When the coronavirus pandemic started, nobody knew what to expect. In particular, nobody predicted the coming “Great Resignation,” also called the “Big Quit.” The numbers show that people are quitting more often than at any time in recent history.
Of course, this is not a random event. There are several observable causes of this phenomenon. The better we understand those causes, the better we can adapt to them to minimize the damage of the Great Resignation.
In particular, there are several strategies you can employ to help improve your employee retention. While your competitors struggle to hold on to their valuable IT experts, you can keep your head above water by adjusting your staff management practices.
So what exactly is going on with the Great Resignation, and what can you do about it? Read it on to learn all about the most potent strategies you can apply to boost employee retention through the Great Resignation.
What Is the Great Resignation?
Some people also refer to this phenomenon as the big quit. In either case, it relates to the fact that more and more employees, including tech experts, are quitting their jobs than ever before. In particular, this seems to be the result of changing dynamics caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
This is one of the reasons that staffing specialists are coming to the forefront of many managers’ minds. Managers rely on the expertise of staffing services to make sure they can keep their company running.
How Bad Is the Great Resignation?
Overall, about 20% more people are quitting than back in December of 2020. That may not sound debilitating all by itself, but you have to account for the fact that it affects some industries differently than others. If most of those extra resignations were coming from a single sector, it would be very hard on that industry.
Alternatively, you might consider the Great Resignation’s effect on individual businesses. Even if an industry, in general, is managing the Great Resignation fairly well, a particular company within the industry might lose many valued IT employees within a short period. Fortune 500 companies sometimes operate on a knife’s edge and cannot remotely afford to lose a slew of valuable technical employees at the same time.
You can respond to this by focusing more on hiring new people. However, you will still need to retain those people later on.
What Can You Do About the Great Resignation?
The Great Resignation is complicated, but the business world has overcome more significant problems in the past.
Not all of the advice that worked for past problems will work for the Great Resignation. However, you can apply some basic principles that will help you manage what is truly only the most recent change to redefine the business landscape.
Employees are precious assets. A business cannot function without them. There might have been other priorities in the past, but right now, the focus is employee retention.
1. Set up Employee Incentives for Loyalty
At the end of the day, people often respond to incentives. However, the landscape of incentives is changing. That is why so many people are quitting.
These days, there is a ton of demand for skilled employees. That means employees know that they will be able to find other jobs. As a result, they will not feel as much concern about the prospect of losing their current position as they might have in the past.
This principle goes double for skilled IT professionals. There is incredible demand for people in the IT industry, and the trend lines show that there will only be more demand for them in the future.
To hold onto your tech talent, you will have to ensure you offer the best deal in town. You cannot rely on their reluctance to find a new job.
The most obvious solutions are not always the right ones. But they are still worth considering. The most obvious way to encourage your tech talent to stick around is to offer them better pay or benefits.
2. Create a Workplace With Room for Advancement
IT professionals have so many employment options these days, leading to a second vital dynamic to track. IT experts are valuing opportunity for advancement more than ever before. In fact, some studies have found that this is an essential contributor to IT professionals’ choices about which company to work for.
On top of that, almost half of skilled IT professionals who quit say that they do so in part because they do not see opportunities for advancement where they are working.
People lose hope when they look into the future and believe that they will just keep doing the same thing forever. Even more than providing higher pay or more benefits, you need to give your IT experts the sense that there is something more waiting for them if they continue to provide their valuable services at your company.
One of the most important things you can do to provide hope for your tech talent is to commit to advancing from within the company. Every time you hire someone from outside the company, you send the message that people who perform well within your company will not necessarily enjoy advancement due to that performance.
Every situation is different. However, you might consider making a companywide announcement that you will be focusing on hiring from within.
As long as you can follow through on this commitment, you will want to make the most of it. Ask your company’s CIO to repeat the message every so often, so it sticks in people’s heads. They might even make a point of emphasizing every promotion that one of your technical employees receives.
3. Change Your Hiring Strategy
Of course, that is not a feasible option for every company. Most companies depend on the possibility of hiring fresh new talent from outside. If you keep hiring from outside, you need to ensure that it is worth the message you may send to your in-house talent.
As a result, you need to take a close look at your hiring process and update it for the changing landscape. The Great Resignation is a strong signal that potential employees are less likely to put up with hassle that they perceive as unnecessary.
The right IT staffing service can help you take your old hiring processes to the next level.
Many companies are still using outdated hiring processes. These processes take a long time to onboard an employee. On top of that, they force potential employees through a prolonged interview process that can turn them off.
Updating your processes can fix both of these problems at the same time.
Streamlining Interviews
Wherever possible, you want to streamline your interview process. For example, you might want to eliminate certain rounds of interviews. This way, you will be more convenient to apply to than your competitors that offer the same number of rounds of interviews as usual.
Of course, those rounds of interviews exist for a reason. You need to make sure that you have quality candidates. You may need to compensate for having fewer rounds.
One way to do this is to embrace alternative ways of meeting potential employees. You can make a concerted effort to invite your employees to ask around for quality candidates who might be interested in working for your company.
You may also be able to get away with fewer rounds of interviews if you improve the quality of your interviews. Better questions and more interview training for hiring managers and HR professionals can help you get more bang for your buck.
You can also make your hiring strategy more efficient by embracing remote interviews. This way, you reduce the amount of effort required to apply to your company successfully. The strategy may be especially important for tech employees, who appreciate how much work can successfully be done remotely more than almost anyone else.
4. Adjust Your Company Narrative
The more reasons your tech talent has to work for your company, the less likely they are to leave. Of course, the payment and benefits they receive are reasons not to go—if they are attractive enough. However, you can add to that pool of reasons by focusing on your company narrative.
What does your company stand for? What does the work that your IT employees are doing achieve? How does it affect real people in the outside world?
Specialization is a powerful economic tool. However, it can mean that employees never see the people benefiting from their labor.
If you are careful, you may be able to resolve this problem. You can carefully craft a story about your company. You can trace the line of cause-and-effect from the efforts of your IT employees to the improved lives of people out in the real world.
This kind of story can stick in people’s heads. It will sometimes flash in their minds when they are going about their work. It can add color and significance to labor that might otherwise seem routine and meaningless.
5. Forge a Deeper Connection With Your Employees
Some of the same principles apply to the connection between employees and their managers. Managers exert a lot of power in a company. If you’re not careful, that can lead to resentment.
A quality manager isn’t just somebody who gets as much work as possible out of somebody in a given quantity of time. A good manager also has to think about how much work somebody provides long-term. If you bleed somebody dry until they resign, then you will not be getting very much use out of them later on.
6. Remain Open to New Ways of Managing
Not all kinds of flexibility are systematizable. However, you can still develop a culture of flexibility. You want managers who understand how important it is to retain your tech talent.
More than anything else, embracing remote work can help you provide a more flexible work culture. Especially in information technology, people appreciate how much work can be done remotely. If you insist they work in person anyway, they may view it as arbitrary and oppressive.
Many managers developed their skills in a past era when tech talent was unlikely to quit and find another employer. They may have developed negotiating skills in a time when they could get away with playing hardball.
If you want to focus on talent retention, you may need to emphasize the importance of flexibility to your managers repeatedly. If at all possible, they should allow tech employees to work remotely.
Even if remote work is not an option in some cases, it may be wise for them to make a serious effort to find solutions. Even if those possible solutions do not work out, the attempt to explore them tells employees their concerns are taken seriously.
The same kind of flexibility can also apply to all other types of requests. Whatever your tech talent makes a request, your managers should be prepared to take it seriously. That level of consideration is commensurate with the incredible value that developers and technologists provide during the Great Resignation.
Powerful Strategies to Boost Employee Retention
We hope that some of the ideas in this brief article about the best strategies you can use to improve your employee retention have been helpful for you. Many employers and managers have never experienced something like what people are calling the Great Resignation.
The business landscape is changing in response to technology and people’s experiences during the pandemic. The result is that employers need to learn to adapt. The most successful people quickly learn to adjust their strategies in changing circumstances.
To learn more about how to boost your retention or to speak with experts in staff management to help you, feel free to reach out and get in touch with us here at any time.
