Heads up, employers. Your workers’ impression of how trustworthy and fair their workplace is has a huge impact on retention.
A recent Gartner survey took a closer look at the Great Resignation and the challenges employers face when it comes to keeping their current employees.
It’s incredibly difficult to hire new talent right now, and a natural strategy to combat that would be retaining the people you already have. However, only one-third of employees looking for a new job explore opportunities at their current company.
Only 18% trust their company
Why is that? It isn’t because employees want to leave, necessarily — it’s because they don’t trust the company to give them a fair shake in the internal hiring process.
Only 18% of employees surveyed agreed they worked in a high fairness environment. The rest don’t see the point in looking for internal advancement opportunities.
The survey defined a “high fairness environment” as one where employees believe their managers and company treat them fairly. This kind of environment has a noticeably positive effect on employees — Gartner found their performance improves by 26%. These workers are also 27% less likely to quit.
How to retain more workers
Besides the trust and fairness issue, half of employees aren’t even aware of internal advancement opportunities available at their company.
Here’s how Gartner recommends employers can correct this.
- Make it easy to explore job openings. Employers can utilize technology to help map out career advancement paths at the company for employees, allowing them to see how they could grow. This would allow workers to explore different opportunities very easily.
- Encourage people to share their preferences. Put on record what each employee is interested in. This way, even if there are no current job openings that match their preferences, HR has candidates on the backburner for when new jobs open up.
- Create notifications. As soon as a new advancement opportunity opens up, send out an alert to your employees. Even better, use their preferences to tailor the notifications, so only people who are a good match for the job get notified.
