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If you searching for how to grow a business amid the great resignation, then read on! Following the great worker resignation of 2021, many businesses lost their best staff. Also known as the “the big quit”, this phenomenon saw employees rethinking their job status and resigning en mass.
This follows stagnated wages and government refusal to provide the necessary worker protection amid the Covis-19 pandemic. The voluntary employee resignations across different sectors of the economy came at the worst possible time for business owners, as many have found it difficult to get capable replacements.
The outlook is very grim if we go by a 2021 Work Trend Index by Microsoft, which indicates that more than 40% of the global workforce are considering quitting their job in 2021.
Statistically, it doesn’t make for great reading for small business owners seeking how to grow a business. Consider these: A record 4.3 million workers quit their jobs in August 2021, according to data by the office of Labour Dept.
65% of employees said they are looking for a new job, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers survey in August 2021.
Mid-career employees between 30 and 45 years old lead the mass quit rates between 2020 and 2021, with an average increase of more than 20%.
Though the trend is across the board, the great resignation hit some sectors much harder than others:
The restaurant industry quit rates rose to 6.8%, well above the industry average of 4.1% over the last 20 years, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics of October 2021. Coming in at second place is the retail industry at 4.7%.
The quit trend isn’t just restricted to the US. A survey of 5,000 people by human resources company SD Worx found that COVID-19-related resignations spiked by as much as 6.0% in Germany, 4.7% in the UK, 2.9%, and 2.3% in Netherlands and France respectively.
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The story is not different in Asia, as the tang ping phenomenon in China also started about the same time in April 2021. 26 million people lost their jobs last year amid pandemic-era shutdowns in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the U.N.’s International Labour Organization. Indeed the options for entrepreneurs seeking how to grow a business are really not very bright.
How Businesses Can Survive Amid The Great Resignation
Despite the gloom, there are still few strategies that business owners can adopt to stabilize their business ship, and even grow despite the pandemic-inspired great resignation. In proffering these strategies, we have to look at them through the lens of the various causes.
1. Retain Your Best Staff
Ultimately, retaining your best workers during this great resignation should be your utmost priority. It’s very difficult getting capable replacements this period. 57% of CEOs believe attracting talent is among their company’s biggest challenges, even as 73% of them anticipate worker shortage will disrupt their businesses over the next 12 months.
Here are different ways to ensure you retain your best workers
Listen to our Staff
This is the single most important time to listen to your employees. Ask and ensure they state their concerns. Don’t assume you know what they truly want. Ensure it’s a no-holds-barred truth session.
This way, you aggregate all their concerns and set out machinery to address them. bust one thing is very vital – make the discussion as humane and one-on-one as possible.
The fact that you asked is enough on its own to buy you some time from those who anticipate early resignation. This precious time you can use to work out a solution that may be the difference between losing some staff and keeping your best staff in your quest on how to grow a business amid the great quit.
Be Prepared to Act
Getting to know employee concerns is not enough. You have to be prepared to implement some of those concerns and water them down with humane explanations why the others may not be possible at this time.
As is widely known, most of the concerns as it has to do with the great resignation boil down mainly to stagnated wages and working conditions. Be prepared in your mind to improve on them.
Improve Employee Benefits
35% of CEOs of big firms have already expanded benefits to bolster employee retention. You have to copy what they are doing, count the losses, and pick up later. The most important thing is to ensure the business doesn’t go under, at least this period.
One of the major reasons for the great resignation by employees is stagnated wages. Any business that wants to retain its best workers has to accept that this is the time to increase employee benefits. Yes, this will add to your overhead and expenses, but losing your best staff and trying to find capable replacements where there is employee empathy is even worse.
– Offer Benefits In Batches
Where it’s not possible to give all staff a raise in one swoop, you can take a systematic approach by using the data provided above. Start by increasing employee benefits in batches, starting with mid-level staff between 30 and 45, who are most likely to resign first (according to data above). Make it open to others that theirs will follow.
Intervene in Most Vulnerable Sector
Identify which department of your business will be most affected by worker resignation and start offering the benefits from there. Do not wait for it to happen, offer incentives to those staff in that department immediately, then let the others know that they will follow. Explain to them that the times are tough and you can’t offer to all at once.
2. Empower Staff With Responsibilities
Human nature indicates that those who make decisions stick around to see the outcome of the decisions they made. Going by this fact, it will be wise to empower your staff at all levels to take positive actions geared towards making customers happy with personal experiences.
Maintain An All-Inclusive Distributed Authority Culture
In your quest for how to grow a business during this great resignation, it is time to be all-inclusive with your staff. Consult and include them in as much decision-making as possible.
Bomba, a US retailer involves its employees while hiring. Employees at all levels interview candidates and each person on the hiring committee has veto power.
3. Do Well By Doing Good
Businesses that will grow during this great resignation have to provide world-class customer service. Empower all staff to show some level of personal interest in customer welfare. Train them to latch on to personal moments they had with customers to do these on behalf of the business:
– Surprise customers with company messages, maybe on social media, or wherever.
– Send seasonal greetings from the company.
– Send handwritten cards to customers.
– Send video messages to customers going through hard times or recovering from illness.
The reward of trusting employees in this way is very impressive. A business can generate twice the lifetime revenue from customers who contact the company’s happiness team- provide gifts to customers.
Staff workers feel good working in an environment that gives back to the community. That shows that the likelihood of these staff leaving to join other company will be greatly reduced.
4. Provide a Safe Working Environment
A safe working environment is one of the major reasons for the great resignation in the first place. So it makes all the sense to ensure the workplace is safe for your staff.
This can be included in the interactive session with your staff – enquire from them and find out how the workplace can be made safer for workers.
Staff members don’t just feel safe working in such environments, but they also give the company a high mark for providing a safe working environment for them to work, which leads to them sticking around longer.
5. Allow a Flexible Work Culture
If you are serious about retaining your best workers during the great resignation and still grow your business, you need to provide employees with a flexible working culture – workplace, description, time, and career path (their future with the company).
Work culture – are there strict dressing codes? consider reviewing this where necessary. Do they work like robots, similar to North Korea’s traffic wardens? Review these and let them loosen up a bit where necessary.
Workplace – Can their work be shifted to working online? Can they work from other spaces? Review these and make necessary amendments.
Job description – can they take on other responsibilities while ditching a few? What don’t they like doing? What would they rather do? Get these figured out and adjust where necessary, and explain to them why the others cannot be implemented at this time.
6. Lead With Human Empathy
Everyone wants to grow, not just you and your business. Having that in mind, come up with policies geared towards the work and human growth of your staff. Invest in their career.
Do not assume your workers are loyal – show them that you are counting on them to be loyal by investing in their happiness and growth, and watch the loyalty come naturally, even amidst the great resignation.
7. Outsource Necessary Workload
Ensure your best staff concentrate on their core competence, while you outsource other duties to competent contractors or hire freelancers to accomplish those.
Jobs like marketing can be handed out to a competent digital marketing agency that will obviously use their years of experience to get you necessary or even better results.
How to Recruit Employees Who Stay
So what do you do in the event that you couldn’t implement these strategies before now, and your staff inevitably leave? Read along to find out how you can get new staff who will staff with you for longer.
Reduce Paper Qualification Requirements
Be more interested in the right skills and attitude, rather than qualifications, as you set out to hire candidates that will stay longer. Those who may come up a little short on qualifications can always be helped to learn the stuff they lack.
Put Personality Over Skill
Sure, skill is very important. But in the uncertainty of today and the quest about how to grow a business, personality seems more important. Get staff that has the personality to stay longer, then invest in them and teach them the skills they lack.
Be Loud About Your Brand
Let prospective employees into the good side of working with your company by purposefully shouting about it everywhere (online and offline). Let them already dream of working with you even before they get the job. Those whose vision aligns with your mission will jump in and stay.
Make Yourself Accessible
In today’s workplace, workers feel they should have some level of access to the authorities. As much as possible make yourself accessible and let it be known that this is so.
In the process of hiring, pretend you are the one seeking a job and implement most of the processes you would like your employers to showcase.
Get Your Best Candidate ASAP
Don’t drag the time in getting the best available from the pool of candidates, Show them you realize they are a good fit by making them an offer and closing the hire.
Candidates respect the fact that they are highly thought of, and will want to reciprocate by remaining longer in the job.
Promote From Within
It’s always advisable to fill vacant positions from within before seeking to hire from outside. This not only ensures experience from old staff is tapped, it encourages old staff to stick around for longer, knowing their promotion day is only a matter of time.
How Businesses Can Survive – In Conclusion
It is inevitable that employees will leave or seek to leave businesses either for others or when they feel their safety is not guaranteed or when they feel their wages are not commensurate with the times. It is up to you as the business owner to implement these strategies I outlined here in a bid to keep your best workers.
Alternatively, when the inevitable happens and they leave, then you should also use the necessary strategies to get replacement workers that will stay for longer in your business. These are enduring ways about how to grow a business amid the great resignation.
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