talent shortage Archives

From a business perspective, the turbulent year of 2021 will be remembered for “The Great Resignation,” when record numbers of employees left their jobs.

But when it comes to the worldwide problem of talent shortages across many industries, perhaps employers haven’t seen anything yet. New Year’s resolutions of retaining top employees or finding the right talents when recruiting may be even more difficult to achieve, if you believe surveys such as one conducted in the fall of ‘21 by LumApps in collaboration with CMSWire. Seventy-one percent of U.S. participants in the poll say the pandemic made them rethink what they want out of their career, and 63% have considered a new career in the past year.

All that data fuels concerns among many employers that the talent shortage will continue to be a major problem in 2022. Everest Group’s 2022 Key Issues Study shows companies’ No. 1 constraint now is “finding enough talent to run the business.”

This talent crunch, along with the trend for many companies to move from 100% remote work to a hybrid model or back to a fully in-person model, is causing business leaders to reconsider what keeps their teams happy and productive. Many are asking: How can we keep employees invested in and passionate about our brand in this new hybrid environment?

One key to keeping the best employees on board may lie in how well companies give them the opportunity to put their own skills and interests into action in making a difference in the world. In the LumApps/CMS poll regarding “The Great Reflection” among workers, among the reasons cited are heightened demands for flexibility and inclusivity in the workplace, more career growth and companies that walk the talk about corporate social responsibility. Indeed, employees’ special gifts and passions for social issue involvement contribute towards helping their company’s overall impact efforts and also to employees’ fulfillment: 76% in the LumApps/CMS poll are looking for corporate social responsibility and 73% want to choose employers with a reputation for supporting diversity, equity and inclusion.

Just as businesses have unique abilities and resources to solve problems for their communities, their employees have their own set of talents that can add a rich dimension to the company’s social-impact profile. Unleashing those talents can be as simple and informal as assigning appropriate roles to your employees for a volunteer project. If there’s a photographer on the team, for example, have them take photos at the event. Have a group that loves to haul things in their pickup trucks? Put them in charge of collecting the cans from your office locations for your food drive.

Over time, of course, you can become more intentional and strategic about how you use your employees’ skills. We do an employee survey or focus group with our client teams to identify employee interests such as public speaking, strategic planning, committee leadership, budget planning, and more. Effectively leveraging these skills and interests helps extend our client’s impact footprint in the community, even with limited formal staff resources.

Employees, especially the younger workforce, are looking for a deeper meaning in their work and to feel as though they are contributing to something impactful. Millennials are especially vigilant about researching and weighing the values and cultures of companies they want to work for. Gen Z is following suit, looking for authentic commitments from their employer to take action to solve the world’s problems.

This is worth the effort: recent statistics on corporate social responsibility show that 95% of employees believe businesses should benefit all stakeholders, including the communities in which they operate, and 70% say they wouldn’t work for a company without a strong purpose.

Employers are understanding that social impact is a critical component to an effective business strategy. In today’s connected and interdependent world, employees increasingly demand that businesses and their suppliers take part in creating solutions to the world’s most pressing problems. It’s time to fire up those special talents and passions to build engagement and loyalty.

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Maggie Z. Miller and Hannah Nokes are ForbesBooks co-authors of Magnify Your Impact: Powering Profit with Purpose (www.magnify-impact.com). They also are co-founders of Magnify Impact, a company that helps business leaders create effective social impact strategies. Miller has developed social impact solutions with hundreds of company leaders globally. Previously, she founded an international nonprofit organization to provide microcredit loans for thousands of women in Peru. Nokes has led corporate social responsibility for global corporations and founded an impact collaborative of companies in Austin, Texas.

At a time when global talent shortages are reported at a 15-year high, one key to keeping the best employees happy and onboard may lie in how well companies not only state their purpose and their values, but also prioritize carrying them out.

“When purpose and values are backed by meaningful action, you have the extraordinary opportunity to sharpen your company’s legacy – and have a better chance of retaining employees who otherwise might seek opportunities elsewhere,” says Maggie Z. Miller, the ForbesBooks co-author with Hannah Nokes of Magnify Your Impact: Powering Profit with Purpose (www.magnify-impact.com).

That’s especially critical these days when 69% of companies worldwide have reported talent shortages, and many employers are working to build more flexibility into jobs, something workers are demanding, according to a recent ManPowerGroup Employment Outlook Survey.

Miller points out that studies show firms that do a better job of practicing corporate responsibility can reduce average turnover over time by 25 to 50 percent. Employees want more than just a paycheck, although that’s important, too, she says. They want to feel that there’s some greater legacy to what they do each day and as a result they are drawn to companies that practice purpose alongside their profit.

Assisting businesses in finding and embracing purpose is what Miller and Nokes do. They are co-founders of Magnify Impact, a company that helps business leaders not only be prepared to react swiftly in times of crisis, but build a proactive strategy for effective social impact.

“Part of enriching your corporate growth journey is to move beyond purely transactional business operations,” Nokes says. “Purpose and values are the rock on which your business stands.”

And an essential element of that involves developing engaged employees.

Workers Desire Fulfillment

“Strong organizational values help cultivate fulfillment, where employees become active participants in, and ambassadors of, a company’s purpose,” Miller says.

People’s desire for fulfillment at work is strong, according to a PwC/CERC survey, which found that 70% of those surveyed said they would leave their current job for a more fulfilling opportunity, and one in three would consider lower pay to find more on-the-job fulfillment.

Meanwhile, Glassdoor’s Mission and Culture Survey 2019 found that 79% of adults would consider a company’s mission and purpose before applying for a job.

But one additional hurdle companies face in keeping employees engaged these days is that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on work and culture, Nokes says.

“Many companies will never go back to a full-time, in-person workforce,” she says. “Figuring out how to manage this new style of part physical and part virtual workplace is at the forefront.

“The pandemic and its reverberating effects raise new challenges for putting a company’s purpose into practice in day-to-day situations. How do you keep your people tethered to the culture in times of stress? How do you keep employees invested in and passionate about your brand when they’re not physically together?”

Miller and Nokes say it’s important to get employees involved in helping develop the solutions to those nagging questions.

Keeping It Simple – And Ambitious

While a company’s purpose and values can and should be ambitious, they don’t need to sound grandiose, peppered with flowery language or impenetrable prose, Nokes says. Some of the most successful companies state their purpose and values in simple and straightforward language.

For example, Patagonia’s purpose is “to save our home planet” and its values are “build the best product; cause no unnecessary harm; use business to protect nature; not bound by convention.”

Definitely ambitious. Also, easy to understand.

But purpose and values can’t just be feel-good ideas. They must be acted upon, or else employees will soon see that the company doesn’t really mean what it says, and they will go in search of a place to work where the purpose truly means something, Miller says.

“It doesn’t matter if you are in a beautiful corporate headquarters with your company’s values painted artistically on the wall,” she says. “Business leaders should ask themselves and their employees, ‘Do we make decisions based on these values? How often do we talk about them in leadership meetings?’ If the answers are ‘no’ and ‘never,’ it’s leadership’s job to get those words off the wall and into the hands of their people to use them.”

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Sidestep The Great Resignation: Keep Workers By Helping Their Communities

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