Over the past year, I’ve focused my monthly musings on two prominent and timely themes: Using data to power business decisions, and all things “The Great Resignation.” Today, I’m bringing the two ideas together as I share insight into how you can use your data to retain employees.
Two years into what many are calling the worst talent shortage of the last decade, businesses across the globe have put talent retention at the top of their priorities list. According to the Bureau of Labor claims, the Great Resignation is costing employers thousands, if not millions, of dollars in turnover costs.1 Here’s the real eye-opener: 75% of these turnovers are preventable.2
In my view, this is good news. That means that as employers, we have some level of control over the destiny of our own respective workforces, despite what’s going on in the broader business community. That is… if we are operating with the right insights.
That’s where data comes in. You have the power to slice and dice data that you collect about your employees in a way that reveals trends, red flags, what’s working and what’s not—so you can proactively address concerns before your best team members leave you for a “more appealing” job. It’s all about knowing what data you should be delving into and how to use it to inform decisions that make an impact across the organization.
Three data elements that can inform impactful retention efforts:
- Engagement: If you don’t have an annual or bi-annual employee engagement survey in place, now is the time. By gathering data from your employees and analyzing it against those who’ve left your organization over the past six months or a year, you will begin to see trends that reveal who’s leaving and why. Not only can you use this data to target retention efforts to individuals who are showing signs of disengagement, but you can also take a big-picture look at what’s going on across your employee base and make improvements at an enterprise level.
- Performance: Data from your performance reviews can also offer important clues about what’s going on with employees, not just in terms of how they’re contributing to the business, but also to get a glimpse into their current mindset. Let’s say, for example, you have an employee who’s always performed at a consistently high level, but they’ve recently begun to slip in performance—or maybe they’re missing more work than usual. These people might be a flight risk. Again, you can look at this on an individual basis by trying to get at the root cause of what’s going on with the employee. But you can also gather and analyze the data at a more holistic level to identify patterns that may point to bigger organizational issues.
- Exit surveys: Exit surveys offer crucial insight into what’s happening in the minds of your employees. More than identifying why they left the organization when they did, this information can be analyzed against your engagement surveys to see how employees’ perceptions changed over time. By bringing the two data points together, you’ll be better poised to predict attrition risk.
By using predictive technologies to analyze data around job satisfaction, compensation, productivity, and other metrics to identify which employees may be on the verge of resigning, you can take proactive steps to prevent it and turn The Great Resignation into The Great Retention for your business.
Have you used data to inform retention decisions? If so, let’s talk!