DEI Can Beat The Great Resignation
If Covid-19 has brought us anything, it’s the sudden (forced) understanding that a lot of what we used to do in an office can be done from pretty much anywhere! Clearly not everything, but a significant amount. Several years ago as I returned from my first maternity leave, I was shocked as I heard stories from other mums that their company had denied their flexible working request stating that their job needed their presence in the office every day of the week.
However, despite this discovery, a number of companies are eager to see their employees back in the office as we transition out of lockdown. The issue is, if not handled well, employees who have been used to autonomy and feeling like they are trusted, could feel like this is being taken away from them.
We are currently experiencing what has been dubbed ‘the Great Resignation’ by employment experts. In April 2021, the US saw their biggest spike in resignations ever – 4 million resignations in a single month. The Microsoft Work Trend Index 2021 surveyed workforces across the globe and found over 70% of respondents want flexible working options to stay and 41% of workers are considering quitting their jobs or changing professions. In the UK, a recent survey showed one in twenty UK workers resigned from roles.
Why is the ‘Great Resignation’ happening?
1. The pandemic has been an unstable time for society and the majority of individuals, and a lot of people may have felt it unwise to leave a job during the worst of it. As things have become more stable, many have re-evaluated life, and work, and decided it’s time to shake things up professionally and find a new job or even career.
2. How organisations and leaders treat their employees matters – this has never been proven more so than now! Employees who felt unfairly treated, micro-managed from a distance, over-worked, and under-valued during lockdown and remote working will have just been biding their time until they were able to leave and find an employer that treats them better.
3. Some companies may have dealt with the pandemic just fine and offered a range of flexible working options, which they are now rescinding to coax employees back to offices. Their employees may find that the pre-pandemic way of working doesn’t suit their lives anymore; maybe it was easier for school drop-off and pick up, the lack of the commute was appreciated, being able to go for a walk around their diary was welcome, or they don’t see a need to work from an office space when home is just fine. If organisations aren’t accommodating their employees needs going forward, these employees will just leave.
4. For some, they just feel safer at home than they did in the office. This is particularly true for marginalised groups. Research by YouGov and Totaljobs published earlier this year, found that a third of transgender employees felt safer and more confident working from home during the pandemic than they did working in the office. Employees who may have experienced daily micro-aggressions in the workplace may now seek to work from home full-time, and will change jobs if necessary.
What can be done to keep employees?
The companies that have been spared the brunt of ‘the Great Resignation’ are unsurprisingly the ones that are listening to what their employees want and need and finding ways to accommodate flexible working policies. These flexible working policies go hand-in-hand with inclusion policies; they help protect people from under-represented groups and make the work lives of all employees safer and easier.
Navigating each of your employees’ working preferences may sound arduous at first, but the benefits of this approach will long outweigh the initial effort put in. Your employees have likely spent the last 15 months or so working from home at least occasionally, their priorities in life may have shifted from what they were pre-pandemic and they may have different expectations of work. As with most things, an open and honest conversation about mutual expectations is the best way to move forward – think of it as a ‘return to office review’. Ask your employees what they need from you going forward to work at their full potential.
Without knowing the needs of your employees, it will be difficult to devise an effective new strategy for work culture and protocols. Undoubtedly the next few years will see a shift towards employee preference and wellbeing, and to avoid being left behind and losing talent to organisations with more of a focus on these ideals, organisations must keep up.
Employees will likely desire more transparency too, both in their flexible working options but also on the protocol for any future potential lockdowns that could send the company back to working from home, whether related to Covid-19 variants or not. Company policy on lockdowns may even be a focal point in interviews for much of the near future, so make sure that policy is clear and developed.
Without doubt, your leaders need to be prepared for new and different conversations. At Avenir, we are inclusion strategy and inclusive leadership experts. We can help you develop a bespoke inclusion programme to help you create an effective DEI strategy, part of which will identify where flexible working policies can make key differences in your organisation, as well as inclusive hiring strategies that ensure the benefits carry over to future employees.
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