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8 Things Companies Can Do to Thrive During the Great Resignation

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The Great Resignation continues into 2022, with over 4 million Americans quitting their jobs for six consecutive months. Now the question is, how can leaders respond to this crisis effectively? How can businesses surmount this challenge and even thrive?

In this article, we outline 8 strategies to help your business grow and expand in the midst of the Big Quit. We offer insights into why employees resign, what businesses can do to improve retention, and how to navigate the changing landscape of the workplace.

1. Leverage Information

Solving a problem requires understanding it. In the case of The Great Resignation, employee interviews and surveys are a great resource. These will help you identify improvement points that can prevent the crisis from negatively impacting your business. 

For instance, you can perform “stay interviews” aimed at understanding what motivates an employee to stick to their current role. With this information, you can further strengthen what your employees perceive to be beneficial to their stay and thereby increase retention.

Conversely, you can perform and assess “exit interviews” to understand why past employees left. This way, you can address existing issues and prevent other employees from resigning.

2. Focus on Employee Experience

One of the best ways to retain top talent is to provide a great employee experience. Hence, it is important to invest in this endeavor during the great resignation. When employees feel heard and valued, they are more likely to stay longer with a company.

Some factors that contribute to a great employee experience are inclusivity, psychological safety, and work-life balance. These are factors you can measure by asking for feedback from your employees. 

By continuously working on improving employee experience, you can ensure an engaged and productive workforce during these uncertain times. You can also dramatically increase the positive perception of your business and attract many great potential hires.

3. Offer Time Flexibility

Another way to reduce employee turnover is to offer time flexibility. What we mean by time flexibility is by giving employees flexibility in when they work. Allow your employees to start or end work at different times outside the 9-5 window, so they can attend to life’s demands without feeling extra pressure or stress. This option is highly sought by employees. In fact, a survey by Harvard Business Review revealed that 96% of U.S. professionals need flexibility. Yet, only 47% of the companies in the same survey cater to this need. This means that a flexible working schedule can be a competitive advantage for your business. 

Both you and your employees can benefit from time flexibility. By implementing it, you may be able to enjoy increased employee engagement, higher productivity, and reduced tardiness and absenteeism. While new business models like the one this entails can be challenging to adopt, you can surely reap great rewards after.

4. Hire Remote Employees

Experts claim that remote work is here to stay. Many businesses already transitioned to a full remote or hybrid setup during the COVID-19 pandemic. If you haven’t yet, you may be having difficulty finding the right talent as many are prioritizing location flexibility when seeking employment today. 

Besides location flexibility, employees have experienced greater productivity, work-life balance, and overall job and life satisfaction on a full-time remote schedule.

Those who hire remotely find themselves having a wider talent pool. They can find the best people to do the job from all over the world. They also spend less on office space and can allocate the supposed budget for other important things. Most importantly, they are able to cultivate a culture of trust which is the foundation of any good employer-employee relationship. 

5. Cultivate a Culture of Empathy

Research shows that burnout is the main reason why people quit their jobs. One great way to prevent it from happening to your employees is by making empathy central to your company culture. Activities related to this may include creating conversations around empathy, learning how to acknowledge individual feelings at work, and knowing how to listen to employees without judgment.

Empathetic leadership brings out the best in people. It is especially important to practice it during times of crisis. By practicing empathy in the workplace, you can boost employee morale, foster greater collaboration, and improve employee loyalty.

“There’s no magic formula for great company culture. The key is just to treat your staff how you would like to be treated.” – Richard Branson

6. Create Advancement Opportunities

Lack of growth opportunities is another reason why people are exploring the possibility of employment elsewhere. If you want people to stay in your company, you have to think about what their short-term and long-term goals are. Then, you have to think about how these goals align with what your company can offer. This kind of information should be made available and discussed with your employees. 

One great maxim to follow is “offer careers, not just jobs.” This means offering not just promotion and advancement, but also room for personal and professional development.

7. Promote Health and Wellbeing

The Great Resignation is, in part, a workplace mental health crisis. In Mind Share Partners’ 2021 Mental Health Report, half of the respondents said they quit their jobs due to mental health reasons. There are many ways employers can avert this problem. You can start by destigmatizing mental health issues, offering more personal time off, and promoting work-life balance.

Aside from mental health, many employees also leave their job for better financial wellbeing. With the recent increase of national inflation by around 7%, employees are needing more financial capability just to keep up with their basic needs. 

All things considered, it can be more costly to replace top talent than to simply increase their salary. For this reason, you should consider reevaluating the compensation package and benefits you offer in response to today’s high quit rates.

8. Outsource and Delegate to a Virtual Assistant

Navigating the pandemic and The Great Resignation can be quite overwhelming. Thinking about how to do all the tasks listed in this article alone requires great effort. In order to lessen your workload and combat the effects of The Great Resignation, you can consider hiring a virtual executive assistant or EVA. EVAs perform time-consuming tasks so you can focus on the ones that generate income. 

EVAs usually have lower wage demand, so they can help your business recover from the financial setbacks of today’s crises. Plus, they have been less likely to participate in The Big Quit.

There are several ways to combat the dreaded Big Quit. As discussed in this article, leaders must first understand why employees quit. Then, they have to gather information and respond to employee demands today such as time-flexibility, location-flexibility, and advancement opportunities. Another strategy is to choose to outsource some of your business functions.

 In the end, companies may choose to adopt strategies like the ones listed in this article or suffer great attrition. Meanwhile, companies that are consciously turning The Great Resignation into the Great Retention are the ones that will survive and thrive in 2022.

Lorraine is a copywriter at Virtudesk, a virtual assistant company. Together with Virtudesk, Lorraine produces content such as blogs and ebooks that inspires business leaders to scale their business by leveraging virtual assistants and technology. Check out some of her writings at https://www.myvirtudesk.com/blog.

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Success Advice

How to Alter Your Business Approach With Technological Advancements

Keeping up with technological trends has become a challenge for almost every business owner.

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altering business approach
Image Credit: Midjourney

Technology’s evolution has impacted everything, and business is no exception. Keeping up with technological trends has become a challenge for almost every business owner. Entrepreneurs unable to do so are being wiped out of the market.

There is no doubt that AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) have taken over the business world. These technological advancements are impacting decision-making, success percentages, and other entrepreneurial aspects.

Adapting to these developments is integral to business success. Let’s explore how you can accomplish these milestones.

Embed the strength of AI and ML.

AI has modified business operations in major ways. For instance, companies have employed bots for customer support. These bots go through an effective learning process via Machine Learning before being able to answer like humans.  

Bots can also perform detailed data analytics and make business moves with high success percentages.

ML is used more for the analysis of data chunks and generating successful predictions. This simply means that business owners do not have to worry about large-scale financial losses. 

In terms of deployment and usage, a reputed company like Netflix employs machine learning for decision-making.

Blockchain is increasing the count of business opportunities

Tampering of financial transactions is quite common and causes severe monetary damage to customers. With the rise of digital payments, this risk has increased. 

Blockchain is used to elevate your experience for monetary transfers. It combats penetrating events to extract confidential customer information. 

Most business sectors are using block chain but finance and supply chain management sections have a higher count. These two corporate sections have several monetary deposits and withdrawals taking place. 

In terms of percentage, approximately 72% and 5% of finance and supply chain firms have implemented block chain successfully.

Dedicate Yourself to Continuous Learning and Individual Development

You invest in learning some of the very important skills, including digital marketing, financial management, and how to gain customers as an entrepreneur.

You need to set up your knowledge base about doing business on Coursera and Udemy with the basics that are necessary for the business, building further by networking with experts through webinars.

Besides, Agile methodology will introduce elasticity to your company: this review and feedback system with further correction regularly will allow for enhancing efficiency and promptly reacting to the market.

Developing key skills to achieve goals

Running a business successfully is not only about having niche/domain knowledge. Business owners need to have communication / soft skills as well in addition to niche information.

Here are some key technical/domain-related areas that business owners should have a strong grip on.

Data Storage on Cloud: These days, companies do not store their data on physical servers. Therefore business owners should know how data is stored/edited/removed/updated via AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and other platforms.

Data Analysis/Interpretation Qualities: These days, data is as precious as gold. Business owners with data analysis abilities make correct predictions. As a result, their ventures grow in volume.

Development/Coding Knowledge

Programming knowledge gives business owners an edge whether the application is developed in-house or outsourced. It assists in getting updates deployed and handling application underperformance without getting professional support every time.

Hacking proof framework

There is no benefit of having an advanced automated system if can be penetrated. Successful business owners have above-average knowledge of cyber security and hacking attempts. They are able to choose top-notch anti-hacking software without much of an ambiguity.

Communication Abilities/Soft Skills

Here are some key communication qualities that business owners should have:

Communication/Conversation: Business owners should use to-the-point sentences in both written and oral communication.

Issue Resolution Abilities: Business owners should be able to drill down to problems and solve them. This is done successfully only if an entrepreneur has in-depth business domain knowledge.

Agile Implementations

It is mandatory for business owners to have knowledge of iterative/agile models. With such a competitive environment, it is impossible for business owners to succeed without adopting an agile framework.

Create a productive well-crafted Business Strategy

A productive business venture starts with a clear vision. The first factor making a business successful is the idea behind it. It helps with endless growth and combating competition successfully. Katherine Philips once mentioned that business goals are inevitable if goals are set concretely.

  • Goals should be based on smart achievements instead of complexity. Focus on the value that each one of them adds. 
  • Business objectives should not be vague. Key indicators should be constructed to measure the success/failure of each milestone.
  • Be realistic when setting goals. Do not aim at impossible milestones since they can be demotivating.
  • Milestones/goals need to be time-bound. Set a completion deadline for each one of them. 
  • Business goals should not be alien. Owners can think out of the box but not be obsolete / unrelated.

Create a productive well-crafted Business Strategy

Business owners cannot succeed without having a network. Some tips help in this case. Attend conferences and professional gatherings to connect with other entrepreneurs.
Here are some other related points business owners should pay attention to.

  • Attend meetings and conferences to stay updated with trends and meet business owners who already have well-set ventures. This helps in enhancing the learning curve of new / growing entrepreneurs.
  • Being a part of business communities/groups is very productive. When one shares opinions and discusses decision-making tactics, it helps in preventing errors and enhancing success rate.
  • Even the most experienced business owners have mentors as learning never stops. Take part in mentorship programs so there is an assurance that you are following the correct roadmap.

Conclusion

There is absolutely no doubt that business dimensions have evolved with technological advancements. Successful entrepreneurs have grabbed these changes in due course of time and continue to evolve. On the other hand, people following old paths and conventional steps fade out of competition. In a nutshell, keep an eye on the processes and practices you follow as these factors decide success rate.

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Success Advice

Understanding the Power of Yes and No: How to Create Boundaries For Success

These words have a significant impact on how our success unfolds

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Creating legal boundaries
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The two smallest yet most powerful words in life, “Yes” and “No,” have a big impact on our growth on both personal and professional levels. In addition to affecting the choices we make every day, these words have a significant impact on how our success unfolds. (more…)

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Motivation

From Couch Potato to Go-Getter: A Step-by-Step Motivation Plan for Everyone

By understanding what motivates you, you can turn your dreams into reality

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How to be motivated
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Are you tired of feeling like a couch potato? Do you want to transform your life and become a go-getter? You’re not alone! Many people struggle with motivation, but the good news is that change is possible. (more…)

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Success Advice

10 Micro Financial Habits for More Wealth and Peace of Mind

The World Economic Forum still reports that half of U.S. adults lack financial literacy

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micro financial habits
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You’ve heard about developing financial habits, but what about micro-financial habits? Micro habits are the tiny things you can do every day with minimal effort that, together, transform your future. (more…)

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