We were joined by Maureen Brown, Founder and CEO of MI-Say, to talk about employee retention and attrition. Why do colleagues choose you? Why do they leave? And how can you up your retention?
Watch the full webinar back below, but just in case you don’t have time, here’s some highlights!
MI-Say provide analytics, reporting and insight gathered from starters and leavers that translates into incisive and impactful action. When people join or leave an organisation, they have just made a big decision, MI-Say’s research approach gets under the skin of what has influenced those decisions, looking at things like ENPS (Employee Net Promoter Score.)
In Maureen’s own words:
“Some clients use us because they have an attrition issue or an attraction issue. But what’s been most exciting to us is leaver advocacy. You might not keep people as long as you used to but everyone wants to send leavers off as advocates of their business. That’s one of our USPs. It needs to be a much bigger thing in the world of attraction and retention.”
An ENPS is a standard measure that looks at the levels of advocacy across your employees. You might ask a question like: “how likely are you to recommend this organisation to a friend or peer?”
MI-Say catalogue these results by having a Starter ENPS and a Leaver ENPS.
Maureen prepared a presentation to walk us through some of MI-Say’s latest findings and the results were quite illuminating!
Here, we’re defining a starter primary driver as what motivates a candidate to accept and start a job. The top 5 primary drivers were:
There hasn’t been much change in these numbers across roles or sectors. If you’re going to take Leaver Interview seriously, mirror them with the data you have on your starters. If someone tells you a Starter Primary Driver is career progression, but then that person leaves and cites career progression as the reason behind their leaving, their might be a problem with your messaging!
Notably, pay isn’t in the top 5 drivers here. It’s a factor but it’s not the main factor. Complimenting this, Jobtrain’s latest talent intelligence report noted that work/balance was prioritised over pay by a whopping 79% of candidates!
A starter contributory driver is a secondary motivation to a candidate accepting a role and starting a job. A Primary Factor is final trigger before someone takes a job. A contributory driver is something that might influence that final trigger! The top 5 contributory drivers were:
Pay is the second largest contributory driver and that shows that – while it’s not a final trigger or the main motivation for a candidate – it is certainly a factor! When someone joins your business, you expect something from them but they also expect something from you. Post-COVID, workers are expecting more. They expect you to have a good reputation, pay well, and offer benefits. Jobseekers are considering “The Deal.”
When we say “benefits,” – that’s quite an open question. It isn’t a cycle-to-work scheme, it isn’t fruit, and it isn’t a pool table. It’s hybrid/flexible working. It’s your pension scheme. It’s holidays. It all ties back to the focus on improving your work/balance.
A leaver primary driver is the final straw for a colleague. It’s the main motivation behind them pulling the trigger and looking for work elsewhere. The top 5 primary drivers were:
Other: 18.1%
Better career opportunities: 10.8%
Better pay: 8.5%
Personal reasons: 6.2%
Improved work-life balance: 5.6&
“Frankly,” Maureen told us, “the fact the top primary driver is ‘Other’ is quite annoying from a data perspective! But what it shows is that this is often quite a personal decision. We give people a lot of options to choose from and when we break down the specific feedback associated with “Other” there is no specific theme. For example, redundancy can be grouped into this, or ill health.”
“Bad management,” is an option in the survey that we see generally unselected. Regarding bad management, we’ve actually seen people be quite empathetic with their managers post-covid. During COVID, it was like managers realigned with their teams because they were in it together. We’ve seen a lot of negativity that was initially reserved for managers shift up to leadership.
A leaver contributary driver is a stepping stone to that final trigger. The top 5 primary drivers were:
Other: 9.7%
Better pay: 9%
Improved work-life balance: 7.6%
Better career opportunities: 7.5%
Not satisfied with the working environment: 6.5%
Working environment will include a whole mix of factors. It doesn’t mean the desk, the parking, the toilet. What it usually means is the feel of the environment – management, culture etc.
Maureen told us:
“We see that a lot of leaver questionnaires are created with the aim of individually trying to prevent someone from leaving. ‘Are they looking for more pay? Maybe we can offer more pay.’ We don’t recommend you approach it this way if you want to find trends. Create consistent engagement surveys that let you understand the whole employment process.”