They’re calling it “The Big Resignation.” You’ve surely read that ominous title by now, which refers to the spike in the number of workers quitting their jobs throughout 2021. You might even have heard one of its many variations, including the Great Reprioritization, the Great Reshuffle, the Great Re-Invention, the Great Realization, or the Great Awakening.
It doesn’t really matter what you call it, really. The important thing is you understand the underlying phenomenon, a massive social process closely related to talent attrition. But not only that — you also need to grasp how the current workforce landscape affects your business and everything you can do to minimize its effects.
Notice that I’m talking about minimizing effects rather than neutralizing them altogether. There’s a big reason for that: with so many workers quitting their jobs and companies struggling to fill the open positions, you’re bound to suffer the influence of The Big Resignation. That’s why I’m going to share some insights about how you can survive today’s context on your way to becoming a more attractive place to work in.
The Current Situation
Before contemplating how this situation can affect you, it’s essential to understand what’s happening. While the entire business world knows in their guts that it’s more difficult than ever to find and keep the best professionals, there are certain reports and surveys that can help you take a precise look into the phenomenon.
For instance, a Future Forum survey found out that 57% of workers across the globe are considering moving to a new job in 2022. The Boston Consulting Group says that its clients are seeing up to 30% attrition for certain roles. For its part, McKinsey points out that 40% of employees are likely to leave their current job in the next 3 to 6 months, while 85% report that their well-being has declined with the pandemic.
Also, and according to research conducted by Visier, a leading workforce analytics company, found out that the technology industry is among the most affected by attrition, with 4.5% more resignations when compared to the ones in 2020.
The first (and most evident) thing we can read from those numbers is that the pandemic has really impacted the workforce. It’s pretty clear that employees are looking for something else, a search that might be sparked by a lot of reasons, including the desire to work in a new field, burnout stemming from a challenging year, or an unmissable business opportunity.
Whatever the reason, there’s another thing we can deduce from those numbers. If people are more willing to take on another job, then they’ll certainly look for a better one than that they currently have. This can mean a lot of things, from looking for a higher salary and better conditions to wanting a hybrid working model. The motivations for changing a job can be varied, but people almost always do so to improve their situation.
That leads me to companies. Over the last couple of years, the pandemic forced businesses to play defense, reacting to the new emerging challenges rather than taking planned steps. That makes sense, especially considering how unexpected the business landscape has behaved. However, it’s high time to ditch that reactive stance and take a more proactive approach, especially when it comes to workforce-related challenges.
In other words, it’s time to stop patching your workforce holes as if you were in emergency mode. Now is the moment to revamp your company, elevating your processes and reimagining your corporate culture to improve your appeal which, in turn, should help you attract (and retain) top talent.
What does that mean? Well, it mainly depends on who you are and what you’re doing. But there are some general things you can do to minimize talent attrition.
5 Changes You Should Make Right Now
We’ve already covered many techniques, tactics, and insights that can help you reduce talent attrition. My advice is that you review them and complement them with the ones I list here. But before doing so, I highly encourage you to tackle the first one I’m sharing below. Without it, all of the other measures you apply won’t have the same impact.
- Adopt an improvement mindset. You won’t get anywhere if you believe that you have nothing to improve. Even if you aren’t suffering from significant talent attrition, that doesn’t mean you can’t enhance some things in your company. There’s always something you can do better and given that workforce demands are constantly evolving, adopting this mindset will definitely show your workforce how committed you are to their needs and wants.
- Analyze processes to establish critical priorities. You need to take a deep look at how you’re doing things and determine which processes are essential to create and preserve value. Understanding that will allow you to trim processes and tasks that aren’t useful while concentrating on the ones that are important. This has a two-sided benefit. On one hand, you’ll enjoy increased productivity and higher quality output. On the other hand, your employees will feel like their work actually means something, because they’ll be focused on value-generating tasks.
- Map out your roles and responsibilities and identify talent gaps. A great workplace should be one where people are passionate about what they do. While passion is a very personal thing, you can help people feel comfortable with their tasks by putting them where they can shine the most. That’s why you need to understand the roles you need and who can better occupy them. You might end up identifying talent gaps that can be filled with the right people from other teams or by hiring highly-qualified people.
- Embrace flexibility. By forcing remote work on us, the pandemic has shown people that many roles can be performed from virtually anywhere. That’s why so many employees are expecting businesses to offer some sort of flexibility in their working model. You need to define whether you’ll be using an everyone-on-site, all-remote, or hybrid approach to your work (knowing that a lot of people want to work remotely at least part of the time). Providing that will bring you one step closer to full flexibility, which should also include a move towards goals over time spent working.
- Elevate your mission. Finally, it’s important to remember that people today are looking to work for companies that are making a difference in the world. While there are other factors to consider (especially salaries and career opportunities), the reality is that employees want to belong to an organization that provides something valuable. That’s why you need to review your mission statement and make the necessary changes to show that you care about something more than the bottom line. Naturally, you need to do more than just craft a nice statement—you need to act on it to prove that you’re more than just talking.
Acting on these steps and combining them with the other recommendations we’ve made over multiple articles here on The Daily Bundle should put you on your way to hiring and retaining the top talent. And, trust me, we know what we’re talking about—these are the strategies we use at BairesDev that allows us to work with the Top 1% of Tech Talent with minimal impact from the Great Resignation.
