Young Workers, “Grit”, and New-Hire Turnover

During the holidays I re-read Grit, the Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth’s great book on what makes people continuously push to learn and achieve more.  Dr. Duckworth’s research is convincing in that “as much as talent counts, effort counts twice”.[i]

As just one example, Dr. Duckworth discloses how she successfully predicted which West Point cadets would graduate and which would drop out, declaring that there is no relationship between talent and grit. We could call that a turnover study.

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Further Reading: The High Cost of Lowering Standards for Retention in the Military, and More

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Measuring Levels of Grit When Hiring Employees

Today is prime time for learning how to measure our applicants’ levels of grit…defined as passion and perseverance…because we are hiring so many of them. And a quick literature survey defines our obstacles, telling us the unflattering characterizations of young workers throughout the news:

• Employees want remote work but they are less productive when they get it, especially after 4 PM.
• Young workers are rejecting promotions because they don’t want the additional responsibility.
• “Quiet quitting” equals doing the bare minimum, nothing more.
• “Career cushioning” means always targeting a back-up job.
• “Coffee-badging” refers to checking in at the office for morning coffee and then going home to work remotely.

As this is happening, managers say today’s workers lack time management, professionalism, and critical thinking skills[ii]. Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah dished out some tough holiday love last month when he emailed all employees to say this:

 “Working long hours, being responsive, blending work and life, is not anything to shy away from. There is not a lot of history of laziness being rewarded with success. Hard work is an essential ingredient in any recipe for success. I embrace this, and the most successful people I know do as well. Everyone deserves to have a great personal life – everyone manages that in their own way – ambitious people find ways to blend and balance the two[iii].”

Given that C-Suite Analytics, our company here, consistently cuts our client companies’ turnover by 20% and more, here’s a tip that you might consider:

By cutting new-hire turnover you will ultimately reduce all turnover…because implementing processes to connect new hires to their managers causes those employees to stay way beyond the measurable new-hire retention goal periods that we determine for each client company.

Granted this is easy to say but takes hard work to do so. Let’s say it takes passion and perseverance…and the right tops-down management processes that we invented years ago.

Do Young Workers Have Less Grit?

If I didn’t study any data on this topic, my bias would be “no”, that every aging generation has a dominant “get off my lawn” opinion that young people are less persevering…and that many older workers think young workers are “less everything” than they were when they were young.

But Dr. Duckworth’s research tells us that young workers do indeed have less grit. She reports that the grittiest adults she studied were in their late sixties or older, and the least gritty were in their twenties, with grit increasing as we get older. She goes on to explain:

“It’s possible that adults in their seventh decade of life are grittier because they grew up in a very different cultural era, perhaps one whose values and norms emphasized sustained passion and perseverance more than has been the case recently. In other words, it could be that the Greatest Generation is grittier than the millennials because cultural forces are different today than yesterday.”

Hmm. “Cultural forces” are the culprit.

Dr. Duckworth’s study was conducted with a one-time sample of American adults rather than a longitudinal study that included many generations over many years…and it was conducted prior to her book’s 2016 publication date. So our challenge is to speculate about which “cultural forces” could have influenced grit levels ten years ago or so.

Might the Employee Grit Problem Be in the Mirror?

Some researchers have proposed that younger-generation workers are so prone to quit because they watched their parents suffer through the mass layoffs beginning in the 1980s. The heart of the dinner-table conversation was:

“I gave 30 years to that company and look what they did to me…so promise me that you’ll never be like me.”

Likewise, the “helicopter parents” of the 2000s have now been told that excessive parenting may negatively affect children’s emotional well-being and behavior.[iv] Then Bloomberg reports parents are risking their retirement savings to support their adult children[v] as one in three Americans ages 18 to 34 are still living at home.[vi]

Speaking as one parent to another, is it possible that we have squeezed the grit out of our children? That at least some of them are entering the workforce such that they are unwilling to dedicate themselves to work in the ways generations did before them?

As they say, “just sayin”.

COVID-19 is likely another one of those “cultural forces”, even though Duckworth’s initial study as reported above was done prior to the pandemic.  Whether age 5, 15, 25, or 40, life and its associated development was shaken by staying home versus in school or the office, by having to re-build our social structures, and by inevitably developing long-term wonders about future pandemics and their impact on our lives and our happiness.

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Further Reading: Which Generation Has Fastest-Growing Workforce?

Further Reading: Older Workforce Part II: Confession of Someone Who Could Retire

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Hiring Young Workers Who Stay

First idea for hiring young workers who stay: Hire more older workers instead of younger ones.

The greater idea, though, is to study Dr. Duckworth’s self-administered questionnaire on how she measures grit. She asks subjects to respond to just ten items, rating themselves on a 5-point scale. Some of the key words among those ten items are “finish”, “setbacks”, “diligent”, and “overcome”.

Several years ago I authored a book named Raise Your Team’s Employee Engagement Score.[vii] Included there is a section on identifying engagement competencies accompanied by the best pre-hire interview question to measure each of these competencies. Assuming grit and engagement are workplace cousins, these questions provide a good start to help structure the best interview questions to measure levels of grit in your applicants:

• To measure gives top effort: “I’d like you to think about each of your past three jobs, telling me what you did in each job that made your most proud. Take your time to review each job in order to consider what you did that made your say, ‘This really made me feel good’.”

• To measure achieves results: “Again please take me through your last three jobs, telling me about your top achievement in each one. These achievements should indicate that you performed above the required standards, that you exceeded the expectations of your managers. Best would if you tell me about measurable achievements with numbers, but non-measurable ones are OK, too.”

• To measure resiliency: Let’s talk now about disappointments because we all have them. Again for your last three jobs, tell me about a time for each when you hit a wall, when something didn’t go the way you wanted. Think about not just A disappointment but THE disappointment Iin each job. Maybe a project got stopped, you didn’t get a promotion your deserved, or some other thing bothered you a lot. What was it and how did you react to it, both initially and then at the end?”

Of course, probing more deeply after initial responses will bring out even better information. And some young workers might not have three full-time jobs that they can reference, but they likely do have one or two that they can combine with part-time jobs or school leadership activities.

Key takeaways to consider here are:

1. Grit meaning passion and perseverance is almost always more important than talent or skills because grit-full people will easily learn the latter.
2. Cutting new-hire turnover cuts all turnover over time.
3. For a full look at how we help clients cut their turnover.

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Looking for new ideas and ways to improve your new hire retention but not sure where to start or how to convince your executives? Write me: DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or connect with me to have a one-on-one conversation on ways you can get started today on your journey to cut turnover.

[i] Published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2016.

[ii] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careers/most-companies-have-turned-to-skills-based-hiring-but-there-s-a-big-problem-workers-are-missing-3-key-skills-they-re-looking-for/ar-AA1i2DOF?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=11a98f25541d4e49b93a6a7284310669&ei=3

[iii] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/wayfair-ceo-niraj-shah-tells-employees-to-work-longer-hours-in-year-end-email/ar-AA1lUzxr?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=bf628593a02f4fcab220b978a3cd5c7f&ei=9

[iv] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2018/06/helicopter-parenting

[v] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-21/parents-drain-savings-retirement-funds-to-support-adult-children?utm_campaign=news&utm_medium=bd&utm_source=applenews

[vi] https://www.healthline.com/health/how-to-manage-when-your-adult-children-are-living-at-home#:~:text=If%20your%20adult%20children%20are,the%20family%20home%20for%20longer.

[vii] Published by AMACOM, 2018