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By Sharon Florentine and Mary K. Pratt

Talent is your biggest asset, and while you’ll never eliminate employee turnover, the following strategies can help you keep your best.

News of the Great Resignation isn’t overblown.

Some 4 million people quit their jobs in July, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. And companies reported a record-breaking high of 10.9 million open positions. The IT profession is feeling the effects of that churn, with 80% of tech managers saying they’ve seen an increase in turnover in 2021, according to staffing firm Robert Half.

Seeing all that talent walk out the door is challenging, but losing top workers is even harder — and happening more and more.

“It’s harder to hold onto top-performing superstars when the market is throwing money at them,” says Kim Curley, vice president of workforce readiness consulting at NTT Data Services. “Most companies do not or cannot react quickly enough to either prevent the loss due to a big salary increase offer or to successfully negotiate a satisfactory counter offer.”

But before you can implement a plan to increase employee retention, you need to determine why valuable employees are leaving. Here are the most common reasons top tech employees jump ship.  (more…)

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By: Eva Sage-Gavin

There are many words for workers: employees, talent, staff, teammates and colleagues, to name just a few. But at the end of the day, what do we mean? We mean people—human beings with lives, families and ambitions.

Unfortunately, for many people, the hope and dream of a good job is currently out of reach. New research from Accenture and the Harvard Business School’s Project on Managing the Future of Work shows that more than 27 million people in the U.S. fall into the category of “hidden workers.” They’re people who want to work and possess the skills that employers seek—which would be great if organizations with good jobs could find them. The challenge is that many of these workers are not easily accessible at scale.

What’s behind this paradox? A major factor is how companies search for and screen candidates. At a time when the skills gap is growing and the labor market is tight, some of our current hiring systems may automatically exclude qualified workers from consideration—caretakers, veterans, persons with disabilities, immigrants and refugees, formerly incarcerated individuals and many more. According to the research, a quarter of these workers have college degrees in addition to their existing skills and experience.

A significant majority of employers (88%) believe that qualified, high-skills candidates are screened out because they don’t match the exact criteria defined by common job descriptions, such as having a four-year college degree, which may not be necessary if people have the right skills. That number rises to 94% in the case of middle-skills workers with more than a high school diploma but less than a four-year degree.

(more…)

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By Kristin Stoller

For as long as Keyla Cabret can remember, diversity has been a priority at Aflac. Years before companies started boasting equity and inclusion initiatives, the insurance giant was creating diverse pipelines, recruiting Black high school students in Columbus, Georgia, for its internship program.

That’s how Cabret got her start at the company: In 1995, the then high school sophomore worked two hours a day as a part-time human resources intern. Some 26 years later, she’s come full circle as Aflac’s director of diversity, equity and inclusion.

“It’s been a life-building investment. That was an investment in me and the program the company had. I’m really proud of the foresight we had,” she says. “For young professionals like myself, there has always been an opportunity here. I’ve never had an issue of seeing myself in a lead role. I’ve had plenty of examples of success.”

Those examples still exist today. At the end of 2020, Aflac reported that 46% of its U.S. employees are from underrepresented communities, while 65% are women. And roughly 64% of the company’s board is made up of individuals from both of these groups.

(more…)

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by Adam Bryant

Many powerful forces push high-performers into bigger jobs. But we should ask if that’s the right move.

If you are good at your job, all sorts of push–pull forces within your organization—and society at large—will propel you into bigger roles with more responsibilities, including managing people for the first time or taking on larger teams.

And many people understandably want those bigger jobs, and the reasons go beyond the pay bump that often comes with promotions. It’s called a career ladder for a reason: it’s something to climb. As human beings, we are wired to strive for greater status, and all the markers that come with it: titles, more pay, and a better office (at least, back in the day when people had offices). Social media platforms amplify that dynamic, because we share our titles with the world.

Within organizations, there can also be an assumption that all high-performers want to move higher. So, as managers assess and develop talent to be future leaders, the default belief at many companies is that people will want to move up—a point that I hadn’t quite appreciated until I interviewed Shawna Erdmann, the senior vice president of learning at Comcast, the telecommunications multinational based in Philadelphia. (more…)