Gimme Shelter
There have been a number of social media posts recently which reference a McKinsey report from September 2021 (“‘Great Attrition’ or ‘Great Attraction’? The choice is yours”). Writing this blog gave us a chance to expand on this a little, as well as (apologies) allowing another blog where we can reference a Rolling Stones title.
Much of the focus has been on the challenges facing employers in understanding why their staff were leaving – which we will address later – but the report also covered a number of other areas, and posed some suggested questions for employers to challenge themselves with. As the report suggests:
“Our research suggests that executives aren’t listening to their people nearly enough. Don’t be one of these executives.”
For those unfamiliar with the report, it highlighted that 40% of employees reported themselves as ‘likely’ to quite their jobs in the upcoming 3-6 months, and that 53% of employers were reporting greater voluntary turnover than in prior years. 64% of employers expect voluntary turnover to increase, or stay at these levels.
36% of respondents had quit their jobs without another role lined up, and of those who said they were ‘somewhat likely’ to quit in the next 3-6 months, a staggering “64% said they would leave without a job in hand”. With the global economic climate having taken a sharp turn since the completion of the survey, it may be that reality would have softened those numbers somewhat, but for employers, this is not necessarily good news. If people who were thinking of leaving are feeling more reluctant to take a leap without a role, it’s likely there are more dissatisfied workers remaining in jobs they would like to leave. We’ve seen the rise of ‘quiet quitters’, and it’s likely that some of these come from this cohort of reluctant potential leavers.
The report highlighted the gap in understanding about why employees were leaving.
“For example, when employers were asked why their people had quit, they cited compensation, work–life balance, and poor physical and emotional health. These issues did matter to employees—just not as much as employers thought they did. By contrast, the top three factors employees cited as reasons for quitting were that they didn’t feel valued by their organizations (54 percent) or their managers (52 percent) or because they didn’t feel a sense of belonging at work (51 percent).”
Now, the research says these aren’t really independent factors – the employer fear of ‘poor emotional health’ is, most likely, a result of the employee reports of not feeling valued, having a poor manager, and no sense of belonging. But the differences are stark:
What we found genuinely fascinating here are in those areas where the differences were really stark (the upper left corner). The role of the manager was hugely undervalued, as was the role of the team. Logically, how can employers undervalue the most important and regular human connections that most employees have? How can there be such a significant, and seemingly obvious, blind spot?
I know it’s easy to look at this and generalise, and also ignore it – “Ah, that may be true in general, but its not true for us..” so the report concludes with some questions, which are worthy of exploring. Do we have the right people in the right places (especially managers)? Are our benefits aligned with employee priorities? How are we building a sense of community?
Two jumped out for us:
Is our work environment transactional?
To quote McKinsey:
“If your only response to attrition is to raise compensation, you’re unwittingly telling your people that your relationship with them is transactional and that their only reason to stay with you is a paycheck. Your very best people will always have a better cash offer somewhere else. You want to solve the problems of the whole person (not just their bank accounts) as well as the whole organization.”
And finally, a question that employers simply have to ask, and face head-on:
““Do we shelter toxic leaders?”.”
If your leaders don’t make people feel valued, motivated and inspired, they’re poor leaders and absolutely contribute to churn. At the minimum they should behave in a manner consistent with the behaviours your employees expect.
The question may not be “do we shelter toxic leaders?”, but actually “do we even know where our toxic leaders are?”, and may even be “how committed are we really to removing our toxic leaders?".
If you’re not listening to your people, how will you ever know?
