Toxic Culture Drove the Great Resignation
The Gist
Using employee data, they lay out some interesting results about what was behind the mass employee exodus- Top 5 Predictors of Employee Turnover:
Toxic corporate culture - by a landslide
Job insecurity and reorganization
High levels of innovation
Failure to recognize employee performance
Poor response to COVID-19
Data is great, but useless if you don’t know what to do with it. Here are the articles 4 short-term steps that their data shows companies can implement to improve retention.
Short-Term Actions to Boost Retention
Offer lateral career opportunities
Allow remote work arrangements
Increase company-sponsored social events
Offer predictable schedules
Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.
Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
Our Take
While on the surface these steps seem good, their success or failure is based on more nuanced factors than were presented. Viewing this list as simply a menu of options that a company can use to see results, is a mistake. One that a lot of organizations make.
Company Social Events Can be Risky
For example, if you apply a bit of psychological understanding, you’ll realize that a company with a toxic culture will likely cause more issues and breed further resentment if they increase their corporate social events. People who are struggling and feel that they are in survival mode at work generally bristle at this approach, as they tend to just want to get their jobs done and go home. Worse, companies risk looking like they are out of touch with the real problems, and their desire to improve the situation can end up backfiring, causing further distrust among their workforce.
Caution With Lateral Career Opportunities
Now take the option for lateral job moves. Kati’s own doctoral research showed signs of similar benefits within the nursing sector. However, there are specific issues that an employer already dealing with retention problems should be aware of before they use this as a short-term stop-gap. First, logistics. Unless your company is already well set up for inter-organizational movement, there are going to be bumps in the road. Without taking the time to plan and work through all those details, this will not be a positive experience for your employee and may make the company look even more dysfunctional. Second, work-load distribution. This goes hand-in-hand with the first concern, but is often not viewed with the importance it actually deserves. If your business is actively losing employees then your remaining workforce is already feeling the strain. To remove individuals from their teams will only compound this problem while a replacement is found. Simply put, you run the risk of saving the few, at the expense of the many.
The Brain-Science
When we reviewed the articles top 5 reasons for attrition over the last few years, one commonality jumped out - all 5 of these cultural topics had the same type of effect on the brain - psychological discomfort. Why? Because they all caused instability within the organization's work environment. Our brain’s can be very complicated, but our responses to our environment are fairly predictable. Instability breeds a lack of psychological safety. So when a company is looking to stop attrition, stabilizing their organizational environment should be their first goal, and these steps, for the most part, only tangentially address that.
The Takeaway
There is a lot of data out there about the “Great Resignation”, with experts sharing knowledgeable advice based on it. It’s entirely reasonable for you to want to take that general advice and try to apply it to your specific problem -we all want to get past the craziness of the last few years - but doing that can cost.
We know that achieving both quick and lasting improvements within your organization's workforce is possible, we’ve seen it. We also get that it takes more than simply knowing what works. It's about tailoring what works to your world. We’re good at that, and at the risk of sounding overly cocky, really good at it. Get in touch, we can help.
