5 Strategies to Counter ‘The Great Resignation’
March 16, 2022 In the last article, we discussed reasons for “The Great Resignation” along with a few longer-term strategies organizations can implement to avoid this in the future. In this article, we’ll discuss five effective strategies you can deploy to immediately improve your odds in finding top talent once a position on your team has been unexpectedly vacated.
As much as we would like to prevent resignations from occurring, we can’t control everything, and can’t meet everyone’s expectations. People are going to leave despite your best efforts. You can try to react with increased salaries, but that will affect your overall compensation structure and salary ranges. You can also attempt to adjust the responsibilities of a role, yet still have them depart for a position with a different title. And finally, it’s even more common to have employees request working conditions or locations that you just can’t accommodate. At this point, we have to accept that despite the value an employee has to the business, their interests have evolved in a direction that doesn’t align with your business, and efforts in retaining them will be even more disruptive than allowing them to leave.
1. Positive Off Boarding
When a valued employee chooses to leave, all you can do is control what you can and establish a positive offboard experience for the employee and everyone on the team. The environment you create around an employee’s departure will set the stage for how successful you will be in finding their replacement. How they feel on their last day of employment will set their view and how they describe their entire employment experience with your organization. Therefore, its critical to recognize that regardless of how you or others feel about an employee’s resignation, you need them to have a positive overall impression.
How you handle those final weeks and days directly affects your reputation in the employment marketplace. The transparency of social platforms allows negative experiences to be shared and magnified, potentially discouraging future applicants. This is especially critical when you consider how off boarding an employee is directly tied to five of the most effective ways to replace lost talent on your team.
2. Leverage Referrals
The best source of talent in any organization is referrals from current talent. Asking good employees who they might recommend as a potential employee helps identify candidates more likely to contribute to the organization. Good employees are vested in the success of the company and are also concerned about their reputation in the future of the company so there is little risk in them referring a bad candidate, since that would reflect poorly on them! In addition, when a referral is hired, the employee who offered the referral is more likely to stay because they now have a sense of commitment to the new employee. Additionally, a referred employee is also more likely to stay due to that same level of loyalty or commitment, along with the added experience of team and support from the employee that referred them.
3. Rehire Employees
In a rapidly changing marketplace where companies, services, and product lines, come and go each year, it’s important to remember the best future talent pool should always include former employees who might return. The grass isn’t always greener in a new company, and those who leave your team with the anticipation of opportunity, salary, or working conditions may find those things have not come to fruition. Staying in touch with departed employees might induce those employees to return. The additional value of a rehired/rebounded employee is they tend to stay longer and tend to communicate the value of not leaving to those who might considering something different.
4. Reinvent the Work Setting
It’s no secret the closest thing to a “silver bullet” for talent management in 2022 can be described in one word — flexibility. Employees now crave, and possibly demand, flexibility and autonomy far different than that of a work scenario in the pre-pandemic era. Increasingly, businesses are recognizing that flexibility isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a need-to-have workplace quality. If you don’t know where your organization stands, ask the team. Identify where you can flex with your employees. Advocate for what your employees need. Even the smallest accommodations can provide you with great dividends in retention. Even if you can’t provide the degree of flexibility employees want, your efforts send a strong message of support that won’t go unnoticed by those you are advocating for.
Remember, in a period where many feel that isolation to their homes has allowed them to maintain their performance, it’s easy to forget that employees come together to work together, not to isolate. If someone comes to work to merely repeat what they had been doing from home, then they are more likely to consider moving on. Employment, and your culture, needs to be a forum for successful collaboration. It’s difficult, if not impossible if some team members prefer isolation over cohesion and collaboration.
5. Personalize Work
Personalization improves retention and helps with talent attraction. A concept that has been avoided and labeled as preferential treatment, has now emerged as one of the most effective talent management strategies you can have in your arsenal. There are two ways to approach this concept. The first step is to treat each employee as an individual. Recognize and respect their unique lifestyle and skills by showing a genuine interest in them outside of work and communicate with them at a personal level.
Secondly, recognize their uniqueness and be flexible to their circumstances. Understanding things that enable your employees to exceed your expectations, in a work environment that exceeds their expectations, isn’t preferential treatment — its good management. Especially if it’s established with defined expectations and objectives at the start.
The team that surrounds you today is not only the best solution for the current talent challenge but are also a critical component to making your organization “Great Resignation-Proof” in the future. Your employees hold the answer to why employees leave, what will help them stay, and who those next employees should be. Engage with them in this challenge, ask for their help in building the solution, and you will undoubtedly be very pleased with how they respond and the positive impact this activity will have on your organization.
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