In this time of uncertainty and mass redundancies, you’d expect everyone to hang on to their job like D. Trump to his bronzer. It is not so. I am surprised by the sheer number of people I hear toying with the idea, in the midst of global pandemic and confinement, of changing jobs!
While digital companies have come to terms with employees' short tenures, many leaders seem to be in denial of what’s going on right under their nose. They assume that the employees they have decided to retain will stay on gratefully. How incorrect this assumption!
From conversations with employees and with recruitment professionals over the past month, I have gathered a list of ten reasons why employees are thinking NOW about jumping ship. I hope that raising awareness about this trend can help leaders put in place a relevant employee retention strategy.
Many companies have recently had to let go of people. In doing so, they have carefully selected the precious talent that they must retain in order to survive today and to thrive tomorrow. In digital, we often talk about MVP (minimum viable product), for many companies, the team who stays on is their MVT (minimum viable team)! If this talent also leaves, companies who are already down to a skeletal team, will simply no longer be functional.
So this is not about tenure and ‘HR stuff’, this is about survival!
In order to avoid the laundry list syndrome, I have organised the 10 reasons why your top talent may be considering leaving your company soon under 3 themes:
Redundancies aftermath
Working from home snowball effect
Soul searching.
Redundancies aftermath
1 - Team spirit: There is amongst many companies and teams a stale atmosphere, now that several colleagues have been let go. For those who stay on, the team spirit is broken because cherished colleagues have left. The people who left may not have been ‘key talent’ in the eyes of the leadership team, but they could have been ‘key connectors’ and without them, the team no longer ‘gels’. It could be that a team has lost their manager who they felt they learned a lot from, someone who nurtured their growth and now they are left to fend for themselves. Other instances involve companies letting go of people who predominantly demonstrated soft skills such as communication or collaboration, and without them, the people left are a group, but not a team.
2 - Trust: Employees who stay on, fear that they'll be let go next, when a second wave of mass redundancies is required. Leaders who promised a month ago that there would be ‘no redundancies’ are now promising that they will not be a second wave of redundancies: Could they be trusted? Employees feel they are on the ejectable seat. As a result, it would be insane for them not to put a plan in place to counteract this risk. Staying on for much longer, hoping for the best, seems foolish.
3 - Workload: People have left, but this does not mean that the workload has decreased! Org charts have become skinny but deliverables are still ambitious. Employees who remain have so much work that they drown in it and are concerned for their sanity and the very real risk of burnout. They are left with a job and a half, and the extra half (inherited from people who left) makes no sense. They feel like a devalued jack-of-all-trade.
4 - Stagnation: Employees who remain are concerned that they will not be learning during or even immediately after the pandemic, as their work will be about covering the most basics of tasks. Most of the exciting and innovative projects are currently on hold and will remain so for months. The mid-term future looks really bleak!
Working from home snowball effect
5 - Isolation: As discussed in my previous posts on remote management, there are amongst employees who remain a broken team spirit: The sense of ‘belonging’ is lost. Reminder: Belonging ranks number 3 in Abraham Marslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs, so it is not to be ignored! People can’t imagine the company recovering fast so they start looking for a stronger sense of belonging, elsewhere. They want to feel wanted.
6 - Work-life aspirations: The experience over the past month of working from home is very positive for some people. It makes them feel like they may want to continue working from home after the confinement is over. This, added to a desire to slow down, or to be more focused on their personal lives, is deeply affecting their expectations of work... and if they sense that their current employer is not keen to offer flexibility moving forward, they start considering alternatives.
Soul searching
7 - Disappointment: Many employees, after feeling a sense of relief for not being let go, can’t help but feel disappointment versus peers and leaders. They experienced deceit, they witnessed what they consider to be poor treatment of others, they had to accept what they deem as bad decisions. All this contributes to a feeling of uneasiness and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What sort of company are they working for, if it reacts “so badly” in time of crisis?! Could the grass be greener elsewhere?
8 - Values: While working from home and witnessing the world we know change beyond recognition, people could not fail to experience more introspection about who they are, what they stand for and what their role in society should be. This results in heightened self awareness and a focus on their personal values which they sometimes feel are not aligned with their current role or employer. While ‘values’ were a complex concept a few months ago, with people dying all over the world and priorities drastically changing, aligning values with work now feels like a priority.
9 - Guilt: There is such a thing as ‘Survivor guilt” in times of war and disasters. People who have not been directly affected feel the pressure to ‘do bigger things’! They feel that these ‘bigger things’ won’t be achieved in their current role. They’re looking for a place where they can re-define who they are, and that brings them a sense of contribution. They don’t believe that they’ve been spared, just to continue as before.
10 - Doubt: So much has changed in many industries over the past 6 weeks, with competitors folding and customers voicing their change of heart and forecasted different ways to consume, that many employees don't believe any more in the future of their industry. They don’t feel it will look anything like it did in the past. Some even wonder if the industry they work in will survive at all. Furthermore, they don’t get a sense of strong leadership at the top, capable of making the required bold moves. While employees sense that the only thing that could save their industry is “total reinvention”, their leaders only focus on “bouncing back”. For this reason, they look for other industries, where their skills are in demand, and where they can make a fresh start post-pandemic.
Leaders who have carefully selected the key talent to retain may be in for a shock when these employees leave the company on their own accord. As leaders rely on their remaining team to bounce back post-pandemic, they may discover that a considerable percentage of them are on their way out, due to the redundancies aftermath, the experience of working from home or some serious soul searching.
Leaders: What can you do to pre-empt this? Share your thoughts!
This article was first published on LinkedIn