Strategies & Digital Technology Solutions to Addressing the Business Continuity Impacts of the Great Resignation

What is the Great Resignation?

Here comes the Great Resignation, the pandemic-era labor trend sometimes known as the Great Reshuffle.

It’s another critical threat to organizations emerging from the COVID pandemic; and if you thought you could ride the wave out, think again. 

Why’s that?

Well, last year, 48 million people quit their jobs in the U.S. – easily breaking records for annual quitsⁱ. 

48 million people quit their jobs in the U.S. – easily breaking records for annual quitsⁱ.

Things haven’t slowed down since.

Another milestone was hit when March 2022 data came out; this time 4.5 million workers quit their jobs, more evidence that the labor market was hot and getting hotter.

U.S. employers aren’t the only affected. The latest figures from peer economies show that the Great Resignation has gone global. Resignations have jumped in the U.K., Australia, and France, as well, according to CNNⁱⁱ. 

Last year, France saw third quarter resignations break records dating back to 2007. The Australian Government, for its part, announced that 1 million workers began new roles in the three months to November 2021 – a rate of job switching almost ten per cent higher than the pre-pandemic average.

In the U.K., the rate of employed people aged 16 to 64 moving from job-to-job was at an all-time high between October to December 2021.

What’s more, a Future Forum report from January 2022 found that 53 per cent of workers in France and 55 per cent in Germany and Japan were still open to looking for new jobs in the next year. The number rises to 64 per cent in Australia and 60 per cent in the U.K, respectively.

December survey data out of Singapore found that almost half of responding workers were unsure if they’d stay in their current positions over the next six months. Nearly a quarter intended to leave their employer in the first half of this year. 

Add to that, LinkedIn data from January 2022 showed a notable increase in the number of workers switching industries in Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy compared to early 2021.

Why does the Great Resignation matter?

With the prospect of new blood, why should the trend matter to employers? Well, some of your best people might be the ones getting reshuffled.

Which is what the evidence suggests.

Indeed, nearly half of all current employees (44 per cent) are now job seekers, according to Willis Towers Watson’s 2022 Global Benefits Attitudes Survey. Among those, a third are actively job hunting – at least as of the last quarter of 2021. 

Think that’s bad; another 11 per cent were planning to look in the first quarter of 2022. The reasons why should send a shiver down the spine of most employers.

There are pandemic-related reasons; for one, the backlog of people seeking to leave their job who held on due to the pandemic. Another: people left the labor market to care for children or elderly relatives. 

In certain sectors, like retail and hospitality, shortages of workers have boosted demand for labor, which has encouraged people to leverage a competitive market for a role with better benefits or pay. Many people in desk jobs, for their part, cite being tired of long pandemic hours and Zoom meetings.

Surprising few, though, pay is the top consideration of new job seekers, particularly as global inflationary pressures erase wage gains. 

The desire for flexibility causes tension

It’s not the only factor, though. When polled, one in five job seekers said that they would take a new job for the same pay. 

Why’s that?

Health benefits, job security, flexible work arrangements, and retirement benefits came in right behind pay, as the top five reasons employees would move elsewhere. 

Remote work in the post-COVID era has emerged as a huge bone of contention, as well.

Workers who got used to work from home during earlier phases of the pandemic are balking at employers looking to return to the traditional office.

Many job seekers want more remote work options than current employers are allowing.

How many?

Over a 1/4 of survey respondents (26%) are always or mostly working from homeⁱⁱⁱ.

Well, over a quarter of survey respondents (26 per cent) are always or mostly working from homeiii. Another 15 per cent have an equal split between home and the office. Much higher shares, though (36 and 22 per cent, respectively), would prefer remote work.

It’s not hard to see why. Reasons cited as the three biggest benefits workers see with remote work include:

• Less time commuting
• Lower costs associated with going to the office
• Better management of household commitments 

Alongside the need for flexibility is the rise of burnout. In professions like nursing, burnout is reaching unsustainable levels. A survey of more than 9,500 nurses conducted by the U.K.’s Royal College of Nursing published in late 2021 found that 57 per cent of polled respondents were thinking about leaving their jobs or actively planning to leave. The top reasons given were feeling undervalued and feeling exhausted.

Strategies to mitigate the business continuity and organizational resilience impacts of the Great Resignation

Indeed, employers are cottoning on to the fact that losing top talent in critical business areas imposes an steep operating cost, which can imperil the very viability of their organizations. 

That’s why the loss of important personnel – not just the C-suite – is often considered a staffing or personnel crisis – on par with data breaches, natural disasters, acts of workplace violence, and other crisis types.

What then can be done to mitigate the risk? To the extent that the issue involves workers feeling burnt out, wellbeing management strategies and accompanying digital management system solutions might be an appropriate response to the Great Resignation.

Here, the relevant treatment for that specific continuity risk includes the following:

• Surveying personnel using wellbeing surveys
• Enabling personnel to self-serve content to improve wellbeing (more generally)
• Creating wellbeing activities which personnel can opt in to attend

What if staffers admit in surveys that persistent remote work is causing feelings of isolation and loneliness? Those staffers might be at danger of leaving, as well, resulting in potential losses of productivity in a critical business area. For that use case, employers should consider:

• Enabling personnel to schedule regular check-ins when working remotely
• Enabling personnel to self-serve relevant content to improve their wellbeing
• Create relevant wellbeing activities which personnel can opt in to attend

Finally, a flurry of staff exits might have been triggered by a significant wellbeing event, of which there’ve been many. If staffers haven’t left yet, the company might still be suffering from increased worker disengagement, likely to result in churn – potentially in critical business areas. For that use case, employers should consider:

• Conducting welfare checks (at scale), enabling personnel to respond via email, SMS, or voice, so that you can triage your response to events
• Survey personnel using wellbeing surveys
• Enable personnel to self-serve content to improve their wellbeing. 

The role of digital technology in operationalizing your mental health and wellbeing program

Of course, there might be significant start-up costs to getting a best-practice wellbeing program operationalized to mitigate the business continuity effects of the Great Resignation. Fortunately, there’s a way to avoid belaboring implementation while ensuring metrics are tracked.

Here, certain digital wellbeing management technologies can help businesses (1) respond to mental health and wellbeing events, (2) implement and track proactive initiatives to support their personnel, as well as (3) better understand the opportunities for mental health and wellbeing improvement. What capabilities in particular?

• Gain situational awareness of current events impacting on personnel through live weather, Twitter, and pandemic feeds
• Broadcast communications to distributed personnel in seconds using email, SMS, or voice
• Conduct welfare checks at scale enabling personnel to respond via email, SMS, or voice 
  – Triage response to events
• Push surveys to personnel to understand how they are coping before, during, and after events
• Launch initiatives with templates that take the heavy lifting out of creation and implementation
• Customize initiatives based on current events or unique organizational requirements
• Schedule periodic working from home ergonomic assessments for distributed staff
• Enable personnel to request mental health and wellbeing support
• Direct personnel to support programs and best-practice content
• Securely store personnel information in a single solution or import from your HR Software

Besides that, the platforms in question provide tools for all levels of the organization weighing in on wellbeing questions; executives can oversee events and analytics; line managers can manage events and launch initiatives with centralized dashboards; and staff can access wellbeing tools and participate in initiatives on any device. 

Benefits of digital wellbeing management technology

• Integrated with safety management software to reduce start-up costs and increase efficiency
• Reduce the risk of injuries and illness in your organisation
• Reduce churn by providing better supports to personnel 
• Understand how personnel are coping with traumatic events 
• Increase resilience by providing tools for personnel to grow in their work and personal life 
• Monitor organisational morale across your organisation
• Draw insights into which initiatives add the most value
• Effective spend of Mental health and Wellbeing budgets to deliver on organisational targets

To conclude: the Great Resignation might be an opportunity to pick up new talent. But it poses just as much disruption risk – if it’s your top talent that goes.

How to avoid paying the indirect operating costs: implement best-practice, context-specific wellbeing management solutions, with the help of integrated wellbeing management technology, like Noggin’s.

Such solutions help you maintain a comprehensive view of the wellbeing of your workers, their needs, and the wellbeing initiatives you conduct. The easy-to-use assessments, checks, analytics, and resources will give your staffers a sense that you have their best interest at heart, while simultaneously allowing you to manage the physical and mental wellbeing of personnel (even those who are geographically fragmented) in these volatile times. 

Appendix: Quick-Start Guide to Best-Practice Wellbeing Management

Employers might be loath to intervene in what they consider personal issues. But the evidence now indicates that workplaces themselves need to play an active role in maintaining the mental health and wellbeing of workers. 

Besides avoiding the loss of valuable personnel, employers who intervene proactively also stand to benefit from lower rates of absenteeism, as well as increased worker productivity, engagement, and loyalty. The remaining question, however, is how.

Well, it’s difficult for employers to develop mentally healthy workplaces to combat the impacts of the Great Resignation, without first understanding what the factors that contribute to such workplaces are. According to the research^iv, those factors include:

• Job design.
  Demands of the job, control in the work environment, resources provided, the level of work engagement, the characteristics of the job, and potential exposure to trauma.
• Team/group factors.
  Support from colleagues and managers, the quality of interpersonal relationships, effective leadership, and the availability of manager training. 
• Organizational factors.
  Changes to the organization, support from the organization, recognizing and rewarding work, how justice is perceived in an organization, a psychosocial safety climate, positive organizational climate, and a safe physical environment. 
• Home/work conflict.
  The degree to which conflicting demands from home, including significant life events, interfere with work. 
• Individual biopsychosocial factors.
  Genetics, personality, early life events, cognitive and behavioral patterns, mental health history, lifestyle factors and coping style.

Attributes of a mentally healthy workplace

• Work designed and managed to minimise harm 
• Protective factors promoted at an organisational level to maximise resilience 
• Personal resilience enhanced
• Early help-seeking promoted and facilitated
• Workers’ recovery from mental illness supported
• Increased awareness and reduced stigma of mental illness

Challenges to developing a mentally healthy workplace

If only it were so simple to turn those attributes into a self-executing wellbeing management program, though. It’s not. 

Sure, progress is being made. Business leaders are slowly overcoming some of their aversion to discussing mental health in the workplace. Still, formidable challenges to developing mentally healthy workplaces remain. 

For one, the fragmentation of workforces due to the pandemic clearly creates a barrier to business leaders gaining the requisite situational awareness of employee mental health and wellbeing. 

Besides that, the way oversight of wellbeing and mental health management processes has been distributed within most enterprises also creates issues. Though poor mental health is a key factor in poor physical safety outcomes, Safety teams rarely have a seat at the table when it comes to mental health. 

At most organizations, wellbeing and safety management represent separate initiatives, managed by different departments, with different budgets, metrics, and incentives.

Worker mental health (specifically) and wellbeing and wellness initiatives (more generally) are traditionally handled by HR and/or a combination of third-party resources, including employee assistance programs (EAPs). 

Why then should Safety get involved at all? Well, beefing up wellbeing management entails Safety involvement. Besides a basic overlap with wellbeing management,
Safety teams have the technical know-how and experience
influencing workers. 

Overcoming the challenges to developing mentally healthyworkforces: practical recommendations

Having senior management intervene to clarify the importance of workplace mental health and wellbeing is one way to overcome structural challenges to developing mentally healthy workforces. Leadership must be committed and provide support to get wellbeing programs off the ground or to take existing programs to the next level.

Leadership might deputize wellbeing committees, including representatives from Safety and HR, to conduct situational analyses of the current state of wellbeing in the workplace. Measurement tools available to such committees might include data coming from or related to:

• Sickness absence
• Work-related psychological injuries
• Return to work rates
• Exit interviews
• Staff turnover rates
• Audits of existing mental health policies and procedures
• Focus groups of employees
• Surveys of employee engagement
• Audits of existing leadership and management training
• Examinations of the mental health strategies of similar organizations
• External expert advice and best practices from psychologically healthy workplace programs
• Recognition of upcoming organizational change

Gathering and synthesizing that data is only a first step, however. With the blessing of senior leadership, wellbeing committees must then abstract from the data to identify and implement the appropriate intervention strategies for the workplace. 

Organizations shouldn’t simply implement interventions without follow up, though. Committees must review outcomes and adjust intervention strategies along the way.

Sources

i. Greg Iacurci, CNBC: The Great Resignation continues, as 44% oof workers look for a new job. Available at https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/22/greatresignation-continues-as-44percent-of-workers-seek-a-new-job.html

ii. Julia Horowitz, CNN: The Great Resignation is taking root around the world. Available at https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/30/economy/greatresignation-uk-australia-europe/index.html. 

iii. Greg Iacurci, CNBC: The Great Resignation continues, as 44% oof workers look for a new job. Available at https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/22/greatresignation-continues-as-44percent-of-workers-seek-a-new-job.html.

v. Dr. Samuel B Harvey et al, School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales: Developing a mentally healthy workplace: A review of the literature: A report for the National Mental Health Commission and the Mentally Healthy Workplace Alliance. Available at http://affinityhealthhub.co.uk/d/attachments/developing-a-mentally-healthy-workplace-final-november-2014-1476727013.pdf