Retaining top talent in today’s modern workplace isn’t as complicated as you might think. According to recent guest Joe Mull, author of Employalty, employers must make a commitment to three essential aspects of a “destination” workplace: providing the ideal job, prioritizing meaningful work, and being a great boss. Simple yet powerful, these focus areas are the key to lasting retention.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Joe Mull is a widely recognized speaker and author, renowned for his expertise in helping organizations lead their people well. He established the prestigious BossBetter Leadership Academy and serves as the host of the highly acclaimed BossBetter Now podcast.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
THE EMPLOYEE EXPERIENCE
Before you read Joe Mull’s recent book, Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent In the New Age of Work, you might wonder what this new term, “employalty” actually means. “Admittedly, we’re playing a little bit of a trick on the readers here because you hear that word ‘employee,’ and you think that probably means ‘employee loyalty,’ which is what we’re striving for,” Joe explained. “But in the book, we turn the tables a little bit. ‘Employalty’ is a portmanteau of the words ‘employer,’ ‘loyalty,’ and ‘humanity.’ So we define ‘employalty’ as the commitment an employer makes to a more humane employee experience — because that’s what triggers commitment at work.”
Joe Mull went on to explain that social science research shows that organizations can attract and retain dedicated employees by focusing on three key areas: “ideal job, meaningful work, and great boss.” By analyzing numerous studies on job transitions and employee preferences during and after the pandemic, his book, Employalty, presents a simplified approach to creating a thriving workplace, or a “destination” workplace for employees.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Work Recalibration
“We know that, in 2009, about 23 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs. Last year, at the end of 2022, it was almost 51 million Americans, so the number has more than doubled. And when you look at that same period of time, we see burnout at an all-time high in the workplace. We see wages that were completely stagnant and have been for decades, and we see workloads exploding. Then, a pandemic arrives, and it forces people to recalibrate and reimagine the way that work fits into their lives. So all of these things are coming together at this moment right now to create this era where people are recalibrating how work fits into their lives and the kind of work that they want to do.”
Becoming the Destination
“If you took every unemployed person in the US right now and put them in a job, we still have 5 million unfilled jobs tomorrow. So there are simply not enough people to do all the work that we’re adding to our economy. So what we say in the book is that business owners and leaders need to embrace a mindset shift. There is no staffing shortage. There’s a ‘great jobs’ shortage. When employers become a destination workplace and give employees their ideal job doing meaningful work for a great boss, they end up providing great jobs that people wanna be a part of.”
The Ideal Job
“The ideal job is really made up of my compensation, my workload, and my flexibility. So compensation exists on a continuum of generosity, and it is true that the more generous our compensation, the more impact it has on our willingness to join and our willingness to stay. Workload is about whether I find my workload manageable or overwhelming, and flexibility is about whether I get some choice around where, when, and how I work.
And flexibility isn’t just remote work, right? We sometimes falsely equate the two, but remote work is just one kind of flexibility. So maybe I have some influence over my start time, or my shift length, or the days that I work, or who I work with, or the locations where I work. We know that if we give employees some influence there, it ups commitment.”
Going Beyond the Minimum
“You’ll see a lot of employers right now really evaluating their expectations of what one person can reasonably accomplish in a given workday. I know a lot of employers are finally admitting, ‘Hey, we’ve spent a lot of years operating at a minimum staffing threshold. What is the minimum number of people we can get by with?’ And that’s great in terms of your balance sheet, but as soon as somebody needs to take a day off or gets sick or somebody leaves for a new opportunity, you’ve got chaos and you’ve got workloads that then become absolutely overwhelming for others who stay. And so we know that where organizations are staffing up a little bit to disperse workloads across more people in the organization, the quality of life for everybody goes up and then retention goes up.”
Moving in the Right Direction
“People generally do a great job when they believe they have a great job. So if you create these conditions at work and you see commitment levels go up, guess what? Every metric you care about in your organization goes up. Quality, service, safety, reputation, revenue. You end up creating an ecosystem where you’re delivering a superior product and service. And so the numbers that you care about on the bottom line should move in a positive direction. But it’s not only that, Brandon, there are so many hidden costs to churn, to turnover, to retention issues.”
The Trouble with Wages
“Let’s acknowledge that the wages piece here is a harsh reality for a lot of folks. There are a lot of organizations that are having to raise wages to make up for decades of having been behind, and most of the organizations that are doing it are having to find that money in one of three places: shareholder revenue, executive salary, or new and expanded revenue streams. And that’s the nature of where we’re at today. Until two years ago, Brandon, the average salary for the median US worker had moved 10% since 1979. The cost of living had quadrupled, and so the wages reckoning that’s taking place right now is not a revolution. It is a making up of the sins that have been in place for years.”
Purpose, Strengths, and Belonging
“There are a number of things that lead people to believe that their work is meaningful. The three that we point to in the book — and that keep showing up again in research and in the studies that are being done about why people are leaving jobs — are what we call purpose, strengths, and belonging. Purpose: Do I believe my work matters? Do I believe it makes a difference? Strengths: Do I do work that aligns with my unique talents and gifts? And then belonging: Am I an accepted and celebrated member of a team?”
What Makes a Great Boss
“This ‘great boss’ factor is made up of three dimensions. We call them trust, coaching, and advocacy. So do I grant trust and do I earn trust? As a supervisor, do I engage in coaching? Which is not giving advice. It’s not telling people what to do. It’s asking open-ended questions in the right order to mine people for their ideas, for their insights, for their creativity. This is a really powerful interaction that actually gets to many of the other things that we’ve been talking about here, like leading people to feel like they have purpose, for example. And then the third dimension of ‘great boss’ is what we call advocacy, which is the catchall word that we’re using to talk about acting in the best interests of another human being. So if I’m an advocate for my direct reports, I don’t just care about the duties of their job, I care about who they are outside of work.”
LEARN MORE
Find out more about Joe Mull by heading over to his website, or grab a copy of his book, Employalty: How to Ignite Commitment and Keep Top Talent In the New Age of Work, wherever books are sold.