Did you think about quitting your job in 2021? There’s a good chance your top talent did. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 40% of working Americans considered leaving their employment at the start of the year, and by year-end, a record 24 million had quit. So it makes sense that the common headline on my social feed would be scarcity and panic. Keeping your employees through the certain threat of the Great Resignation is a hot topic. Many even call it the “war for talent.” But we’ve got it all wrong. It’s not a war, and treating it like one is hurting you.
War suggests there are winners and losers, or more accurately–one winner and a staggering body count. While the change our labor force is facing thanks to the shake-up of COVID-19 is no less permanent than war, fighting like we will be the sole winners of a limited resource completely disregards the opportunity before us. Talent strategy that locks the doors and focuses on keeping your people is the organizational equivalent of going underground and waiting it out. You’re missing what’s happening on the surface, where if you’re courageous enough to venture out, you’ll find an open and available marketplace. Talent you’d never dream of having even contact with is now within your grasp, like flowers that spring up in open fields while we hunker down in our basements.
When we look at who has left their jobs and control for industry, attrition in the past 2 years spans class and job type. According to innovative analysis of Glassdoor reviews and employee engagement surveys, apparel retail lost the highest percentage of workers, followed by management consulting, internet, enterprise software, and fast food. It’s a cross-section of the country, suggesting there is no turf on which this supposed war can be waged. The desire to find a better way is pervasive.
War suggests you have a united battalion of fighters sharing both a purpose and a path forward, but we know workers today are less loyal to any individual organization or even industry. You don’t win wars with independent contractors.
And even if you could, who are you fighting against? Your peers in an industry of competitors? That seems like a lonely move, one that assumes all talent is interchangeable, and disables any of the power your purpose, culture, or mission may bring. Maybe you’re fighting against your employees themselves, convincing them to stay with incentives that hurt you but feel like the price of the handcuffs you’ve been dealt by a challenging job market. Good luck hiding the eventual resentment that builds by seeing employees as anything less than your favorite asset. Maybe you’re fighting your customers, gripping tightly around your unique value proposition, striving to be the favored provider so that others want to be in your orbit. While I don’t like the idea of fighting your customers, this last opportunity starts to get us slightly beyond scarcity.
In fact, it honors the fact that this is not a war, but a newly open marketplace of possibility. In this new world, one time-tested strategy will work, opening to the opportunity of abundance. You can thrive without holding on so tight. This strategy is to study the very best, and you must have a plan to do this both within your own walls and across the marketplace of talent outside.
Let’s start by studying the newly available talent. Who left? Not your typically transient players. More than ever, we saw mid-career, highly skilled, well-paid professionals leaving their organizations. And let’s study what they were leaving in search of: purpose, development, and a sense of belonging. A Gallup study predicted part of this pre-pandemic, suggesting the changing desire of the workforce leans toward a desire to improve upon individual strengths, aligning their life with their work, beyond just their paycheck. An MIT Sloan Management Review article cites lack of inclusion as a primary driver of attrition.
So play offense. There are brilliant people out there, no longer limited by location, looking for something you can offer. Be courageous enough to prioritize your culture above all else–focusing specifically on the employee experience of individualized development. Invest in helping your leaders unlock the emotional environment of their teams. Celebrate the bright spots in your organization where people feel recognized for doing good work, invited to contribute their opinions, and valued for their differences as well as their strengths. And talk about it! Promote your focus on purpose, development, and inclusion.
Shifting our study toward abundance, we also need to study our best talent within our organizations. Great management doesn’t hire talent to keep them, but to develop them. Sometimes that means they stay and grow with you. Sometimes that means they leave and grow thanks to you. Either way, plan for development and celebrate growth. Succession planning doesn’t just mean knowing who is in line to take over the currently filled seats. It means understanding which employees are truly your irreplaceable stars, and giving them excellent managers to maximize the partnership you have while you have them. This should include studying why they joined and where they have influence in the available job market. Talent attracts talent, so follow their pipeline to you backwards to find more like them. Know what made them choose you, and amplify that.
Be brave enough to believe in your top talent as future contributors to abundant growth, even if they aren’t answering to you. Know who is highly poachable, what will keep them, and what they dream of with or without you. If aligned purpose, development, and inclusion is more than a buzzword to you, you’ll eventually be able to find it in yourself to be happy for your top players, even when they leave. Focus your energy on creating great relationships with the superstars, and when they take off for additional constellations, they’ll bring you with them as they shift to being your customer, your partner, or your biggest promoter.
TLDR (too long, didn’t read):
It’s not a war for talent. It’s a marketplace.
The most important thing is not to keep people from leaving, but to attract the newly available top talent. Anything short of that is playing small.
People want purpose, growth, and inclusion. If you’re providing that, it’s not a war. It’s an abundance strategy.
Constellations shift. (Hello, Encanto.) Study your best and build relationships with them. If you’re in this for the long run, you have to be in it together, not against each other.
