Early Warning Sign That Predicts Employee Turnover

April 9, 2023, Pavel Krapivin, Contributor

With quiet quitting on the minds of talent management teams the world over, it might be tempting to assume that there is more concern about employees tuning out rather than quitting. While there is an element of truth to that, employee turnover remains a notable challenge for HR teams to grapple with.

Research from Wharton suggests that how tasks are ordered plays a key role in whether employees will quit or not. The researchers found that when people are given a large number of complex and challenging assignments in a row, they’re more likely to quit than if their workload has a sprinkling of easier assignments. As a result, they believe that their findings demonstrate extremely simple interventions managers can implement to ensure that employees don’t want to quit.

Making Progress

Their work builds on that of Harvard’s Teresa Amabile, who famously stated that our motivation is heavily influenced by whether we’re making progress or not. If much of our work is extremely difficult, it can easily feel like we’re bogged down and not going anywhere, which when coupled with the mental stress associated with working on complex projects means we can easily become demotivated.

The Wharton researchers analyzed around 2 million text conversations between over 14,000 volunteers at a hotline people call when they’re in desperate need of help. The text conversations were randomly assigned to the volunteers so that they received conversations with varying degrees of difficulty, with those involving suicide prevention regarded as the trickiest to manage.

The results show that while the content of each conversation undoubtedly influenced the likelihood that a volunteer would quit, the order of the conversations was even more influential. Indeed, those who dealt with a long sequence of difficult conversations were up to 110% more likely to quit. The simple act of breaking up the conversations so that some easier ones were interspersed with the challenging ones reduced the resignation rate by around 22%.

Transferrable results

While the results were achieved in a very specific context, the researchers are nonetheless confident that they can translate to different professions and industries. This is especially so as few industries aren’t suffering from some form of talent shortage, so reducing employee turnover in a relatively simple way should be of interest to managers everywhere.

When putting their findings into practice, the researchers urge managers to consider a psychological trait known as the “peak-end rule”, which suggests that we often tend to judge an event by how we felt at the end of it. For instance, a bad end to a journey can prompt us to evaluate the entire journey negatively, even if most of it was fine.

The researchers believe that this applies equally to the sequence of tasks we perform at work. They suggest that when we look back at the work we’ve done, we tend to focus primarily on “streaks”, or several similar tasks performed in a row, and also on the most recent task we performed.

This is important, as it underlines that it’s not necessarily the amount of work people do that affects their perception of their job but rather the sequence in which they perform those tasks, with this especially potent if the latest task was challenging.

Breaking the pattern

Managers often compound this problem by relying on the same employees repeatedly. For instance, it can be extremely tempting to assign the most challenging tasks to your best employees on a repeated basis. After all, they’re your best people so must be most likely to yield the best outcomes. While there may be an element of truth to that, the research suggests that such loading of difficult tasks is also more likely to make your best people want to quit.

The key, therefore, is to ensure that you throw in some easier tasks as well as to mix things up so that your best people don’t feel like they’re weighed down by a never-ending stream of challenging work. This will probably result in them being happier, more motivated, and therefore more likely to stick around.

How to Retain Employees During the Great Resignation.

What is the Great Resignation really about?
By Brian O’Connell

It's about the Great Self-Evaluation, according to some workplace experts.

"The Great Resignation has been fueled by workers taking a step back to consider their worth and demand more from their work," said Matt Hoffman, head of talent at M13, a technology venture capital firm in New York City. "Talent is not resigning from the workforce itself; people are just reconsidering what's most important to them when presented with multiple compelling opportunities."

The COVID-19 pandemic, in particular, caused legions of career professionals to seek opportunities to bring more meaning to their lives, which included finding more challenging and rewarding work. "Employees want to be part of high-performing teams with healthy cultures," Hoffman noted. "So, for companies, trying to drive retention through compensation is not enough. But in a world where there is so much information out there and so many options, it will be incumbent upon employers to step up their transparency, fairness, and equity to survive."

According to the U.S. Labor Department, the quits rate—the percentage of employees leaving their jobs voluntarily—stood at 4.5 percent in November 2021. In addition to losing employees to departures, companies are having trouble attracting replacements. A study by WTW (formerly Willis Towers Watson) showed that 73 percent of 380 employers surveyed in 2021 were having difficulty attracting employees. Additionally, 70 percent of companies say the problem will persist in 2022.

The Way Forward for Management
How can companies keep valued and talented workers on board? Management professionals offer these tips:

Connect with staffers regularly. North 6th Agency, a brand communications company based in New York City, offers an array of programs designed to recruit, keep and develop talent for the agency.

In what executive vice president of talent development Nina Velasquez describes as a "high-turnover industry," North 6th emphasizes people-first practices. These include an employee rewards system (think spot bonuses, paid time off, or donations to a staffer's favorite charity, for example) and team performance rewards like agency-wide sabbaticals for meeting revenue goals. That's helped the company to retain many workers.

"Now more than ever, it's important to keep team members engaged, healthy, and connected," Velasquez said. "With some planning, executives can keep meaningful employee interactions constant, even when most are working remotely." One way to keep workers engaged and connected, she said, is by taking their ideas seriously.

"A collaborative work environment where everyone has a voice can lead to strategic recommendations that help move the company forward," Velasquez said. "A team advisory board is one example of bringing together diverse perspectives inside the company. An efficient board can set up checkpoints and meetings throughout the year to vote on pressing issues across the company, advise on the company vision, and provide input on company policies and procedures."

Velasquez also recommends that company managers engage team members in other ways. "It could be quarterly surveys, monthly suggestion boxes, or it could be revisiting the day-to-day structure of an individual's workday," she said. "If an employee feels connected to their company, it's likely due to managers' efforts to motivate, inspire and be an advocate for their career path."

Listen to employees. One key for managers looking to keep top talent is to listen better. "Get direct input from employees in terms of what is working and what is not," said Gia Ganesh, vice president of people and culture at Florence Health Care, an Atlanta-based health care software company. "Address concerns with a plan of action based on the input, share the plan, and start acting on it."

Show appreciation. Employees want to feel valued and appreciated for their contributions. Most, 79 percent of people leave jobs because they feel unappreciated at work."Recognition plays a huge part in building a delightful culture," Ganesh said. "Yet recognition does not always have to be monetary or tangible. Verbal appreciation can be equally effective."

Ganesh said recognition can come from peers, managers, or an entire team. "Simple public Slack channels where managers can share public appreciation are easy strategies to implement," she said.

Offer growth and opportunity. Career professionals want to see a clear path for growth at their companies, so employers should clear that path as much as possible. "What we've done is make it clear that our company is a place for you to start, explore and grow a career, no matter who you are," said Claudia Ivanova, head of HR at FISPAN, a financial technology firm in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. "We've put in place programs for interns and new graduates who can start their careers at FISPAN. We've put in place learning and development programs for existing employees to ensure they are continually being challenged and developing their professional paths."

When companies ensure that an employee feels valued and sees growth possibilities at an organization, there's little incentive for them to look elsewhere. "When they find everything, they want and need at Company X, they won't have time or the need to look or entertain other opportunities," Ivanova said.

Encourage a "corporate explorer" mindset. Managers should create opportunities for employees to realize their entrepreneurial ambitions inside the company. "At the same time as we are facing the Great Resignation, we have new business starts surging to four times the pre-pandemic level, according to the U.S. Census Bureau," said Andy Binns, a managing director at Change Logic, a Boston-based strategic advisory firm. "This reflects the lack of freedom [that employees feel] to innovate in corporate America."

By unleashing a worker's entrepreneurial spirit, companies can not only retain the best staff but also help generate new sources of growth. "Think of these [employees] as 'corporate explorers' and equip them to pursue innovative business ideas inside, not outside, the corporation," Binns said.

Provide Inspiration. Karen Cho, HR leader at Columbus, Ohio-based Designer Brands, the parent company for DSW Stores. "Executives must inspire and communicate with top talent around three things: the future of the company, their value in the organization, and opportunities and development for growth," Cho said. "What executives often fail to do is simply ask their top talent probing questions like, 'What would make you consider an opportunity outside our company?' "The answer might surprise you, and then you know what you need to do to retain each individual."

A Black chief diversity officer lost a job offer after flagging racial bias.

Joseph B. Hill received an offer to move to Houston to work at Memorial Hermann Health System as its chief DEI officer.
Aaron M. Sprecher via AP

The hospital system said its incoming diversity, equity, and inclusion officer was “too sensitive about race issues,” as one reason it rescinded the offer.

By Curtis Bunn

Joseph B. Hill received an offer to move to Houston to work at Memorial Hermann Health System as its chief DEI officer and was four days from starting a new position as vice president, chief equity, diversity, and inclusion officer at Memorial Hermann Health System in Houston when he received an email that changed the trajectory of his career.

The two-sentence note from Memorial Hermann’s human resources vice president, Lori Knowles, which was obtained by NBC News, read, “We regret to inform you that we are rescinding the offer of employment dated July 21, 2021. ... We appreciate your interest in the position and wish you much success going forward.”

“It was a shock, to say the least,” Hill said. “I was floored.” He was dumbfounded further when his lawyer, Mark Oberti of Houston, was told two weeks later over the phone the reasons Memorial Hermann invalidated its offer: that Hill “was not a good fit,” although he went through more than a dozen interviews over six weeks before he was offered the job. Oberti was also told by the company’s lawyer that it was uncomfortable with Hill inquiring about hiring staff to build his team; that Hill wanted a larger relocation budget; that he rented and charged a luxury car to the company; and that he was overall “too sensitive about race issues.”

“The reasons they listed were just as shocking as rescinding the offer,” Hill said. He felt that way because, he said, much of what Memorial Hermann indicated was “false and nonsensical,” but also because “they didn’t even contact me to discuss their so-called issues.”

Executives at Memorial Hermann declined to comment but issued a statement that read, in part: “We continue to make great strides in enhancing equity, diversity, and inclusion within our system, but we know there is always more that can be done — which is why we are recruiting for a Chief EDI Officer.” Hill’s case draws into focus concerns some experienced Black DEI officers expressed about the overall commitment by employers to making internal changes. After the social justice movement following the murder of George Floyd, many business leaders announced plans to address the diversity imbalance in the workforce by hiring DEI personnel.

However, the pledge to do so has gone unfulfilled on the director level, according to a report examining diversity in 2,868 American workplaces. The report indicated the percentage of Black DEI directors barely increased: from 11.3 percent in 2020 and 11.5 percent for 2021.

More concerning to specialists in the diversity space is that the efforts are not sincere and the hiring practices are “misguided,” they say. Chris Metzler, former associate dean for human resources and diversity studies at Georgetown University, created DEI certification programs at Cornell University and Georgetown, which many professionals in that discipline consider the gold standard. For all the efforts to make organizations diverse and comfortable for all employees, Metzler called much of it “disingenuous.”

“Many organizations are not interested in real change,” Metzler, the ​​president, and CEO of FHW and Associates, a global consulting firm, said. “They are looking at diversity as a numbers game. Many executives ask me privately, ‘How many Black people do I have to have?’

“Over last two years, very little has changed,” he said, “even with all these companies saying last year, ‘We are 100 percent in on diversity.’ And one key reason it hasn’t changed is cases like this one, where an experienced diversity officer is giving you outstanding information to help your organization, and suddenly he’s ‘no longer a fit.’ Until the commitment is genuine to make the change, nothing will change. And right now the commitment is not genuine.”

Hill’s case underscores an urgency for companies to take inclusion efforts seriously, Hobby said. “Those who are doing the hiring have forgotten that DEI officers are hired to be a conscience, to be a guide, to be a mentor to the organization, to help it transition from a not very inclusive organization to an inclusive organization,” Hobby said. “Now, they have engaged in more window dressing as a way of socially keeping up with the Joneses, more so than focusing on providing, in the cases of hospitals, better quality health care for minority patients and a better working environment for all minority employees.”

How return-to-work plans are evolving due to the Delta variant

Article By: Kathryn Mayer

Employers’ mask guidance and vaccine strategy changed quickly as the variant spread rapidly. What does it mean for return-to-workplace plans?

Like many employers, software company Paylocity had moved its employees remote due to COVID-19 early last year. Some of its employees have returned to the office have over the past several months, and with COVID-19 cases on the decline and the country moving toward a new normal, the company was planning to officially reopen its offices for its workers after Labor Day. But the Delta variant—the highly contagious COVID strand that is surging in much of the country—is changing those plans.

 “We have now put a pause on that and said, ‘Hey, let’s put it out until October and keep an eye on what’s going on,’ ” says the firm’s CHRO, Cheryl Johnson. “The Delta variant is something myself and the senior leaders are keeping a very, very close eye on.”

Paylocity is among the scores of employers that have reexamined and changed their return-to-office plans in recent weeks. After widely embracing remote work for well over a year, several organizations had planned for a return to the office in September. Now those plans are being put off, at least by companies that can continue with remote workers. Twitter decided to close its re-opened offices in New York and San Francisco, as well as to pause future office re-openings.

Facebook announced it will delay its plan to return U.S. employees to their office until January 2022. Many others, including Apple and Google, delayed their return dates from September to October. As Delta variant cases rise, some businesses that can operate with remote employees are delaying return-to-work plans based on guidance from the CDC and local health officials,” says Traci Fiatte, CEO, professional, and staffing at Randstad USA.

The change comes amid other alterations happening rapidly because of the COVID surge: After the CDC reversed its mask guidance—now recommending wearing them in most indoor places—most employers are  in offices after allowing vaccinated workers to shed them in previous months. And more employers are getting more aggressive about their vaccination push, with employers like Tyson Foods, Microsoft, United Airlines, IBM, mandating mask-wearing and more now requiring inoculation against COVID-19 for their workers.

These changes of plans—including pushing back a return to the office—are not only the safest strategy in keeping employees healthy they also are the smartest one to retain workers, but experts also say. Recent research show employees—even vaccinated ones—are growing fearful of the Delta variant, with many saying their biggest concern about returning to the office is a fear of getting sick.

Not listening to employee concerns, and neglecting health and safety, is a surefire way to lose workers, especially in a hot talent market where companies are struggling to keep and hire workers. “COVID safety is especially important given today’s tight talent market,” Fiatte says. She notes that a recent study from software firm Nulab finds that workers who felt unsafe at their jobs due to COVID were three times more likely to look for another opportunity.

The Delta variant is further proof that COVID-19 will continue to throw a wrench in employer plans—and that company leaders need to continue to be flexible in handling complications. Becky Cantieri, chief people officer of tech firm Momentive, recently told HRE that the company’s COVID-19 strategy has been to be flexible and stay iterative based on the status of the pandemic. With return-to-office plans, it continues to be “super thoughtful,” she says. “We’re planning, and planning a plan B, just so we’re ready and adaptable and agile based on how things evolve.”

“Top companies are embracing agility when developing return-to-work plans in the midst of changing health guidelines. Companies should consider surveying employees to determine their priorities and comfort levels about in-person work,” she says. “Leaders should also frequently communicate return-to-work plans to provide employees with the most up-to-date information.”

Why the 'Great Remote Work Experiment' may have been flawed.

This article is by Bryan Lufkin
August 2021

We've lived through a global remote-work experiment. But is our assessment of work-from-home flawed since we didn't have a choice?

Since the pandemic hit, people around the world have been taking part in a ‘Great Remote Work Experiment’. We’ve learned a lot, about things like productivity, communication, and boundaries. We’ve proved we can do get our jobs done, something that has fueled global conversations about work structures once Covid-19 subsides.

Yet there’s one thing we keep forgetting. We weren’t just working from home – we were working from home during a pandemic. The experiment began almost overnight, with minimal preparation or support. We worked at our kitchen tables, sometimes watching our children, as we sheltered from a virus. Everyone was in the same boat, working remotely without choice.

That means that although we did work from home, our experiences were shaped within a very specific, unique and communal set of circumstances. When the world re-opens, these circumstances will change – meaning that remote work may feel rather different. Some experts suggest we need to reflect on which parts of our ‘experiment’ may have been unrepresentative of long-term remote work in a pandemic-free society. Others suggest that our pandemic ‘experiment’ taught us more about remote work than we could ever have imagined, and propelled work-from-home into the mainstream in a vastly accelerated manner.

Both good and bad effects have come from the great work-from-home experiment occurring during a global medical emergency. Experts say pinpointing these could better inform our future work practices.

Why the pandemic isn’t the best guide

On one hand, we crash-landed into remote work because of the pandemic. This could mean we’re not best placed to judge how well or poorly it works under ‘normal’ circumstances.

“There was this enormous uncertainty – the stress that we all felt of ‘what’s going to happen to society?’,” says Martha Maznevski, professor of organisational behaviour at the University of Western Ontario. The last 18 months have been tough for many of us; some have faced health-related anxiety, loneliness and boredom, while others have been juggling children and homeschooling with professional responsibilities. And all of us had to rapidly adjust to new ways of working.

Workstations, for example, weren’t necessarily standing desks in home offices; they were stacks of books on kitchen tables, or even our beds. Zoom made conversations – professional or personal – feel foreign and exhausting, but we couldn’t leave our homes for fear of contracting the virus. It’s fair to assume these factors will have shaped people’s ability to work, and their resultant view of remote work, in diverse ways – and some may never want to work away from the office again. 

Not all of these ‘forced’ conditions were bad, however. Because knowledge workers went remote by necessity, regardless of company or industry, everyone was facing the same challenges, and people pulled together to find solutions. Yet this benefit may have been unique to the pandemic; once we return to a world in which people have different working situations, our ways of working will begin to diverge again, and integrating remote work may become more complicated. 

“The all-remote was fine; now we’re getting into the mix [of remote and non-remote], and that takes a lot more thought,” says Anita Woolley, associate professor of organisational behaviour and theory at Carnegie Mellon University, US. Now, as some firms begin hybrid working, employees may soon realise that it’s going to be harder to pull off remote work when some people are at home while others are in the office, where it’s easier to build relationships, collaborate and even advance in the company.

Additionally, the working hours we put in while remote were linked to the fact that we were stuck at home. While there’s data to suggest that we were more productive during the pandemic, and that some companies were more productive than others, that could be due to people working longer hours each day, to the point of burnout. There were few leisure options available, plus we were worried about our jobs, which meant many people defaulted to working longer hours. We can’t necessarily conclude that widespread remote work makes people more productive, even if we do save time on things like daily commutes.

So, does that all mean that we’ve conditioned companies and workers to think of remote work in a certain way that isn’t necessarily indicative of the future? We’ve developed preferences about working from home that might be based on experiences that aren’t necessarily representative of what remote work is supposed to look like – we’re not going to be glued to Zoom during lockdowns forever, after all. It could be that we’re in for a surprise – unpleasant or otherwise – when we experience remote work after the pandemic.

The all-remote was fine; now we’re getting into the mix [of remote and non-remote], and that takes a lot more thought - Anita Woolley

Don’t pull the alarm yet

Yet not all experts are concerned about whether our pandemic work-from-home experiences could distort our view of remote work. Some argue that the context in which we worked shouldn’t discount our experiment – if anything, it should help guide how we roll out long-term remote work policies going forward. “In what ways can we use this dataset and generalise from it, and in what ways can we not?” says Maznevski. “Not that we throw it all out – but what parts of it are going to generalise to a non-pandemic situation?”

But despite challenges, some experts say that the pandemic-era remote work experiment was more successful than anyone could have guessed

Nicholas Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford University in California, points to “three golden rules” that, pre-pandemic, were believed to be crucial for successful remote work. First, having a working space that wasn’t the same room as where you slept; second, having high-speed broadband; third, six or more months of experience on the job so that you knew what you were doing.

The pandemic proved all three were, in fact, not required – and if it weren’t for the unique nature of the pandemic, we never would have been able to figure that out, says Bloom. Now, moving forwards, we can look at the difficult remote-work conditions during the pandemic, and use what we’ve learned to improve our set-ups. Bloom says he thinks it’s “incredibly positive” that pandemic remote work has been “more successful than anyone ever predicted”.

He suggests that the forced remote-work experiment is like comparing two versions of a smartphone. Say you bought an original smartphone years ago, and thought it was convenient at the time, but then one day you buy the newest, shiniest model, and suddenly realised how much more convenient it is than the original. That’s what remote work after Covid-19 could be like – we’ll only be able to improve and iterate on what was surprisingly successful during the pandemic.

Bloom also believes that, without the unique pressure-cooker environment of the pandemic, there wouldn’t have been as many leaps in remote-work technological innovation. He and his colleagues point out in a 2021 working paper that the number of US patent applications for technologies supporting telework, video conferencing and working from home doubled between January and September 2020. Even “Zoom is a lot better now than a few months ago”, says Bloom.

Kevin Johnson, associate professor of management at HEC Montréal business school, says that the pandemic gave remote work a wave it wouldn’t have had otherwise. “We’ve got the momentum to use in the coming months, weeks, to try and build something more integrated in our management system and our leadership styles,” he says.

In the end, we can acknowledge both perspectives; that while working remotely during the pandemic distorted many people’s views of what long-term remote work would look like, the unusual ways the pandemic affected the telework experience can serve as learning points for the future.

It’s important to identify the pieces of the Great Remote Work Experiment that were unique to the pandemic. After all, we might be tempted to look at those elements, and assume that they’ll always be a part of remote work. That’s why we need to pay attention to the parts of the day-to-day that pan out better or worse than we think, and flag it with a manager early. Communication and flexibility will be key. Just because certain factors helped remote work spread more quickly than it would otherwise, doesn’t mean those factors will stick around forever.