ESCAPE ROOM

Understanding why people leave organizations

By Tabari McCoy , Scooter Media

“SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?’

A famous song by English punk band The Clash, the phrase has also become a familiar refrain among workers nationwide following “The Great Resignation,” a.k.a. the increase in people voluntarily quitting jobs since 2020. As reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in July 2022, the rate of people quitting jobs has reached heights “not seen since the department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey program in December 2000.” Additionally, the department noted that “the recent quit rates are too high to be explained solely by labor market tightening” and that future research “should also examine whether workers are taking new jobs or leaving the labor force.”

Brenda Cahill, MBA and Senior Solutions Consultant of HSD Metrics, is doing just that. She seeks to help companies throughout Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky mitigate the Great Resignation before it gets any worse.

Cahill is one of the presenters at the NKY Chamber’s 2023 Talent Strategies Symposium this March defragmenting why people leave organizations being her area of expertise. Possessing nearly 30 years of experience in human resources, branding and account management, Cahill specializes in designing surveys, making sense of data and helping organizations make actionable changes.

The Great Resignation, or rather its wake, has HSD Metrics’ services in high demand.

Satisfying Job Satisfaction Needs

While it’s no secret many people left jobs during the pandemic, the reasons why they left are what employers should be exploring, according to Cahill.

“The increasing number of obstacles to employee engagement make turnover predictors much more pronounced. Employers have generally benefited from what they believed was an endless supply of workers,” she says. “The model has changed. Workers have more choices. There is increasingly more competition for talent. Employee engagement is not a 'nice to have' or an empty platitude. It is essential for employers if they want to mitigate the cost of losing talent.”

While she says the job market is now settling, the Great Resignation accelerated the top three reasons – compensation, supervision and advancement potential –people are leaving jobs across America’s top 10 industries. They are also key aspects of an “engagement umbrella” that HSD Metrics, with help from the University of Louisville, developed to conduct and analyze surveys to help its clients improve culture and prevent talent loss. Inspired by Maslov’s famous hierarchy of needs, the engagement umbrella examines two levels of factors with compensation, safe working conditions and job stability making up the foundational levels as the basics of job satisfaction.

While some say money can’t buy happiness, Cahill says it most definitely has an impact.

“If compensation is the issue, it is the only issue. If you are paying below market, it will show up in the data. But for most employers, they pay at least at market,” she says. “Employees will say they are leaving for compensation purposes, but what they mean is they won't accept the amount of compensation they are making to work in a difficult workplace.”

Level two of the umbrella examines factors that add an extra layer of engagement among a workforce, including leadership acumen, line of sight and belonging and influence.

"If we give everyone a raise but change nothing else, everyone will feel good about the organization for a few weeks, but it will fade. If we invest in level two factors, change takes longer but it will be more sustainable,” Cahill says. “You will see Generation X, Y and Z being more into this. They want an organization’s values to align with theirs.”

Getting a company’s leadership to commit to using this data to make actionable changes, though, is the next imperative step.

“The challenge after that is ‘how do I pick the top priorities and how do I align the leadership team and CEO to get behind this initiative and trickle it from the top down?” Cahill says. “HR people can only throw so many pizza parties and host so many morale-boosting activities. You need the top leadership team invested.”

Survey Says

Surveys provide all types of data that can be scrutinized and examined in any number of ways. When they are conducted by employers that workers trust and respect, Cahill says they showcase one universal truth regardless of the survey takers’ history or demographics.

Showing you care is a key component to talent retention.

“I’ll quote HSD Managing Director Adrienne Chiaradonna, ‘Employee engagement is the extent to which employees feel connected and committed to the organization and put extra effort into their work. Employee engagement is not the same as employee satisfaction since an employee can be satisfied with their current employer, but not necessarily committed to going the extra mile for them,’” she says. “If they're not engaged, you can bet they're working at maybe 50, 60% of their full potential … But when you have engagement, and when you try to recruit the right people for your organization, there are proven, profitable results.” NKY