The forced work-from-home in 2020 and 2021 has led to two immediately-recognizable acronyms: WFH for work-from-home and RTO for return-to-office. From the employee side, WFH represents options. For employers, the combination of WFH + RTO = higher turnover, worse recruiting, and for-certain-resulting lower productivity.
Four-day workweeks feel trendy, almost fad-like, but data shows its popular with employees. On the company side, data suggests work satisfaction and productivity is up, recruiting is easier…and turnover is down. And during these days of extreme workforce shortages, every company is seeking a recruiting edge. Could this be “it”?
The Wall Street Journal recently did a deep dive into the benefits of hiring older workers as right now people 55 and older are the fastest-growing segment of our workforce according to federal data. WSJ went on to profile older workers on why they are choosing to keep working.
Right now, people 55 and older are the fastest-growing segment of our workforce according to federal data. We should leave past assumptions and biases behind us, like everyone quits at 65, and focus on this recruiting opportunity, whereby some of the very best workers are in fact coming back to the workforce and are available to us.
Part of calculating the monetary cost of turnover for your retention efforts includes placing a dollar value on lost productivity, which is more complex, but more important than many of the direct costs we usually think of when we lose employees.
If we can safely presume high pay equals most essential then there are at least 11 jobs in healthcare that are more important to retain than nurses who traditionally have a high rate of turnover. Yet the higher-paid workers almost never receive a Stay Interview or an assessment of their likelihood to stay.
When employees seek support regarding any of their daily employee needs, their supervisor is their go-to source. First-line supervisors drive no less than 50% of turnover and 70% of engagement. Research and data support that if the boss is seen as trustworthy, the number of reasons to leave diminish significantly, including leaving for pay.
If improving employee engagement and retention is top of your priority list, consider changing just one Employee/Manager meeting to a Stay Interview where employees talk about their needs, not their performance.
It’s likely that in the next few months our national workforce data (open jobs and unemployment) will get closer to “normal”, but the data is painfully clear, that we will not have enough workers to fill our open jobs for a long time. So says the Census Bureau which has released a chilling chart.
Learning that the tenure for young workers’ didn’t get even shorter during “The Great Resignation” raised an internal alarm. How could it be that with so many open jobs that those young workers who stray so frequently didn’t stray even more?