Pass The Playtime With Co-Workers

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PASS THE PLAYTIME WITH CO-WORKERS— CO-WORKERS— IT’S MA$$IVELY #WINNING. #WINNING.

How leading companies are slowing the tidal wave of exiting staff.

Awise CEO I was recently talking to shared that: “…the pandemic is hard. Everyone wants a change. Something to break up all the monotony of doing the same thing, day in and day out. But realistically you can’t divorce your partner. Moving to a new house is insanely expensive right now,” the wise pharmaceutical marketing leader continued “... so what can employees do to shake things up? They don’t have a lot of options besides quitting their jobs. That’s pretty much their only option right now, and as a leader, I can tell you that’s really hard on me and hard on my company.”

Monotony of Covid Forces Employees to Crave Change As an executive coach and corporate trainer, I found this so insight so powerful it got me by Jen Nash looking at what do stats show will consistently work when it comes to retention, so I could focus more profoundly on positively supporting my corporate clients. The CEO who preferred to remain anonymous—as they’re looking at staff attrition rates between 15-20% over the past quarter—was eager to consider all solutions available. Especially if those solutions were easy to implement and could create lasting change.

Office Friendships Make All The Difference I did some digging and it turns out that supporting office friendships went a long way to changing the resignation culture. Did you know that 62% of people would say NO THANK YOU to a higher paying job if they

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had 5+ friends at their current job? And that number rises to over 70% for those with over six at work1 .

“That warm, fuzzy feeling drops dramatically as the number of workplace friends declines— fewer than half of those with one to five friends at their company feel the love and just 24 percent with no workplace friends love where they work.” Says Kathy Gurchiek in an SHRM article about the importance of workplace friendships2 .

Just how Expensive Is Losing Employees? In case you’d forgotten, according to a Gallup study, the cost of replacing an individual employee can range from one-half to two times that employee’s annual salary --

1 https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hrtopics/employee-relations/pages/workplace-friendships. aspx 2 https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hrtopics/employee-relations/pages/workplace-friendships. aspx and that’s a conservative estimate. So, a 100-person organization where the average salary is $50,000, would have turnover and replacement costs of approximately $660,000 to $2.6 million per year3. Holy wow. Let’s start helping our employees make friends shall we?

How Can Employers Support Employee Friendships? As more leaders are leaning into empathetic leadership styles, they are seeing how important it is for them to foster potentially connective moments. One effective suggestion is encouraging employees to starting meetings by playfully sharing something personal about themselves, like what everyone is currently binge watching. Better still is going deeper and connective moments where people are encouraged to openly talk about their core values, as these moments can

3 https://www.gallup.com/workplace/247391/ fixable-problem-costs-businesses-trillion. aspx#:~:text=The%20cost%20of%20replacing%20 an,to%20%242.6%20million%20per%20year.

give leaders and staff insight into what motivates everyone from a deeper perspective. This insight gives the firm a direct line to understanding what type of motivation will be most effective moving forward.

Having time set aside for virtual games and other connective engagement, that’s not necessarily directly correlated to client work or the bottom line, can be deeply rewarding over time. PwC has project managers allocate different employees to take walk and talks together. Everyone is “walking” wherever they want to walk, but for that 25 minute, they’re on the phone with a colleague…connecting. Little initiatives make all the difference as I’ve found in training after training that I’ve facilitated.

Final Word?

Friendship and connection support retention, and it’s critical now more than ever to look for ways to add more of that into your office culture. Dim Sum anyone?

With two decades of professional experience working as a senior consultant for Fortune 100 Pharma, Health, Tech, and Finance giants—Jen integrates human behavioral theory with realworld practicalities.

Jen understands that you can be critically successful and yet still wonder if there isn’t meant to be more for you? To that end Jen has coached and trained hundreds

ABOUT JEN

of individuals on stepping into their potential, mastering connective speaking, and being the best leaders they can be.

Jen has completed training as a Coach For Life and is a member of the ICF. She is regularly interviewed on a wide range of podcasts talking about coaching and her book The Big Power of Tiny Connections.

Born in Canada and raised around the world in such countries as Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Australia, Jennifer confuses people by speaking French with a French accent and trying her hands at over 40 other languages. She studied Communication Design at Parsons & The New School for Social Research in New York City.

When not traveling the globe learning new ways to say ‘thank you’ and finding bright souls with whom to foster lifelong friendships; Jen Nash can be seen biking around New York City, Los Angeles or striding around el Centro in San Miguel Allende, Mexico.