The talent crisis just got bigger: Plotting a course out of this perfect storm

We don’t want to be the bearers of bad news, but there’s more than a little rain on the way when it comes to attracting and retaining talented employees. In fact, three storm cells have coalesced and are bearing down on your organisation. If you don’t have an effective talent strategy prepared for this crisis, your workforce will vanish like an ebbing tide.

The first of these storm fronts is The Great Resignation. In the wake of the covid-19 pandemic, more and more people want to find jobs that, in a holistic sense, offer a better quality of life. The experience of lockdown and home working are driving factors in this quest for flexibility, greater autonomy and work with more purpose.

The next cloud on the horizon is the cost of living crisis. In real terms, salaries are decreasing, inflation is rising, and financial demands are coming from every angle. It’s not just families feeling the pinch: it’s businesses too. Cash pressures make it impossible for most employers to increase salaries.

Our third storm cloud has quite a big silver lining—providing the issues it presents are addressed. As noted above, employees are looking for work with purpose—jobs that make a positive difference to the world. For many in the modern workforce, pay packets are less important than finding an employer who shares their values. They want to work for companies committed to improving the world.

This change in values is particularly evident amongst Gen Z and Millennial employees, who now make up more than 50% of the workforce. A business is only as good as the people who work for it, so to stand a chance in this new talent market, companies need to match their values.

Charting a way out of the talent crisis storm

Let’s make no bones about it: a workforce mass exodus will cause potentially irrevocable harm to a business. But there’s no need to grab the life jackets yet. We can chart our way to dry land, and en route, maybe make our workplaces and planet a better place.

Step 1: Make your business a force for good

In the competition for talent, the organisations that are looking to make the greatest positive impact will attract some of the most talented people.

People are looking for a sense of purpose. That’s a relatively easy mission if you’re a C-suite of senior manager looking to make waves, but it’s much harder for the bulk of your organisation. According to McKinsey, although 70 percent of employees say their sense of purpose is largely defined by work, only  15% of frontline managers and employees say they can find purpose in their current day to day work.

So give them a cause they already believe in and put sustainability at the heart of your organisation’s business strategy. True, this might mean changing your company model, but nothing is impossible with enough commitment. Consider the Danish energy company Orsted. They radically reworked their fossil-fuel model to become a renewable energy provider.

Step 2: Reshape your Employer Value Proposition

You can think of your EVP as a sort of pledge—a guarantee to would-be applicants of all the good things your company culture has to offer.

Your EVP should make explicit every advantage open to employees, not just in terms of pay and progression, but in support and lifestyle too. Flexible hours, hybrid working, child-care facilities, and any other benefit needs to be included. It should demonstrate that your company culture offers a place where employees thrive

So invest in your employees’ well-being, and support them holistically to meet not just their career aspirations but their physical and mental needs, too. By showing that you share in your employee’s concerns, you’ll give them a deeper reason to stay.

Step 3: Modernise employee benefits to support the new values

This is an area where our Lumina platform can help. The climate crisis is second only to personal health concerns for the majority of younger employees. Through Lumina, your workforce can choose to invest in the Cushon Net Zero pension—the only pension that offers complete and immediate carbon neutrality.

Other Lumina benefits reflect current environmental values, too, offering employees the opportunity to plant protected trees and measure and reduce their carbon footprint. There is access to renewable energy solutions and the option to restore wildlife habitats and create employment for poverty-stricken communities.

Step 4: Let the world know

To avoid the growing talent crisis storm, and possibly even to benefit from it, you need people to recognise that your organisation is leading the way, not only as a wonderful, caring place to work but as a champion of the environmental and social causes potential employees care about.

You need to communicate the progress you are making with ESG and your Net Zero goals. Make it clear that your organisation isn’t interested in greenwashing publicity exercises but is genuinely committed to saving planet Earth.

If you do all this, your company will be viewed as a haven where the dissatisfied employees of other firms can find the purposeful, life-affirming work they crave. And maybe the perfect storm will blow the most talented applicants through your door.

To learn more about how to move forward, see why corporates can’t afford to ignore the net zero pension pot or how to reduce your Scope 3 emissions with employee benefits.