Almost every business owner I have spoken to recently shares the same concern: in their companies they are seeing a trend, sharpened by two years of pandemic, towards rising staff turnover. A phenomenon that in the United States has been called the Great Resignation – in Italian, “grandi dimissioni”. In the US, in April 2021, the number of people who voluntarily left their jobs exceeded 4 million and stayed at that level for over a year, as reported by Business Insider, among others.
The numbers of the “Great Resignation” in Italy
In Italy, in the first six months of 2022, 1,080,000 people resigned, an increase of 31.73% on the same period of 2021, according to figures from the INPS Observatory on Precarious Employment reported by Corriere della Sera. In part this is a natural rebound after the “freeze” of the labour market caused by Covid. But in part it is a new phenomenon, driven by a range of social, economic and existential reasons, including the search for work that is more in line with one’s own aspirations.
For companies it is a retention problem: losing an employee means letting go of a wealth of skills and experience and having to look for a replacement who must be properly trained and onboarded, at a cost in time and money. However, I notice that this concern often remains at the level of statements and is rarely translated into what psychologists call planned behaviour or reasoned action. A bit like when we complain that we ought to lose weight or stop smoking, but then do nothing concrete to change our behaviour.
Managing the “employee life cycle” scientifically
Often, when I hear this kind of talk, I think: “Do something, stop complaining. And do it with method, not with initiatives that fall out of the sky”. Companies should get used to thinking in terms of processes and applying structured problem solving to the management of human resources too, not only to the management of operations, assuming they are doing so there (I am an optimist). How big is the resignation phenomenon, and what size would be acceptable for the company? What are the root causes and their priorities? What countermeasures have been planned? How much benefit are they bringing? Which indicators are measured at each stage of the “employee life cycle”, from hiring to resignation? These should be the right questions to ask. Logic, numbers, method.
I can already hear the criticism: “People are not parts like the ones produced in a factory”. True. People have motivations, emotions and behaviours that “parts” do not have. They are much more than that. This does not mean that in human resources we cannot measure and act on the basis of numbers. Of course, the approach in human resources has to be more complex, culturally and historically situated, and there are other aspects that have little to do with a quantitative approach to research. But a great deal can be done before reaching such advanced considerations. After all, wasn’t it from this very aspiration that psychology was born at the end of the 19th century? Using the scientific method in the human dimension too, to move beyond introspective speculation that has little to offer in terms of concrete intervention, capable of acting on reality in order to change it.
The Inproov approach
So how can the problem of turnover in a company be tackled with method? An effective strategy cannot do without certain actions, such as:
- measuring the phenomenon over time;
- identifying the reasons behind resignations;
- once the priority cause has been defined, designing and implementing countermeasures;
- measuring the effectiveness of the countermeasures.
The good news is that where this approach is not used, a lot can be done with little effort. And the benefits come quickly.
