Ready to Lose Good Workers Who Quit to Stay Home With Their Children?

There is a new bug going around and I’m afraid we are all going to catch it. The bug is you will lose several high-performing employees because they will choose to stay home to teach their school-aged children. Given the number of schools opening and closing, going virtual or not, this is inevitable.

Many factors contribute to this, not the least of which is parental guilt. Every parent wants the very best for their children, and COVID-19 is throwing down many obstacles to our kids’ learning and socializing each day in school, which is where we would all agree they are supposed to be during safer times. Parents who travel to work must first find adult caregivers to care for their kids, which doesn’t begin to address ensuring these children are doing their online school lessons. And parents who are working from home must share space and possibly computers which cuts into productivity on both sides.

COVID has greatly inconvenienced everyone on earth, but who saw this issue coming?

One in five working-age adults is unemployed because Covid-19 upended their childcare arrangements, according to new research from the Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve. And of those not working, women are nearly three times more likely than men to remain home for the kids.[i]

This doubles-down on women whose job losses have already been disproportionally impacted by the pandemic. The International Monetary Fund recently reported that “The COVID-19 pandemic threatens to roll back gains in women’s economic opportunities, widening gender gaps that persist despite 30 years of progress.”[ii]

If you’ve not faced this scene yet, you likely will. A high-performing employee, likely female, hands a resignation letter to her boss and the hard decision has been made. The letter is just closure. That employee has consulted deeply with family members, made adjustments to expenses to compensate for lost income…or maybe solicited and found at at-home job…all before you have one bit of awareness, she is thinking of leaving. There are no early leave signs at work because their exiting is not about work. Performance doesn’t wane, work relationships remain solid…and then they vanish.

The answers to many workplace questions is communicate, and this issue requires a lot of it. The first decision point is about policies, as in what are you willing to do to accommodate working parents until schools are fully re-opened? Is your company willing to give temporary leaves with pay or without? Or adjust working parents’ schedules to accommodate their children’s needs? Would these policy changes apply only to parents or to all employees?

Note such policy changes would be temporary, until schools are open in the ways they used to be.

Or if your organization does not want to offer any across-the-board policy changes, who on your employee list is most vulnerable? Have their managers asked about their children’s schooling? Or heard about a particular employee’s concerns? 

As our clients conduct Stay Interviews, we’ve advised them to use some additional probes when asking the 5 key Stay Interview questions during the pandemic.   For example, ask Are their circumstances outside of work that could cause you to leave us?  Managers on all levels must become proactive to identify employees with children who are most at risk of quitting and catching you by surprise 

There is no playbook for solving our kids being unexpectedly marooned at home. Sometimes the best solution to help solve problems is to ask and listen. This turnover issue is coming down the pike, though, and we are wise to consider how to counter it now.

Please email your comments to me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.  You are also welcome to forward this blog to anyone you believe would find it helpful.

[i] https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/19/economy/women-quitting-work-child-care/index.html

[ii] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/covid-19-gender-gap-economic-change-gender-parity-equality-coronavirus/