Focus on Developing These Skills if You Want to Keep Your Workforce

It’s no surprise that having high employee retention makes is extremely beneficial for organizations. When an individual leaves, they take both their unique skills and the institutional knowledge of the company and customers with them. Recruiting and hiring new employees can be costly, and it takes time to equip them with the same institutional knowledge that was lost. Meanwhile, as workplace social dynamics shift and reduced bandwidth slows productivity, team morale may start to decline.

If you want to keep as much of your workforce for as long as possible, then you need to find out why people leave their jobs in the first place. Digging deeper can lead to surprising discoveries.

OpenSesame and Lighthouse Research & Advisory recently polled 2,000 people to find out what issues about their jobs and their professional learning and development were most important to them this year. After compensation-related reasons, job stress and burnout were the biggest factors causing people to quit during the past year and a half. That’s not exactly a revelatory discovery, but when you look at ways to combat this burnout things get interesting.

Combat Burnout With Employee Belonging

The survey results are summarized in a report called "3 Key Learning Trends for 2023: What Employers Need to Know." This report suggests a few ways to reduce stress at work. Providing specific training on how to deal with stress, making managers better at their jobs, and making work environments more fair were all good ideas. But the data showed something else that matters tremendously: cultivating employee belonging.

Belonging at work means how much a person feels like they are respected, accepted, and valued at work. Through our research, we saw just how much this mattered for employee retention. The data showed that workers with a high belonging score were four times less likely to have dealt with mental health declines in the last year and nearly three times less likely to have plans to quit their job. They were also five times more likely to recommend their company as a great place to work.

Cultivate Employee Belonging Through Learning and Development

Employee belonging is linked to mental health and diversity, equity, and inclusion. We discovered that investing in one area resulted in improvements in others. So, if you want to keep your employees, it's a good idea to put money into making them feel valued, understood, and important at work.

Many organizations understand the importance of these initiatives. Of those surveyed, employers were six times more likely to say their budget for DEI-related programs had increased, rather than decreased, over the past 18 months. They were also three times more likely to say that DEI and mental health training should be provided in part or in whole by an outside content provider, as opposed to strictly in house, further underscoring the value they see in these kinds of investments.

The key takeaway from all this: If your company wants to keep its top talent, it can’t afford to treat issues like mental health, diversity, and belonging as afterthoughts. You need to make them top priorities.