Consider that top performers out-perform average performers by 4 to 1. But during these dog-chase-tail times, retaining even your average workers versus having to dip into the highly competitive recruiting pool makes more sense than continuously playing in the doom loop of recruit/train/do exit interviews and then start over.
The common belief is that the employees quitting during “The Great Resignation” are young and don’t make much money, so replacing their meager incomes is easily done. Two reports throw a heavy wrench into the assumption that the majority of quits are entry-level workers.
We believe a good retention strategy moves you past lamenting about Quiet Quitters and keeps the focus on the opportunity to retain your best workers.
The highly-respected Gallagher 2023 Workforce Trends Report survey of 4,000+ organizations says that employee retention remains priority #1. Not only did 66% of HR executives say so, but more than half of operations executives did as well. So businesses who must get product out the door now see turnover as their main obstacle, just as nurse turnover drives patient-care shortcomings and ever-increasing agency costs.
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?
Gallup’s ongoing reporting shows that engagement has stayed the same for years, long before the pandemic, through “The Great Resignation”, and shows no signs of improving in the future. But there is a way you can move engagement from stagnation to success starting right now and I have proof it works.
A Paychex study tells us 80% of those who changed jobs during “The Great Resignation” have regrets and wish they hadn’t walked out on their original jobs. Let’s extrapolate that over the more than 97 million quitters from 2021-2022. That’s 77.6 million people who regret quitting their job. Let that sink in.
What is the best two-word description for recruiting today? Doom Loop “a painful cycle of decline”. The recruiting doom loop can be overcome with proven smart retention practices.
Companies that believe retention is based on pay, benefits, or any other traditional reason are dogs chasing their tails. They will never out-pay their competition for talent…but they will irritate and lose top performers by constantly raising starting pay without addressing pay compression for others.