The Great Resignation – Is Your Business Prepared?

  1. Home
  2. /
  3. Employment relations
  4. /
  5. The Great Resignation – Is Your Business Prepared?
The Great Resignation - preventing staff from leaving

The Great Resignation

We are warned that in 2022, New Zealand will experience ‘The Great Resignation’. While we all know the frustration of hoping someone will resign who won’t, that’s nothing compared to the pain of staff resigning when you don’t want them to. AUT’s 2020 Wellbeing at Work study showed 46.4% of our employed workforce has “high turnover intentions” and less than 10% of NZ employees were not considering leaving their job in the next 12 months.

These are breathtaking statistics which we take lightly at our peril. This is longstanding research showing a disturbing trend. How could it affect your business? What can we do to minimize the impact of any resignations in our businesses? And maybe just as importantly, how can we capitalize on the biggest labour shake-up the country has ever seen?

The power of the conversation

Be the employer who does not shy away from talking to your staff informally about their intentions. This doesn’t need to be in a formal appraisal process, but if that is where you are most comfortable, definitely take advantage of that opportunity. To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Know your people

If you have a particularly ambitious, mismatched or underutilized staff member, acknowledge any unmet expectations and do what you can about developing career paths or training. The team you already have are a resource you have already invested in. The grass is not always greener on the other side.

Rather than “What if I train them and they leave?“, consider this ……”What if I don’t train them and they stay!

Prevention is better than cure

Get creative! Consider how you can help your staff feel valued. While money, vehicles / tech gear and Friday night BBQs are an easy reach, spend some time thinking how you and your business could do things a little differently. Whilst some resignations are inevitable and healthy for innovation, retention may prevent a Great Resignation.

Tony Falkenstein (Just Life Group) set up $50 Sharesies accounts for all his staff. He then gave them an option to deduct $10 per week into their Sharesies account, to which his company would add 10%. That’s a dollar a week! It was creative, caring, thoughtful & interesting. It made his staff feel acknowledged and valued.

Time to grow?

If you have the opportunity to expand your business, we are likely to see a better calibre of applicants applying. Growing, restructuring to give yourself more time or setting up another branch or division, 2022 is likely to bring you the candidates that could make that possible.

For further reading on this topic, we wrote a blog about it in September.

Share This

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Fill out this field
Fill out this field
Please enter a valid email address.

Recent Posts

Recent Posts

Categories

Was that helpful?

If you still have any questions, reach out and make an appointment or a phone call. We promise not to put you on a weekly call-cycle! But we would love to help if we can.