Should I stay or should I go now?
Is it a catchy song with a cool riff – or the question many of your team members are asking themselves?
In my opinion it’s both! 😊
Despite the current economic uncertainty, The Australian Human Resource Institute’s monthly employee turnover data indicates the Great Resignation may be waning but is not yet over.
For those leaders hoping economic uncertainty might be the key to bringing people back to the office in droves, the 3rd wave of Covid has likely diminished that optimism.
As hybrid work is here to stay, it's high time we figure out how to create sustainable, high performance organisations and personal and professional lives - whilst living with Covid.
Our Focus to date
We’ve been rightly focused on supporting connection and wellbeing, but it's clear burnout is still at all time highs* and mental health is suffering*.
What alternatives should we be considering to achieve sustainable high performance for people and organisations in the endemic era?
Connection: fun events are now common to entice people back into the office. However, the main driver of employee turnover and a desire to stay away from the office, is toxic cultures which don’t value people or make them feel like they belong. The all too frequent need to ‘cover’ and display 'forced positivity', is also more than many have the energy to manage in the current environment.
Wellbeing: whilst webinars and mental health days abound – they aren’t reducing the all-time high rates of burnout and mental ill health*
Job and Work Design: I can’t recall the last time I heard someone mention this – but with a fundamentally new model of working now the norm, it’s not just the commute which needs a rethink – it’s the design of work itself.
What Works in Job Design
When it comes to designing work and jobs, every industry has its own priorities and challenges. So what matters most?
For the answers to this critical question, we turn to an industry which could be considered the proverbial "Canary in the Coalmine". McKinsey’s recent research offers some salient insights.
Insights from the “Canary in the Coalmine”
Outliers offer early warning signals which provide insight into experiences for wider industry and employees. McKinsey's findings in the nursing industry identify "push factors" for leaving a job, and "pull factors" for staying.
Items numbered 1-5 (below) are the top reasons nurses say they would stay in a job.
The horizontal bars show the reasons nurses are most likely to leave a job. The red boxes offer important clues on where to focus future retention efforts.
A side note about compensation. I’m certainly not wishing to diminish the importance of compensation in this or any industry, particularly those most impacted by covid. With a Trillion dollars worth of debt, however, the Australian Government has made it clear it’s not currently in a position to fundamentally reconfigure these long standing norms. With many companies reportedly paying 10-20% increases to replace disenfranchised team members, it's vital we find alternative answers to solve the "stay go conundrum”.
The levers readily available to retain people are:
(i) a safe environment;
(ii) a job which enables me to achieve work-life balance (through flexibility and reasonable workloads) and
(iii) organisations and managers who value and care about me.
A Universal Set of Priorities
These 3 priorities are not unique to nursing. People don’t expect a perfect employee experience, but they do expect one which enables them to do more than survive.
People are wired to thrive.
And thriving people perform!*
When McKinsey asked nurses what would make the biggest difference to their decision to stay, they were told flexibility. Mental health resources and better relationships ranked lowest.
In other words, no amount of wellbeing resources could compensate for a lack of flexibility and unsustainable workloads.
Relationships with peers were not the issue, it was relationships with their organisation and management which need attention.
To say it in a slightly different way, people want to experience:
a reasonable degree of work-life balance,
which enables them to perform meaningful work and thrive,
whilst being valued by their organisation and cared about by their managers and colleagues.
Balance and Meaningful Work, Being Valued and Cared about at work, are not unreasonable expectations.
What's clear, is the abundance of well intentioned wellbeing and mental health resources and the ability to take a few days off from time to time or attend fun activities in the office, do not compensate for unsustainable workloads and the requirement to go in to work on a fixed schedule.
Which may explain why burnout and turnover continues unabated, and not just in the nursing industry.
“If companies make a concerted effort to better understand why employees are leaving and take meaningful action to retain them, the Great Attrition could become the Great Attraction.” (McKinsey)
It’s time to rethink and redesign jobs, fit for humans
As a diverse group of humans offer organisations the best outcomes, redesigning jobs and work for all humans, is the logical goal.
Inflexible and extended schedules have long been a source of great stress for anyone who has work or life commitments outside of ‘normal’ working hours, or whose commute is more than 30 minutes each way / day. And that’s by far the majority of workers!
This Work isn't Soft, nor is it Fluffy.
The financial benefits organisations can reap by designing work fit for humans, are substantial:
1. Increased productivity due to increased performance*
2. Increased profitability due reduced employee turnover and lower ‘production’ costs*
3. Happier and healthier people, for whom compensation will be a driver, not the driver retaining them.
By redesigning the work and the workplace to enable as many humans as possible to perform and thrive, organisations (and society) will benefit.
What is the optimal redesign recipe in your organisation?
The goal is to achieve a great "Employee Employer Experience", which consists of the non-negotiables to enable work to be delivered and supported by a clear feeling belonging and joy in workplace.
For a sustainable The goal is 3-fold: to meet the needs of the organisation; the common needs of the team, and to the extent possible, the needs of individuals.
This ‘juggle’ can be achieved with flexibility and by co-creating ‘agreements’ around the non-negotiables, which can be tweaked or updated as required. In some industries, this will require modernising workplace agreements and consultation with unions, in others, leaders have the licence to co-create these arrangements with their teams.
Agreeing some guidelines and guardrails, whilst being flexible and fair is a wise approach. There will naturally be give and take required by all parties. Some organisations will need to modernise their technology ie. payroll and HR systems, others their leadership and cultures, but if we’re to turn the tide on ‘quiet quitting’ or the ‘great resignation’, this work is vital.
Co-creating the future of work is not a ‘nice to have’, it’s important and urgent to achieve sustainable high performance for organisations, teams and individuals.
The value of designing work and relationships so teams experience belonging and joy is well established. However, few leaders have the skills to juggle both heads and hearts, or put another way, results and culture.
Belonging and joy are the product of being connected, respected, appreciated and valued. Results multiply when they are present.
How will you co-create a great employer-employee experience for your organisation and team?
Take the High Performance Hybrid Teams Quiz to guide you.
At I LEAD Consulting we’re on a mission to simplify Diversity and Inclusion for Leaders and Teams.
PRACTICE INCLUSION | EMBRACE DIVERSITY | ACTIVATE ALLIES
*McKinsey, MIT, Gartner, McQuaid