Why you might be about to lose vital talent

Employ­ee attri­tion can be a dif­fi­cult chal­lenge for busi­ness­es at the best of times, but the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic and the chaos it has wrought on work­places com­pounds issues of staff reten­tion.

Employ­ee engage­ment has become a major issue as work­places become remote: UK pub­lic ser­vice pro­duc­tiv­i­ty fell by a third in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2020, accord­ing to the Office for Nation­al Sta­tis­tics. And world-chang­ing events like pan­demics crys­tallise thoughts about the future. Some employ­ees may be re-eval­u­at­ing what they want as a work-life bal­ance and com­ing to the con­clu­sion they need to leave the com­pa­ny.

“I’ve nev­er seen human resources more promi­nent in the work­place,” says Sir Cary Coop­er, pro­fes­sor of organ­i­sa­tion­al psy­chol­o­gy and health at Man­ches­ter Busi­ness School, and pres­i­dent of the Char­tered Insti­tute of Per­son­nel and Devel­op­ment. In a com­pet­i­tive busi­ness world, where a num­ber of employ­ees are like­ly to look at chang­ing careers, mak­ing sure you attract and retain tal­ent is key.

Avoiding a high turnover rate of staff

Data com­piled by the Health and Safe­ty Exec­u­tive pre-pan­dem­ic found 57 per cent of all long-term absences from the work­place were down to stress, anx­i­ety and depres­sion. That’s like­ly to be com­pound­ed as employ­ees find them­selves away from the col­le­giate atmos­phere of the work­place, left to fend for them­selves against tough dead­lines. “How do you pick peo­ple up remote­ly who aren’t cop­ing?” asks Sir Cary.

It requires build­ing robust rela­tion­ships with col­leagues out­side work-ori­ent­ed goals to reduce the rate of employ­ee attri­tion. This starts at the very begin­ning of the process.

“Every­one needs to look at their induc­tion process­es and think about whether they need to widen them to make peo­ple feel part of the organ­i­sa­tion,” says Pro­fes­sor Heather McGre­gor, head of Edin­burgh Busi­ness School.

She recent­ly did an entire inter­view process for a new posi­tion at the same time as anoth­er new col­league and it was months until they found a way of work­ing togeth­er effi­cient­ly, when they were final­ly able to thrash it out togeth­er in a phys­i­cal room.

“It’s dif­fi­cult to build rela­tion­ships over Zoom,” says McGre­gor. “When you arrive in a com­pa­ny, the induc­tion needs address­ing, and the sec­ond thing is how do peo­ple build rela­tion­ships? What are you going to do to help peo­ple who have nev­er worked in the com­pa­ny, who have only ever been online?”

Improving professional growth

Many things have been put on pause or stalled as the pan­dem­ic bites, but one thing that can’t is the poten­tial for work­place pro­gres­sion. One of the biggest con­trib­u­tors to employ­ee attri­tion is work­ers feel­ing they’ve reached the lim­it of where they can go in a com­pa­ny. Pro­fes­sion­al growth and a sense of pur­pose dri­ve employ­ees the most to work well. Know­ing there’s still the poten­tial for pro­mo­tion is key.

“We don’t have the right kind of line man­ag­er in the UK and many oth­er coun­tries,” says Sir Cary. “We recruit and pro­mote peo­ple to man­age­r­i­al roles on the basis of their tech­ni­cal skills, not their peo­ple skills. Now, more than ever before, we must ensure there’s par­i­ty, when peo­ple go for man­age­r­i­al roles, between peo­ple skills and tech­ni­cal skills.”

Man­agers must be able to reas­sure work­ers there are oppor­tu­ni­ties for pro­gres­sion to keep down the num­ber of employ­ees who leave, and they can do this with sup­port from HR. Pro­vid­ing a roadmap for where some­one comes from and where they can go means they’re less like­ly to head for the door. Job secu­ri­ty and assur­ance are key in times of cri­sis and pro­vid­ing both avoids los­ing vital tal­ent at a time when onboard­ing new employ­ees is more com­pli­cat­ed than ever.

Checking in on work-life balance

It’s also more dif­fi­cult to pick up sig­nals that some­thing is wrong when the work­force is scat­tered to the winds. An unhap­py employ­ee usu­al­ly makes them­selves known when you’re inter­act­ing with them in an office eight hours a day. When they’re com­mu­ni­cat­ing only via email or occa­sion­al video calls, it can be dif­fi­cult to iden­ti­fy issues.

Check­ing in on peo­ple, and pro­vid­ing well­be­ing sup­port through ini­tia­tives that iden­ti­fy where prob­lems are com­ing to a head, and act­ing quick­ly to try and solve them, is the solu­tion to the revolv­ing door of work­ers leav­ing the com­pa­ny for pas­tures new.

“We should be doing reg­u­lar well­be­ing audits to see how peo­ple per­ceive their work envi­ron­ment because of the rapid­ly chang­ing nature of work,” says Sir Cary, who points to the exam­ple of the last sig­nif­i­cant change in our econ­o­my, the 2007–8 finan­cial crash. Then, an HR direc­tor in the finan­cial ser­vices sec­tor came to him and spoke about “regret­table turnover”. “We’ve lost 35 per cent of our staff,” the HR direc­tor said. “How do we retain them?”

The answer is sup­port and pro­vid­ing a sense of pur­pose. “Mil­len­ni­als, unlike pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tions, will leave if they don’t like the cul­ture they’re in,” says Sir Cary.

But it’s not just mil­len­ni­als; con­front­ed with the enor­mi­ty of a world that has total­ly change. Peo­ple are recal­cu­lat­ing what they want from their work­place and employ­ee attri­tion is ris­ing. While the mar­ket for work­ers is like­ly to be sig­nif­i­cant, due to immi­nent eco­nom­ic tur­bu­lence, it’s far eas­i­er and cheap­er to invest time in well­be­ing ini­tia­tives than lose a tal­ent­ed work­er and have to replace them with some­one new.

How to nail a remote interview

No mat­ter how hard you try, employ­ee attri­tion can be unavoid­able, mak­ing online recruit­ment inevitable. The coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic has thrown up an entire­ly new chal­lenge: suc­cess­ful­ly iden­ti­fy­ing and onboard­ing employ­ees remote­ly. So in the world of the Zoom inter­view, what should you look for?

“The crit­i­cal thing about video inter­views is that, as with in-per­son inter­views, 85 per cent of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is non-ver­bal,” says Pro­fes­sor Heather McGre­gor at Edin­burgh Busi­ness School. “You have few­er non-ver­bal clues in a video inter­view.”

So pay­ing close atten­tion to those non-ver­bal clues when they appear is impor­tant: how is the can­di­date dressed? How com­fort­able are they com­mu­ni­cat­ing through a web­cam, giv­en it’s like­ly to be the norm for some time to come?

And what’s their back­ground like? “The first thing you have to think about is whether they’re going to have a green screen back­ground or not, or whether they blur it out,” says McGre­gor. “I think that mat­ters because you com­mu­ni­cate so much through what you don’t say and peo­ple make assump­tions.”

Mak­ing assump­tions is one of the biggest risks for busi­ness­es look­ing to hire peo­ple in the age of Zoom. Assump­tions affect deci­sions and it can be easy to mis­con­strue a mis­placed pot plant or a slight­ly messy back­ground as an indi­ca­tion some­one is unre­li­able when it could sim­ply be that they’ve had to home-school their chil­dren due to a COVID-19 out­break at nurs­ery.

That per­son­al touch is dif­fi­cult to repli­cate online, too. “Your per­son­al expres­sion is not as easy to read when you’re in a lit­tle square, espe­cial­ly if you’re in a pan­el inter­view,” says McGre­gor. “Your bit of the screen is small; unless all the peo­ple on the pan­el have been told to put you on speak­er view, you’re small. When you’re speak­ing, you don’t have the same lev­el of expres­sive­ness dig­i­tal­ly as you do in per­son. I think it’s hard­er to con­vey things.”

So bear all this in mind and be pre­pared to make deci­sions with­out all the infor­ma­tion you would nor­mal­ly have with an in-per­son inter­view.