The Big Resignation: How to Deal with Its Constant Impact on the Operational Workforce
In light of the surprising news that The price of the resignation for Amazon is $8 trillion, it is worth it for all large companies with a high volume of workers in operational roles to see where there is an opportunity for change.
La Great Renunciation, which began in 2021, still has an impact on operational workers.
What is the loss of staff in the workplace?
According to Gartner, the loss of staff refers to the departure of employees from a company for any reason (voluntarily or unintentionally), including resignation, disengagement, death or retirement. The abandonment rate measures the number of employees who leave the company, divided by the average number of employees over a given period of time.
What is the normal dropout rate?
Even in companies that are developing in environments of economic stability, it is estimated that a company will lose 18% of its workforce per year.
How much does the loss of staff cost?
While the loss of personnel may not be worth $8 trillion, the average cost is estimated to be $1,500 for every operating worker lost, which means a number for your company, even more so when you hire hundreds of operational professionals.
As you mention People Keep, these costs are considered for each employee who leaves the company:
- Recruiting costs
- Onboarding costs
- Loss of productivity
- Loss of interaction and impact on morale
- Customer service and errors
- Training costs
- Loss of institutional knowledge
- Cultural impact
Talent managers know that replacing an employee takes more time and money than finding a way to keep them. In fact, a recent SHRM study shows that the cost of replacing an employee is six to nine months of that employee's salary.
So, What can companies do to reduce the chance of staff loss?
Finish it before it starts
Keeping your employees happy involves more than increasing their salaries or adding benefits. While these are important efforts, they are not the only elements to build loyalty with your company.
So how can you ensure your success and that of your team? Treating the problem before it happens.
- Improve the candidate experience
Believe it or not, it's important to deal with the loss before an individual becomes an employee. In a world where a long hiring time is less than 20 days, and the 40% of candidates reject offers Because another employer offered them the fastest job, speed is truly the most important element in making a positive impact on candidates.
Remember, a candidate's first impression of your company is probably one of the only impressions they'll have before they become your employee.
In a market where candidates for operational roles are limited and there are many vacancies, providing them with a quality experience is essential. Those who accept an employment offer will surely have a predetermined attitude towards your company (and hopefully a positive one), simply because of the recruitment process. So, it's essential that you start off on the right foot and invest in a positive, simple and organized experience to get ahead of the loss in the future.
- Create practical onboarding
La 90-day rule it is a concept that is making the rounds in the field of HR. The theory is that if a new employee stays in their position for 90 days, then they are likely to stay for at least a year.
If this is the case, companies should invest heavily in getting new employees to reach that 90-day mark. However, although around the 60% of companies have onboarding programs, 88% of employees still say their companies don't do a good job onboarding new candidates. This shows that there is a need for a practical and personalized staff onboarding process.
While these numbers are not promising, studies also show that Companies with strong onboarding processes increase new employee retention by 82%, and that employees are 69% more likely to stay with a company for three years if they have extensive experience in the onboarding process.
The cost of onboarding is, on average, greater than $1,500 per operating worker, therefore, the conversation is not merely about employee satisfaction, but about managing costs and monitoring ROI.
- Keep track of new employees
While onboarding should include training for the job and information about benefits, pay and bonuses (if offered), monitoring is about how the new employee feels about the role and the company. Feedback from these interactions can show early indicators of potential turnover, which can be addressed immediately, instead of regretting when they lead to abandonment.
In a perfect world, the recruitment or HR manager could have a 1:1 session to follow up after 2 weeks, 4 weeks, 60 days and 90 days from the employee's first day of work. But for most operational worker recruitment teams, this isn't scalable. However, the conversation about continuous feedback shouldn't end here.
That's why leading talent attraction teams have started developing tools and platforms to make this possible. The capabilities of these technological solutions often include the use of automated texts to follow up, or even surveys for new employees to measure feelings, in order to identify individuals at risk of abandonment.
Delve into the root of the problem
- Ask what your employees value
It's important to know what really motivates your employees. That's why we've found that developing candidate programs builds the foundation for employee satisfaction. As we mentioned before, many employees leave their new jobs within 90 days. This is because employers haven't represented them well, or employees haven't understood their role and responsibilities.
There are three main elements that impact a candidate's desire to get a job:
1) The Recruiting Process
2) Compensation package
3) Differential benefits
(We delve into this in the 2023 Guide: What Are Candidates Looking For Operational Positions?).
All of these elements interfere with the long-term satisfaction of new employees.
However, the best way to understand what your employees want or need from you as an employer is to ask. Using automated and anonymous surveys with candidates and employees, you'll be able to see what attracts candidates to your company and what helps to retain new workers.
- Understanding Why Operational Workers Quit Their Jobs
It's no secret that the Great Resignation has had a drastic impact on companies with operational roles. But it is difficult to determine if the underlying issues that led to the Great Renunciation were known issues that were not addressed at the time, or problems that were aggravated by the pandemic. However, worker turnover could have been dampened if leaders had insights before the exodus.
Looking back, we can see that the three main reasons why employees left their jobs in 2021 were low salaries (63%), lack of opportunities for growth (63%) and a sense of lack of respect (57%). And, in 2022, unfortunately, we saw these statistics change very little, being the reasons for resigning again very low salary (63%), lack of opportunities for growth (63%) and a sense of lack of respect (56%).
If the biggest challenge for companies with operational workers is staff, then these companies must address the issues that are known to all. It doesn't matter how many new employees a company recruits if it can't retain them.
- Conduct an automated exit survey (and do something with the feedback)
While conducting exit interviews for each individual who leaves may be ideal for gathering information, it's not a realistic expectation for industries with an abandonment rate of 144%. Instead of trying to do so or losing that valuable information, innovative recruitment teams have taken advantage of automation to ease the workload without losing information.
With automated recruitment technology, HR teams can conduct an exit survey via email or SMS. Of course, only a percentage of those messages will be answered, but those that are will provide insights into why they left. This is one way to help managers deal with consistent challenges that employees may be facing and that would otherwise go unnoticed.
The caveat around collecting this information is that you should act on the feedback. If it's collected just to be collected, it won't help you reduce staff loss or encourage future employees to stay longer.
Remember, staff loss can be treated
While employers of operational workers can't prevent staff loss, they can deal with it. Making changes that truly impact the long term requires intention and will.
It's no secret that HR and operational talent attraction teams are hard at work, but with the right tools and tactics, there's the potential to make a big difference in the health of their companies.
Reduce the dropout rate with better candidate experiences
As we already know, how an employee feels about their job or about the company in the first 90 days has a big impact on whether they will stay beyond that time, and the experience they have as candidates greatly influences their work.
Therefore, it's essential that talent attraction and recruitment teams invest in creating positive experiences for candidates. Checa Here how your team can achieve this in operating industries.
