year’s internal kickoff season, we actively solicited employee feedback around the topics they wanted to hear about, then feeding that back to the executive committee - topics like the company’s strategic direction, employee work-life balance, and what our hybrid work strategy looks like moving forward.  That informed the research, discussion and final delivery of internal kickoff speeches that our senior leadership teams delivered company-wide. 

When we saw the usage of digital communication channels spike during lockdown, we started to think of new ways of communicating internally.  Something that was raised repeatedly by our employees, particularly among Gen Z, was the need for virtual group activities to replace some of the past in-person engagements.  

Our We Are Lenovo Culture Mascot competition was a fun way to answer both of these needs. We ran a company-wide competition inviting everyone to submit their designs and share their stories with short videos about how they championed the We Are Lenovo culture day to day. 

Everyone then voted for their favorite submissions. At the start of this year, we unveiled four super cute mascots called Servo, Inno, Ento and Teamo - each embodying one of our four cultural pillars of Service, Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Teamwork. These values, and our new mascots, express how we accomplish our mission: We do what we say, we own what we do, and we wow our customers. 

Since then, they’ve each given birth to 4 adorable emojis which we use in our group chats with each other. This adds color to the ways we are communicating digitally, and injects a bit of fun into our work conversations! 

The Glue That Keeps Us Together 

Behind “The Great Resignation” is what I like to think of as “The Great Evaluation”.

After the collective disruption of the past couple of years, people are re-evaluating what matters most to them in their personal and work lives. 

If your employees don’t feel that their day-to-day experience at work is worth their time, they are going to vote with their feet. You can reduce the chances of this happening by actively creating purpose and points of stickiness that make it worthwhile for them to stay. The initiatives above are all examples of this - because by the time you're holding an exit interview, it's too late to improve that person's experience at work. 

That said, in the spirit of continual improvement, exit interviews are a practice I encourage for anytime a member of the team chooses to leave. Every kind of feedback is a learning opportunity. 

Once people know they are leaving, there is no lip service owed. Often their honest, transparent and impartial feedback has allowed me to stay close to real employee sentiment, giving me a view on where to make improvements too. 

The Great Resignation may strike fear into some business owners and HR departments, but change usually leads to growth, and encouraging talent mobility is part of that. New people who bring a fresh perspective on things can be as valuable as their more experienced colleagues. 

If the Great Evaluation is causing people to seek new ways to live out their values and get more out of their lives and jobs, we need to keep our ears open to actively listen to our employees, and also re-evaluate how the organization can evolve to retain our best people.

The end result of everything I’ve talked about, after a period of mobility, uncertainty, feedback, growth, and learning on everybody’s part - will be a cohort of better, more rounded, and fulfilled teams that will help propel the whole organization forward.