How to prevent even more employees from quitting this year

Long story short: Are you doing enough to prevent your employees from quitting?

February 11, 2022 11:09 AM

How are you enticing top talent to stay?

Whether it’s cutting down the workweek to better support work-life balance and mental health, learning how to communicate with younger workers, or offering appealing benefits like on-demand pay, employers want their teams with them for the long-run.

In the healthcare industry, quit rates are tied closely with burnout and stress. To combat mental and financial strain, nursing placement service IntelyCare is now offering an earned wage access benefit so nurses can access their pay in real-time. PR firm GillespieHall is also tackling burnout by experimenting with a four-day workweek pilot program. Their staff works just 32 hours a week, and they’ve already seen a huge increase in morale across the team. Our second Perk Up! podcast episode also explores this hot topic — check it out here and wherever you get your podcasts.

Happy people make happy workers, and you may have more control over that than you think. Before getting to that burnout state, or quitting all together, celebrities including Prince Harry and tennis pro Serena Williams share how inner work, which involves self-reflection and mindfulness, can be a tool to better support yourself and show up for others, be it in a work environment, among employees, or with family and friends.

Healthcare workers are quitting in droves. Can flexible paydays help?

The pandemic's toll on frontline healthcare workers is almost unfathomable. It's been a two-year barrage of patients, stress and fatigue that's contributed to staffing shortages at a time when the need is greatest. Employers are responding by reevaluating every aspect of their offers to new workers, including the way they receive their salaries.

IntelyCare, a Boston-based placement service for nursing professionals, has begun offering earned wage access, a benefit that enables employees to receive the earned portion of their paychecks ahead of the regular biweekly schedule. "Nurses have more control over whether they want to work and how. Having control over when they get paid contributes to work-life balance," John Shagoury, president and chief operating officer of IntelyCare, tells John Adams, executive editor of payments for American Banker.

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Healthcare workers are quitting in droves. Can flexible paydays help?

Gen Z workers are quitting because they don’t know how to talk about promotions

Sixty-five percent of Gen Z workers will leave within a year of starting a new job, according to a survey by recruitment software platform Lever. Thirty-seven percent of Gen Z employees say they plan to leave because they don’t feel comfortable discussing their job trajectories with managers, and 33% feel their company does not encourage promotions.

“Companies need to foster growth and development by providing open and transparent communication around mobility within the company and ensuring managers have the training to guide their employees to explore other roles,” Sarah Britton, senior manager or employee operations at Lever, says to executive editor Alyssa Place.

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Gen Z workers are quitting because they don’t know how to talk about promotions

Prince Harry, Serena Williams, and HR leaders are battling burnout with ‘inner work’

The idea of “inner work” was the focus of a BetterUp event, which gathered business leaders and notable speakers including Prince Harry and tennis superstar and entrepreneur Serena Williams to discuss how self-reflection through mindfulness practices can help improve mental health. Currently, 95% of large employers offer employees access to virtual mental health counseling. But “inner work” may be a vital part of guiding workers to holistic well-being.

“We've all been in a situation where we have to learn that we need boundaries, because it truly helps our performance and how we are going to get our best out of ourselves,” Serena Williams said at the event. “That's a situation that I've been in a few times where I'm literally trying to help people, or trying to help my career, but what I really needed to do was make sure that I was okay internally.”

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Prince Harry, Serena Williams, and HR leaders are battling burnout with ‘inner work’

‘No way to live’: Why this company is rejecting a 40-hour workweek

Employees spend just 39% of the day performing primary job duties, splitting the rest of their day between emails, meetings and breaks, according to a survey by software company Workfront. The Behavioral Science and Policy Associate estimates workers are only productive three hours a day.

It’s no wonder engagement levels are low and burnout rates are high, leading some employers to rethink and innovate. PR firm GillespieHall is working with 4 Day Week Global, a company dedicated to helping employers reduce their workweek, to launch a 32-hour workweek trial, in hopes of permanently changing not only how much they work, but how they work. Associate editor Deanna Cuadra chatted with the firm’s partners about how they’re implementing this new schedule.

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‘No way to live’: Why this company is rejecting a 40-hour workweek