The recruitment industry has witnessed seismic shifts in the last few years. According to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), job opening and quitting rates were recorded at their highest between November and December 2021 in the United States.
Industry experts suggest that this Great Resignation is the single largest cause of all job shifts in the world currently.
The Great Resignation has spawned an overwhelming amount of both newspaper headlines and recruiter headaches. But what the Great Resignation means and how companies can overcome it is still murky for many leaders.
This post can help you better understand the Great Resignation and see how employee mentoring can keep it from affecting your company. So, let’s dig in.
What is the Great Resignation?
The Great Resignation, which began in the United States in 2020, is the consensual mass resignation of employees from the workforce.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, companies were forced to set up new rules and ways to work from home. This caused big changes in the workplace.
During the pandemic, employees grew tired of having their pay cut, working extra hours, and not knowing what their next job would be. Plus, businesses were making minimal efforts to support employees, so many employees decided to quit.
Triggers of the Great Resignation
There is no one reason for mass resignations. Every individual has personal reasons to quit a job. But overall, these four reasons are the main trigger points of the Great Resignation:
The pandemic effect
The pandemic was a shock for everyone. It put companies in a spot where they had to adopt a completely new work environment to survive. They were faced with using tools and techniques they had never even heard of.
As a result, many companies ignored employee engagement. Despite the fact that 50 percent of leaders think that employee engagement is important for business growth, many businesses emphasized keeping operations running rather than understanding how their employees were coping with these new changes.
Lack of engagement creates dissatisfied employees, and dissatisfied employees start looking for new jobs.
Recession trauma
The employment sector took a huge hit from the pandemic. But things were getting back to normal with remote and hybrid work environments.
However, the economic recession in 2022 again created job insecurities in the market. Many economists believe that the American economy is on the verge of losing thousands of jobs per month.
Many big companies, like Microsoft, Apple, and Google, are letting their top employees go. These types of insecurities lead to lower-level employees deciding to quit their jobs before they get laid off.
Be-your-own-boss trend
While working remotely, many employees realized they really enjoy the freedom and independence. They realized that they could multitask and work on their own terms while being even more productive than before.
It pushed people who dreamed of becoming their own boss someday but didn’t dare leave a secure job behind into taking the leap. Freedom and confidence motivated many employees to quit their regular jobs and start their own businesses.
Job dissatisfaction
Toxic company culture and unclear recognition policies have always been dominant reasons for employee disengagement. According to company culture statistics, 70 percent of Americans consider company culture more important than salary hikes.
Companies that fail to provide job satisfaction to their employees have to deal with resignation waves. That’s because the gig economy is rising at an alarming rate.
Employees prefer to work on small gigs that make them happy rather than work at a high-paying corporate job and feeling stressed and unmotivated all the time.
10 ways employee mentoring can beat the Great Resignation
Employee mentoring is a learning and development strategy. It lets businesses train their employees one-on-one to make them more productive and help them move up in their careers.
When Capterra asked a group of Canadian employees what the benefits of employee mentoring were, they said:
- 39 percent said it gave their employers more insight into day-to-day business operations.
- 38 percent said it could ensure that employees are never underpaid, and 37 percent said it allows mistakes to be identified before they escalate.
- 35 percent said it gave employers more insight into high- and low-performing employees.
- 34 percent said it enabled employers to assist them in working more efficiently during working hours.
Employee mentoring can help businesses stop the Great Resignation. It gives businesses a way to reach out to talented employees and keep them working for and engaged with the company.
Let’s see how you can use employee mentoring to stop your qualified employees from quitting!
1. Coach employees to grow
Among 42 percent of employees, a lack of career growth opportunities is the number one reason behind low engagement. As a result, low-engaged employees are always looking for another job opportunity that may provide them with better career growth options.
Thus, an effective learning management program can help businesses provide training and development opportunities to their employees. They can help employees learn new skills or upskill the ones they already have. It can not only help a company be more productive, but it can also help employees stay with the company longer. But, remember that employees who are growing their skill set need opportunities to use those new skills and be rewarded for doing so!
2. Preserve employee efficiency
Burnout and work stress can impact your employees’ efficiency. Exhausted employees are not productive employees.
Interactive learning methods, like gamification, can turn necessary job training from feeling overwhelming and exhausting into something rejuvenating and fun.
3. Strengthen an employee’s core values
Is your employee good at communication skills? Then mentoring can help you improve an employees’ good communication skills to excellent ones. You can introduce new communication methods and strategies or help them with areas that they struggle with.
Communication is just one example. You can strengthen any of your individual employees’ strengths with mentoring. You can provide training where your employees already shine. This can help your business be more productive and keep your workers interested in the learning program.
4. Boost confidence and morale
Constant training and learning can give your employees a confidence boost. In addition, they can master a skill with regular training and testing.
As a result, employees will not feel stressed while working on challenging projects. They can handle tricky situations with confidence. This can reduce the resignation of employees due to work pressure or lack of skills.
5. Opportunities to learn new skills
Employee mentoring can help you teach new skills to your employees—and new skills can lead to new job opportunities within your company. For employees looking to upgrade their job titles, learning paths that lead to internal promotions can increase employee engagement and retention.
Employees typically don’t seek outside job opportunities when there are better opportunities within your organization. Increased retention can save you all the recruitment hassle, including job interviews, advertising, and intensive onboarding.
6. Improve the employee experience
An excellent learning experience can help to improve your employee experience. For example, employee mentoring enables managers to work one-on-one with their employees.
This can help you understand employee preferences and pain points and help you create a phenomenal employee experience in your organization. You can make changes in your employment or other work policies based on the challenges your staff faces daily.
7. Increase employee retention
This advantage should be evident. When workers have stable jobs and equal opportunity for advancement, retention rates can increase. Additionally, if top management provides outstanding experience and engagement, your employees won’t quit their jobs.
8. Help with succession planning
With employee mentoring, managers and entrepreneurs can plan for their successors. In addition, an enterprise learning management system can help businesses recognize their most qualified employees, who they can train to take leadership roles in the future.
When employees have a secure growth opportunity waiting for them, they will show more enthusiasm and passion toward their job. They might also take learning more seriously when they have a chance to lead a team.
9. Set responsibilities and accountability
Many employees want recognition and higher responsibilities. So, employee mentoring can help you teach your workers how to take on more important tasks.
For example, you can give your existing employees the responsibility of training new employees. It can give a confidence boost to your existing employees and make them accountable for the performance of new workers.
10. Reverse mentoring
Employee mentoring has two effects. It not only trains workers but also keeps management abreast of emerging trends and technologies.
Managers can only train their teams once they themselves are trained and up to speed on the latest trends, best practices, and more. Reverse mentoring can therefore benefit management as well as reduce the likelihood that their best employees will leave.
Conclusion
The Great Resignation was a great wake-up call for companies to focus on employee engagement and career growth to stay ahead in the competitive market. Employees are a company’s greatest asset. Employee mentoring is a simple and impactful solution to protect your company from the wrath of this global resignation.
It is a simple phenomenon: give freedom and growth opportunities to your employees to receive higher engagement in return.
Is your company struggling with employee engagement? Reach out and let our experts help you build a path to a satisfied workforce!
