I was recently chatting with a contact of mine in the US and they were sharing how they are already starting to experience significant turnover as the pandemic winds down and everything starts to open up. I use the US as a bit of a gauge for what’s to come in Canada, as they seem to be a few months ahead of us these days.

Research from Prudential states that 1 in 2 are going to start looking for a new job as the pandemic eases and 1 in 4 are going to leave their current employer. Wow, these stats are high! 

According to research commissioned by the Achievers Workforce Institute burnout, disengagement and better work/life balance were all contributing factors. Interestingly, 46% percent of those surveyed feel less connected to their company due to the pandemic and 42% say that company culture has diminished since the start of the pandemic. Only 21% said they feel very engaged at work.

With this in mind, here’s what you can do for employee burnout and engagement.

What You Can Do For Employee Burnout:

• Ensure senior leadership is acknowledging the burnout and encouraging vacation time and midday work breaks for movement or simply to recharge.
• Survey employees to see what tools they feel would help them with burnout.
• Ensure that this the burnout is not driven entirely by unrealistic workloads on employees.
• Educate employees through lunch & learns (now webinars) on how nutrition, movement and mindfulness impact resilience and burnout. For example, in our resilience training, we coach participants on how what they eat impacts their ability to recover from prolonged stress and how to use simply mindfulness practices to quiet their mind and improve sleep (in turn helping with burnout). Click here to learn more about our webinars.
  

What You Can Do To Improve Employee Engagement:

• Ensure the vision and mission of the organization is front and centre and communicated often from senior leadership
• Consider running a team building activity that focuses on health and wellness, like our wellness challenge. Throughout COVID and with teams working remotely, we’ve found our wellness challenge to be successful at building remote-team-camaraderie and boosting engagement. In fact, 86% of participants surveyed felt the challenge made work more fun and 88% of participants surveyed felt more connected to their colleagues through the program. Click here to learn more about our wellness challenges.
• Provide both formal and informal coaching opportunities for employees, through training and mentoring programs.
  

While there will always be some employees that leave for your organization for reasons outside of your control, there are so many that you can influence. If preventing employee turnover is important to you, please contact us to build a custom program to boost employee engagement, reduce burnout and ultimately, reduce turnover.