When an employee leaves an organisation, they have typically made a decision to move jobs based on a number of push and pull factors, working in tandem.
Common push factors include; having no room to grow, feeling unchallenged, and being micromanaged.
Common pull factors include; increased freedom and flexibility in how you work, feeling challenged to grow and learn, and your values and beliefs aligning with the company.
In the Nov-Dec, 2024 issue of Harvard Business Review, writers Ethan Bernstein, Michael B. Horn and Bob Moesta outline the forces that compel job moves. It highlights how these act together, forming four main architypes for the typical leaver – which we found particularly relevant to the work we do at ENGAGE and how organisations can use this knowledge in order to better retain their top talent.
Four Quests for Progress
These four main archetypes or ‘quests’ are:
1. Get out
People who tend to experience a classic fight or flight response are often being managed in a way that wears them down. They may feel stuck in a dead-end job or be in over their heads. Many face steep obstacles that prevent them from putting their capabilities to good use – toxic culture, a role that’s a bad fit, a bad commute. These people want a new job to rescue them from their current one.
2. Regain control
Control seekers aren’t searching for the nearest escape. They normally feel good about their overall trajectory but not as good about the speed at which they are moving. They tend to hold off on switching until they find a job that will give them agency over their work environment.
3. Regain alignment
These people feel a profound lack of respect at work and are hunting for a job where their skills and experience will be more fully utilised, appreciated, and acknowledged. They tend to have a negative outlook, fixating on the many ways their current role doesn’t play to what they have to offer or what they wish to contribute. They gravitate towards an environment where they believe they won’t be underestimated or misunderstood.
4. Take the next step
After reaching a personal or professional milestone (completing education, achieving a development goal) job switchers are eager to move forward in their careers. Often driven by a desire to support themselves or their families, these individuals might want better benefits, living environment, the ability to pay for everyday basics and so on. People on this quest aren’t necessarily reacting to a bad situation, they’re pursuing growth, so may be willing to leap to a stretch role.
ENGAGE’s viewpoint:
For employers, high levels of turnover mean that the need for an effective retention strategy has never been greater. By effective we mean tailored, data-driven and targeted. The onus is on those competing for talent to respond to changing employee needs while balancing these with the needs of the organisation. Retention is no longer an HR issue; it is a critical business issue. An effective retention strategy will be fully aligned to clear business performance metrics with demonstrable ROI to guide prioritisation.
By looking at attrition data with sources from across your employee experience, it’s possible to compare the perceptions of leavers and non-leavers on critical issues to identify what may cause an employee’s departure. This is about optimizing your impact on factors that you can control or influence. By mitigating for the harder influences such as reward (any organisation can throw money at a problem), you can identify your true competitive advantages (or disadvantages) and therefore what will help you retain your best people in a sustainable way.
Through integration of attrition data with harder business outcome metrics, we can identify where talent loss is having the biggest impact on how your business performs. This helps you build and segment your retention strategy around key priority areas and can identify parts of the business that are positively impacted by a certain level of employee turnover and fresh thinking, or where low retention rates mask an underlying “coaster” or “hostage” challenge within your organisation.
Our research shows that retention for retention’s sake can have a negative impact on aspects of the employee experience that directly impact business outcomes. Teams with a high percentage of people who are not engaged, but intend to stick around, are:
· 27% less innovative
· 20% less collaborative
· 21% less committed to customers
· 44% less efficient when making decisions
· 16% less likely to challenge each other when needed
Here are five great questions we think you need to be considering when it comes to retention and attrition data:
1. At what rate are you losing people? Is that rate too fast, too slow or about right for your industry and for your needs (e.g., to help keep fresh thinking coming into the organisation)?
2. And who are you losing – are they your best talent or people you are better off without in the organisation?
3. How informed do you feel about why your talent is leaving? Where are you getting that data from (after the event from exit interviews; or from predictive data using, for example, engagement surveys)?
4. Can you quantify the impact of that talent leaving the organisation (e.g., in terms of knowledge loss, impact on customers, true cost of replacement etc.)?
5. How well informed do you feel about the factors that would help you optimise retention of your best talent?
If you need help with or would like to discuss how to address attrition, don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected]