Knowing why people are leaving your organisation, or what factors motivate them to stay, can help you make the strategic and tactical organisational changes needed to hold onto your top talent.
But understanding these push and pull factors is not a simple tick-box exercise. It requires a data-driven approach, underpinned by smart analytics, to most accurately identify which parts of the employee experience are most likely to retain your people, and which are contributing to why people leave. We call this approach Retentionomics.
Identifying the specific reasons why your people stay with you tells you what you need to keep doing, or do more of. At the same time, learning what makes people more likely to leave means you can focus change and improvement in the areas that will have the biggest impact.
Influencing positive behaviours
Behaviour is one area that has a measurable impact on retention and attrition. A core technique to address behavioural drivers (which behaviours do you need to encourage, or stop, to make the improvements that you need?) and therefore to facilitate change, is nudging.
Nudging isn’t a new concept, and at its simplest, is a way of influencing behaviour and decision-making by using positive reinforcement and indirect suggestion.
Nudges are used in a multitude of ways; from displaying healthier food near to the supermarket checkout to encourage healthy food choices when in the queue, to opt-out pension schemes rather than opt-in, to help promote the importance of saving towards retirement (and making it more difficult not to).
Ultimately, nudging doesn’t tell people what to do or enforce laws on people; it simply gives them choices – but does so in a way that encourages certain behaviours. It can be used within organisations to encourage positive behaviour change through influence and suggestion, rather than enforced rules or process.
Widespread evidence and our own research shows that there will be certain behaviours within your organisation that, if leveraged, could make the difference between your best talent staying with you or moving on.
This highlights the importance of using data to drive nudging. If you know – based on data – what drives the outcomes you are trying to achieve, you can be confident that the nudges you deploy are going to help get you there.
Data-driven nudging
Data, coupled with detailed analysis, is what sets our nudging tool apart from others in the market. Humu found that 96% of people receiving nudges reported that they led to noticeable, positive change[1].
While this is a welcome result, our approach goes one step further – using data and smart, predictive analytics, not only ensures that positive change happens, but that this change will prioritise action in the specific areas that need addressing.
For a manager, this might be knowing what parts of the employee experience are having the biggest impact on the retention of talent in their team. For leaders, it might be understanding, from a leadership diagnostic or coaching programme, the specific behaviours they need to display more of to drive engagement with the organisation’s vision and strategy.
This is a critical indicator of the role that data-driven nudging can play in strategies designed to retain your best talent.
In a time where many of us are reflecting on our jobs, our companies and our purpose, data-driven nudging is a powerful and targeted tool that can help your organisation embed the behavioural changes necessary to remain an attractive and engaging place to work.
To find out more about ENGAGE’s data-driven solutions, feel free to download a PDF factsheet about our Retentionomics solution or get in touch to talk to one of the team about how this might be of help to your organisation.
[1] https://www.humu.com/how-nudges-work