2023 is here and comes with unique challenges for the world of work.
Budget conservatism, consistent talent market shifts (quiet quitting), economic swings, rapidly changing workforce trends, and cultural transformations create a quite tough scenario.
Companies will continue focusing on talent attraction, engagement and retention in 2023. However, they will have to deal with complex, often conflicting organizational needs that call for creative strategies to respond to unprecedented trends and cultural shifts.
These strategies include cultural adaptations to meet ever-evolving workplace and workforce trends and new growth strategies to navigate market instability.
People and Culture professionals are primarily involved in solving this challenge.
Knowing how to prioritize strategies that help businesses and people thrive can be an overwhelming challenge.
In this article, we want to help people and culture professionals approach their annual strategic roadmapping by looking at 2023’s focuses for People and Culture strategies that center on employee wellbeing and can be easily tied to business utility and growth goals.
Talent Retention is what brings people and business together.
In 2023, the keyword for strategic people and culture roadmaps will be talent retention.
People are companies’ biggest asset. When people quit, businesses get heavily affected.
High turnover costs a lot of money and effort to companies, disrupting the business both at the financial and cultural levels.
Working on retention is about protecting and leveraging the most important existing resource (people!) and ensuring the company will be bulletproof through capacity+expertise consistency and the business develops safely (and solidly) through turbulent times.
Retention is a common goal serving business and people's needs.
Emerging workforce trends show that professionals have specific expectations and preferences that define their willingness to stay in their company.
- An increasing number of people choose to freelance to enjoy more flexibility and task variation.
- Remote and hybrid work options are highly in demand and deal-breaker in choosing one or another company.
- People seek a healthier work-life harmony, expect flexibility and invest in their wellbeing.
- Inclusive and empowering leadership is a top factor for people to join companies. Yet, leadership development is not companies’ top priority.
These expectations often don’t match the traditional workplace cultural trends, making it difficult for companies to succeed in People and Culture strategies such as talent attraction, engagement and retention.
We put together 6 strategies to help People and Culture departments build retention-by-design strategic roadmaps that create strategic planning to optimize people's experience while supporting business goals.
1. Employee Wellbeing
One of the most important factors in talent retention is wellbeing.
Toxic cultures lead people to burn out and work stress, compromising their ability (and willingness) to perform well in their roles.
Eventually, if the situation isn’t addressed, people who feel and get sick because of work are likely to quit – causing companies big turnover and cultural disruptions.
Retention strategies should be designed to protect and promote mental and physical health at work, building policies and habits that encourage people to create healthy work-life routines, prioritize rest, and have human-centric systems of productivity.
2. Workplace Community
In 2023, companies should focus on engineering meaningful experiences of connection for people at work so they re-engine their sense of purpose, nurture belonging and cultivate strategic synergies with their team members to hit performance goals together – more efficiently and… happily!
A lack of workplace synergy is a lack of efficient collaboration and communication systems among people.
When communication and collaboration break down, people lose their sense of purpose, feel disconnected from their coworkers (personal and social disconnection), from the work mission (professional disconnection), and end up becoming disengaged and unmotivated.
Employee disengagement is a high risk for your business operations (performances drop), and also for the quality of the workplace experience (culture!) – easily becoming a drive for quiet quitting.
Learn more about building and fostering workplace community here.
3. Remote Work Option
One way to get retention right in 2023 is to shift from strictly on-site to hybrid or remote employment models.
Today’s workforce is increasingly distributed and expects workplaces to offer remote or hybrid work options by default.
By allowing hybrid and remote work options, companies not only meet the modern workforce’s needs but get many financial and cultural benefits.
From the possibility of hiring from global talent pools and higher productivity to workforce diversity and workplace accessibility, companies win a lot by shifting to remote or hybrid models.
If going all-in with hybrid or remote models is challenging, companies can start investing in upgrading collaboration systems to prioritize asynchronous work, testing flexible working approaches and designing performance metrics based on quality instead of quantity.
4. Fair Compensation
Compensation and benefits are among the top reasons why people quit a job.
This is why companies should prioritize their compensation and benefits strategies if they want to support talent attraction and retention efforts.
Compensation and benefits packages start from fair and properly benchmarked salaries but move beyond remuneration.
Healthcare, paid time off, learning and development budget, childcare support and paid leisure activities can be alternative forms of compensation that add on and contribute to existing monetary offers and are likely appreciated by employees.
In general, companies that prioritize compensation and benefit philosophies give a strong sign that reward is a key cultural value.
It shows that they care about their people and are willing to invest in rewarding their effort, expertise and engagement.
5. Empowering Leadership
Leadership is culture in action.
Workplace culture is the number one reason people leave their company, and leaders play a crucial role in shaping positive workplace culture.
A strong leadership culture makes a difference in creating an empowering experience for people at work. Empowering experiences include supporting the growth of team members by leveraging their career development through mentorship, learning opportunities, constructive feedback and inclusive communication.
When leadership promotes unhealthy practices such as normalizing extreme overwork, bullying, biased performance evaluations or simply stopping at a task management function, it fails to serve retention-oriented goals. It makes it hard for companies to create an empowering environment.
6. People Development
Professional development is one of the most strategic approaches to talent retention, combining employee experience optimization and business growth needs.
Companies that choose to focus on people development choose to invest in people's potential to grow their skills and pour these back into the business by unlocking newly acquired expertise and contributing innovatively to the business needs.
Furthermore, fostering role mobility, learning cultures and opportunities for internal career advancement put companies in a strategic position to link people’s interest in personal and professional development and find in their workplace the activator of this growth plan.
Learn more about our 10+ tips to build a thriving workplace culture.
At FairForce, we focus on researching trends, designing best practices, and delivering holistic solutions to building and shaping culture and experience for workplaces that care about leading the change.
If you are ready to build thriving workplace cultures and need a trusted partner to support you in walking this path, schedule a FREE STRATEGY CALL to talk to our culture team.
