How to retain your best employees during the Great Resignation

10.24.2021

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The Great Resignation is here. You’ve likely heard this term being kicked around.

After 18+ months of high unemployment, remote working, transition and uncertainty, most Americans want to get back to work, right?

Well, maybe not.

According to recent reports, we should expect this hiring drought to continue well into 2022.

If you’re feeling this pain point of high turnover and low morale in your own organization, you’re not alone. Some of the predictions are sobering.

25% of workers have quit so far this year, with an estimated 25% more planning to follow suit in the next six months.

Depending on which report you read, between 48% – 66% of employees are currently looking for a new job.

What’s the reason? According to one Yahoo! News article, burnout is the leading cause. Defined in this same article, burnout is “a cocktail of work-related stress, exhaustion, cynicism and negativity.”

According to a McKinsey & Co. report, 42% of women and 35% of men in the United States have felt burned out “often or almost always” in 2021. Those numbers are staggering.

Christina Maslach, an American social psychologist who has researched employee burnout, points to these key six areas for employers to focus on for employee retention:

Helping workers find value in their work
creating manageable workloads
giving employees control over their jobs
treating workers fairly and equitably
rewarding and acknowledging good work, either financially or verbally
fostering community

Drive retention through meaningful work

The above metrics and burnout factors can feel dire, and if nothing is done to proactively combat them, it could very well become so in your organization.

However, there are a number of things that you can do today. I want to propose one you may not currently be thinking of…automation!

Automation may not be able to address all of these key stress factors, but it can dramatically impact the top four. Let’s explore how automation can be used to reduce burnout and effectively engage your team.

How to ensure your employees find meaning in their work

(Help Workers Find Value in their Work)

There is nothing worse for an employee than feeling like their work, efforts, and daily contributions simply do not matter.

Fulfillment in work is a key driver of employee retention. Help your team out by removing robotic tasks from their daily duties.

By automating that which can be automated, you allow and enable your greatest asset, your human resources, to focus on cognitive tasks that add greater value to both your organization and themselves.

Automate 30% of daily work

(Create Manageable Workloads)

A study by Deloitte suggests that 60% of your staff could have 30% of their daily work automatized.

How far would it go to reduce burnout if 30% of your team’s work was automated, and that gave employees the time to focus on tasks that bring them joy and value?

A workload shift or rebalance is only possible if you, as a leader of your organization, invest in a sustainable solution for your team.

This is where hiring an expert in the field of automation can pay dividends. An expert will dive in and help you fully understand where this automation can and should occur.

They will meet 1-1 with each member of your team, ask them questions about their daily workload and listen carefully to their answers. An expert’s frame of reference for these strategic questions and the answers they yield is unique, as it is their specialty.

By continuing to dig to the root cause, an automation specialist will find exactly where repetitive, robotic-type tasks live, and then work to automate those.

This effort paired with tangible changes and solutions will re-energize your team and ultimately contribute to your bottom line.

Mindless tasks make work feel draining. Choose to re-align employees’ tasks to the ones that motivate them and fulfill their professional needs.

How to empower your employees to do their best work

(Give Employees Control Over their Jobs)

Have you ever heard an employee ask, “can I please do more data entry?”. Likely, your answer is no.

While automation cannot give them full autonomy, it can alleviate the number of mundane tasks they must complete while giving them time to do the cognitive tasks that contribute to personal and professional satisfaction.

These cognitive tasks are likely the work your employee envisioned when taking the job, so by freeing up more time for that type of work, you will create a win-win for your team and organization.

Enable your team to provide even more value to your organization

(Treat Workers Fairly and Equitably)

Beyond fair paid time off, retirement matching, and other employee benefits, there is another key part of fair and equitable employment.

This is the opportunity to advance within your organization.

When a team member is doing repetitive mundane tasks all day, how can they ever show their true value to the organization, and in doing so, have a chance to advance?

Freeing your employees from these mundane tasks helps the entire organization grow.

The employee feels more useful and aligned with their professional purpose, leading to stronger overall performance.

This also allows managers to more efficiently grow, as their teams collectively begin to perform at higher levels.

How automation can help you attract and retain top talent

Anthony Klotz, a Texas A&M University professor of business administration sums this entire idea of burnout succinctly, “Just keeping people from quitting is not necessarily a good business strategy.”

Businesses need to contribute to their workers’ happiness. Automation is one proven way this can happen.

If you are concerned with how the Great Resignation may impact, or already is impacting, your organization and are looking for solutions to reduce employee stress and drive retention, feel free to contact me at john@dtgroup.io

To read more about the great resignation: