Everyone has a story in their life about something or even someone that had circumstances gone a little differently, would be in their lives right now but aren’t. The feeling is exacerbated when you know deep in your heart that you had control over those circumstances and the fault of that person or thing’s departure solely rested on your actions.
When we apply this level of thinking to the business world, we’re not only playing with emotions - which tie into the whole picture - but millions of dollars worth of lost business as well.
In the workforce, when high-performing employees decide it's time to take their talents elsewhere due to lackluster company culture or employee-wellbeing, this is called regrettable attrition.
Not all attrition is negative however. Most of the time attrition is a very natural process; companies may part ways with an employee, unforeseen layoffs, or circumstances beyond both parties control even.
In some instances, attrition is rather amicable with an employee leaving as part of a natural outgrowth of their role with you where further success might be at another place.
Furthermore, an employee leaving on a positive note can even bolster your company’s reputation when they eventually arrive at their new destination; a former employee of yours crushing it somewhere else and singing your praises is a backdoor PR method for your company.
That’s why investing in your employees does nothing but benefit your company. This leads us into causes of regrettable attrition in the workforce.
Many reasons can be at play when attributing what incites regrettable attrition. One of the more obvious factors is a negative workplace culture. Unhealthy competition, poor and vitriolic communication, lack of purpose, are probably the easiest to identify.
But of the more difficult causes of regrettable attrition to solve - which we’ll talk about in future articles - are things such as lack of career growth when key employees feel stagnate, work-life balance, and a company void of acknowledgement.
The above are somewhat of a quagmire for most companies because they require more tactfulness and clever thinking to address. When employees who perform well reach a stagnation point, feel like their work is not acknowledged or have no time outside of work, the solutions are rarely uniform.
Many news outlets or studies will try to point to specific methods, and while there is a lot of merit to these various strategies, the main point for employers to understand is feeling out your employees’ headspace on as deep a level possible. You may find yourself unable to upend a toxic culture for disgruntled employees in the way some studies suggest you do so. But what you can do, or at least attempt to do, is use specialized methods that cater to individual employee sentiment.
Companies like Worksense measure a plethora of possible emotions and feelings employees can feel at a company using AI to glean through various messaging apps and tools to gauge employee sentiment. Instead of applying a blanket set of strategies, AI-based tools can use a digital scalpel so to speak, without any of the pain (YAY!), and give much needed relief to employers and employees alike.
It should be mentioned though that while Worksense and others are striving to solve regrettable attrition and other sentiment-based issues that can arise in the workplace, in a post-pandemic world the workplace is much more sensitive than ever. While the shift to remote work offered much-needed flexibility to employees that are parents and caretakers, as mentioned in the previous article on burnout, the personal and professional have blended together like never before.
For example, as remote work became the norm across the globe, mandatory return-to-office mandates as the pandemic began to calm a bit were met with great resistance. As it relates to regrettable attrition, per Business Insider, RTO played a role in 36% of senior-level employees looking the other way for a job that was instead fully remote.
This is to show that we are dealing with a very modern and non-conventional kind of cause of possible regrettable attrition that was missing a few years prior to the pandemic.
As you can see, the kind of challenges, demands, and mental headspaces of employees and employers alike present a very precarious arena where if proper measures by both parties fail to take place and coalesce in a harmonious way, regrettable attrition will only be the first issue of many in an eventual great divide within the workplace. But the future, given the proper tools and strategies, is not all doom and gloom.
In a future article we will examine why regrettable attrition matters and why it warrants your full and undivided attention.
Until then, consider getting a head start on this by seeing how Worksense AI can help better boost employee morale company wide.