Burnout is a topic that was there before the pandemic but definitely has been exacerbated as a result of the pandemic. Mental health and childcare are big topics, big concerns, big challenges for many of our associates; the physical and mental health not only of themselves, but their loved ones and their relatives. And finally, financial insecurity. All these are challenges that have emerged in the last 15 months that are impacting the productivity, the engagement, and ultimately the decision of staying with a company or taking the decision of leaving and going somewhere else.

Burnout is a topic that was there before the pandemic, but it has definitely been intensified. I was reading some statistics – I like to add statistics, I like numbers – and a recent survey that was done here in the US stated that 57% of the US employees say that they were experiencing burnout over this pandemic. That is almost a 15% increase year over year. And when we look deeper into the data it tells us that Millennials and women are the two groups that reported the highest levels of burnout. Along with those, also those employees – whether female or male – that have kids that are going through remote learning or homeschooling. So definitely burnout is a big topic, influencing once again productivity, engagement and ultimately retention.

People have had the time over the last 15 months or so to reflect and recalibrate on their priorities and the balance that they’re experiencing and that they want to experience. And as a result, a lot of people are making choices around their life, whether personal choices or professional choices, that are impacting their decision to ultimately stay or leave the companies.

A lot of our employees were forced to work remotely from home; a lot of us are still working from home. And our top priority, most of employees’ top priority was just adjusting to being home, working all day from home versus going to the office, while at the same time dealing with all the factors that we see on the screen, especially those who had to take care of family members, whether children that were homeschooling, or doing remote learning, or maybe parents that they were taking care of. And it was a period of adjustment, right? How can I get the work done? How can I be productive in this new reality?

I think now a lot of people are rethinking and recalibrating, in the sense that a lot of people put their careers on hold last year because they had to shift their priorities to this adjustment. And now they’re going to come back to their career priorities. And the question is, are we, in our companies, ready and prepared for that? Are our leaders prepared to have those conversations with their team members about their careers, and how that can look now that we’ve got past that point of adjustment?

Employees have various specific needs and they are expecting that we respond to their needs. The questions that they need to get answered are: how is this impacting me? How is this looking any different for me? What is it for me? And we need to be ready to answer those questions, and the best way to increase that personalization and customization beyond our policies and our practices is through our leaders and their ability to connect with their employees.

As we transition to this new norm that we all are talking and trying to figure out how it’s going to look, it is very important that we include that component of change management. How are we making sure that we’re reducing resistance, we’re getting buy-in from our associates, and we’re making that transition as smooth as possible into this new norm And keeping in mind, what are the needs of the employees? But also, what are the needs of the business? Which takes me to some final thoughts: how to approach talent retention. How we approach talent retention is not any different than what we’ve done in the past. But we need to keep a few things in mind as it’s becoming a more complex topic for all of us. So it’s very important that we identify a strategy and that has to be tailored for your business needs. We are all tempted to do benchmarks to learn what others are doing. But ultimately, you need to decide what is your strategy that is going to best fit the needs of your business. We need to listen to our employees. And then listen again; an important piece of communication is listening. We’ve done a lot of talking and I think increasing transparency in the midst of all the uncertainty that we’re living is important, but it’s very important that we listen to our associates. And we use different ways to listen, leveraging our leaders as well in this process. Think creatively and act strategically. We all have become very creative in the last 15 months, as a way of surviving the pandemic. But not only do we need to be creative, but now we need to implement the ideas and be consistent with the strategies that we pick, because if we keep switching from one approach to the other, we’re gonna create the opposite impact of what we’re looking for.