The Great Resignation – The impact of Covid on employee retention

Since Covid hit our country, most employees have been forced to work from home. At the start, this resulted in a lot of practical problems and difficulties with the normal activities that take place at home. This was even more apparent when children were not able to go to school.

Luckily, for most Australians, this phase is coming to an end and employees are asked to return to the office. Now, the opposite trend is visible. Employees are hesitant to return to the office and more fundamentally, they reconsider their priorities in life and put more emphasis on having a better work-life balance.

This phenomenon, what is called the Great Resignation, is visible worldwide. Data from the people management platform Employment Hero suggests 48 per cent of Australian workers are planning on looking for a new job in the next 12 months. Combined with a surge in vacancies, senior management of companies now consider the challenge of retaining the workforce to be among their top strategic priorities — an increase of 81 per cent from the previous year according to research firm Gartner.

The key in retaining people is ability of senior management to nurture the right company culture and to be agile in the way ‘returning to the office’ is actually implemented. 

The right company culture

People who know me, know that company culture is one of the topics that is close to my heart. It is critically important that senior management defines what the current company culture is and what the desired company culture is. Interestingly enough, these are not difficult to determine. It are basically the unwritten laws by which senior management judges whether things are right or wrong. These ‘unwritten laws’ are almost automatically adopted by employees. And that brings us to the core of ‘company culture’. Employees will act in line with these unwritten laws.

Let me give an example. I recently met with a CEO, who stated that he wants his managers to take more ownership of their departments and run it as if it was their own company. I checked in with a number of his managers and they confirmed that they would be happy to do that. When asking why they didn’t as yet, I was answered that they had tried, but that the CEO always pushed back and forces through his own ideas. Hence, when they are asked to work on a project, they would always first ask the CEO how he wanted it be executed, rather than creating a plan themselves.

This incongruency in the words the CEO speaks and the way he acts, is killing for creating a company culture.

Being agile in the ‘returning to the office’ implementation

My daughter’s final assignment for her Master degree was to research the impact of working-from-home on the culture in an organisation and how employees think about the post-covid scenario. 

One of the main conclusions was that in the long term, employees are not totally happy with a 100% scenario – whether it is 100% in the office, or 100% working from home. The scenario that most of the employees described as ideal, was where they would come to the office several days per week and work from home several days per week. The reasons they want to work in the office several days per week, are to meet colleagues, have face-to-face contact and strengthen the feeling of being part of their team.  The reasons they want to work from home several days per week, are not having to waste time on commuting, being flexible in work hours and being able to juggle tasks at home better with work.

Having the mix of working in the office and working from home, was for the majority of the people described as ideal and creates the best work-life balance.

Knowing this, it would be worth for management to be flexible in the employment arrangements with existing staff and future staff.

Now that we come to the end of ‘working from home’ phase, power has shifted where it comes to retention of staff and attracting new staff. For senior management, just going on autopilot will not be good enough and it will take a multilevel approach to transition to a new normal and retain good staff as much as possible.

Want to know more?

Feel free to contact ECG if you want to discuss this topic further.