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We think that declining employment trust is the underlying reason for the rise of voluntary turnover seen in many industries.
What's "employment trust"? We are referring to an employee's belief their employer will provide a good "deal" that encapsulates all employee expectations. It goes beyond the concept of Employee Value Proposition (EVP) which tends to focus on more tangible concepts like pay, benefits, and other perks.
In the past, the employee "deal" was less complex and focused on items described by EVP, and the terms were driven by the employer.
Today, the terms of the "deal" are driven more by the employee who, on top of pay and benefits, needs more abstract things like:
Being assigned to meaningful work
Being treated with respect, being heard, and being recognized
Being provided career growth & personal development
These expectations are easy to understand but are often ambiguous or impossible to deliver on a reasonable timeline. For example:
What's meaningful work for some might be mindless busywork to others.
Being recognized might mean being thanked personally, it might mean being thanked formally in a company publication, or it might mean being recognized with a pay raise. Or all three!
A company may have very limited promotional opportunities and employees get impatient when they must wait until someone retires to be moved up.
We believe employment trust has eroded because many employers haven't worked on these new expectations but instead have focused on short-term fixes that have made things worse.
Does the below scenario sound familiar?
A company can't hire enough people due to high turnover. They offer a sign-on bonus of $10,000 to attract new applicants out of desperation. They require a long-term employee to train the new employees. Nothing is offered to the long-term employee, but they know about the bonus because it's advertised online. The long-term employee now feels betrayed and loses trust that the company will take care of loyal employees. Their feeling is justified further when the new employee quits within six months and moves on to some other new "deal."
In his comic strip Pogo, Walt Kelly once famously wrote, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Heard.
We've included an infographic to outlines a path to building employment trust at a basic level. It looks easy, but it's not. We'd love the chance to partner with you to help discover what your employees expect and how you can get closer to meeting their needs.
Extra: Pros and Cons of using the 5 whys
It's common for people to quickly search online for various tools to make sense of a problem without really understanding the tool. Part of the infographic we display refers to using the 5 Whys method, a common problem-solving tool, but we feel it's important to share some pros and cons of this method:
PROs
It's easy for people to understand
It can uncover legitimate root causes of a problem
It's fast
CONs
You may stop too early and accept a reason that sounds good but is not the root cause of the problem. If we ask a team why so many people quit, their final answer might be "a gap in pay," but the real reason might be that employees don't understand how the pay system works and decide to leave because their misunderstanding creates distrust about future pay raises.
The answers can be limited to what your team understands. Your team might not have information needed to answer the question. They may think the answer for high turnover is due to the company paying below market, but they don't have accurate survey data. The real answer might be that your competition for labor is great at marketing and is winning on that front.
5 whys can be manipulated by strong opinions. The "why?" might be bad behavior by management, but a team member who is a manager might be protective and steer the conversation to another answer they can hide behind.
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