Good morning and good afternoon everyone. We are thrilled that you are here for the February Human Capital Watch. This is today's topic is very important to me. I've been studying retention for a very long time, and so we are going to talk about our latest research on retention. Before we start to think about that, these are the questions that we'll be answering today. So why is talent retention important? What are the driving factors of talent retention? How can organizations operationalize talent retention strategies? And what is the more accurate way for calculating the cost of turnover? Wanted to let you know that you can earn credit for attending today. It means you have to stay online for the entire webcast, but you can click OK for the three pop ups that will occur during the program. And so credit is available for participation in the live webcast only. So with no further ado, we'll go ahead and introduce ourselves. My name is Robin Erickson and I lead Human Capital Research here at the Conference Board. I've been here for 6 1/2 years and been studying retention for a very long time. And so I'm also thrilled to have Barbara introduce herself. And then Matt, Barbara, we can't hear you. All right. So I'm going to tell you about Barbara. Barbara is both a distinguished principal research fellow and a program director here for the Human Capital Center. She has collaborated with me on many, many publications and thrilled that she could be here. And you want to try one more time, Barbara, to say hi. OK. So her sound is still not working, but that's OK Matt, you can go ahead and introduce yourself. So my name is Matt Maloof. I'm a researcher here in the Human Capital Center. I am, unlike Robin, I'm just starting my journey on research and retention, but I'm starting here with with these three really interesting pieces. And yeah, we can. We can jump right in. Terrific. So let me tell you a little bit about our recent research that was just published. We have been studying retention as part of much of our research that we've been doing here at the Conference Board, and we realized that we had a lot of content that we could put together into some reports. So there's actually three of those. You can see the first one is cracking the code, why talent retention and psychological contracts matter, and then cracking the code, how to drive talent retention at your organization and cracking the code, calculating the truer cost of turnover. And you have links to all of these and you're also are able to download these slides. So we hope that you will be as interested in this as we are. We also want to thank the members who attended the round table that we did. And so the other thing that we're really interested in is hearing questions from you. So if you have any questions, feel free to ask them as we go along in the Q&A feature. And we'll try to get those as we go along or for a few minutes at the end. So with that, let's go ahead and get started. We're going to start with a polling question that says what percentage of your organization's employees leave within their first year. And your choices are less than 10%. Eleven to 20%, more than 21 percent or I don't know. And Matt, you know, why do we think that it's important to find out whether or not employees are leaving within their first year? I mean, but aside from the obvious answer of cost, it also, and I mean, I mean revenue cost, not just not just productivity cost or, or any of those indirect measures that may may exist of turnover. It's also just important for, for culture and morale. I think if, if you have a large, let's say you have more than 21% of your of your first year hires all leaving, leaving the company and it's not necessarily a great sign that there's a lot of this is like support for those first years, years coming in. Exactly. So let's see we've got so far we've got over 50% of you have answered. So we'll go ahead and close this in about 5 seconds 54321 and let's see what the results are really interested in this. OK, less than 10%, about 29% of you 11 to 20% is 36%, OK, more than 21%, seven and a lot of you don't 29% don't know. Well, that is actually really interesting because we were curious, you know, who would be attending today's webcast and it's really very interesting about knowing how many organizations, how many employees are leaving within their first year. Barbara, you've actually done a lot of work with our onboarding council. Do you want to comment? 1st I want to see if you can hear me. We can hear you, yes. OK, problem solved there. Yes, the the Onboarding and New Employee Experience Council of the Conference Board talks so much about the significance of a really solid onboarding program to boost retention, especially in that first year. And one of our members did a a study that showed a real correlation between satisfaction with the onboarding experience they had and their retention beyond a first year. So there's really solid evidence that investing in onboarding helps get employees through that really important first year. Definitely. And and as Matt had said, you know there is a revenue cost because most of the time if employees leave within their first year, they have to be replaced. And so there is a cost and we're going to talk about the cost of voluntary turnover in a little bit. So let's talk about where we're going to go today. Here's our road map. So there's four sections that we're for this content that we're talking about. The first is creating a strong business case for investing in talent retention. 2nd is understanding the importance of managing psychological contracts. The third is implementing 4 recommendations to increase retention. And then however much time we have, we're going to talk at the end about calculating the truer cost of voluntary turnover. With that, I would like to share with you one of my most favorite charts of all time. Those of you who know me and have heard me talk about this, you'll, you'll, you'll, you'll seen this before, but this chart tracks voluntary turnover against unemployment. So voluntary turnover is the quit rate and that's the blue line. And the black line is unemployment. That's the unemployment rate. And this, you can see that there's sort of when one goes up, the other goes down. And so this, I sort of think of it like this, you know, as voluntary is unemployment goes down, voluntary turnover is going up, right? So it's a pretty high correlation for those of you who are statistically minded. Correlations of .9 really don't happen in nature. So we do feel that there really is a connection. And what that means is that when unemployment is low, employees will feel safer to quit their job and go someplace else. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Matt, who's going to talk about some research from our C-Suite outlook. Awesome. So at the start of the year, the Conference Board completes its annual survey called the C-Suite Outlook, where we ask C-Suite leaders to share what is top of mind for them in in this year and in 2025. When asked about their top human capital internal priorities, you can see that global CE OS and global Ch OS both agreed that attracting and retaining talent was their number one priority. And you can't see the numbers here, but I can tell you that they agreed fairly closely. It was 39% for those CE OS and 41% for those Chr OS. And I can also share that for the CE OS, attracting retaining talent and enhancing people productivity where they're top 2. And then there was a sizable gap between those and 3-4 and five, while for chapter Arrows, attracting, retaining talent was their number one. And then there was a much larger gap, I think it was like around 20 percentage points between attracting retaining talent and upskilling and reskilling talent. So what this suggests is that BC Suite leaders have a shared focus on like building their workforce on, on maintaining their workforce and just ensuring workforce stability. So for nothing else, besides the fact that, you know, our, our, our bosses are caring about these things. We should, we should care about them as well. And so if we go from here, we move on to our, our, our next slide. This, this data comes from our Reimagine, Reimagine Workplace 2024 report. And in that survey, it's also, it's, it's also annual. We ask HC leaders specifically about their, their difficulty attracting and retaining talent. And if you look at this chart, this is the number of respondents responding very difficult or somewhat difficult. So a big number would be bad. And you can see from 2021 to 2022, there's that jump and then it's slowly decreasing year over year from 2022, which is a great sign. However, 37% for mostly professional and office workers and 47% for mostly industry and manual service workers suggests that there's still a lot of work to be done, right? 37% of of those HC leaders are saying we are still having a difficulty doing this. And why is that? Why? Why does that matter, right? Why should we care that they're having some difficulty doing that? Well, because it results in all of these consequences. You can think of them lost productivity, lost client relationships, lost institutional knowledge, we like to say heads and hard drives. We can fight leadership pipeline on sustainable increases in workload, lower employee engagement and lost investment in training. So when when all of these are factored, these are quite difficult and nebulous concepts to put a value on. Can you really say the price of, of what is that lost institutional knowledge when someone, when someone leaves, leaves, leaves the organization? And so it's important that because, because we don't know necessarily the exact cost this is this is this is providing we are paying attention to them and trying to glean as much data as we can when available. And when we glean that data, what can we do with it? Well, we can cut, we can sort of calculate a truer cost of voluntary turnover and we think about the total direct costs minus the interim reduction in labor. That's like the savings you're going to have if, if an immediate staff member or person leaves the organization plus the indirect costs, that's going to give you the truer cost of your employee turnover. We use truer. We know that's not a common word that that is typically, typically said. And the idea is that you may have sort of a picture of what, what that looks like right now or an idea of how much it's costing you. But the more, the more of these indirect costs that you can quantify and add to your, your, your formula, the better and truer picture you'll get at the cost of voluntary turnover. And so before we keep going, Robin, Barbara, did I miss anything? Anything you'll you'll think is worth worth adding? One Barbara, do you want to jump in here? I'm good. Thanks, Robin. OK, Well, I just wanted to say that many people think that it many, you know, the encounters, I'm using that term affectionately. The the they, they think that if employees leave an organization, they save money because usually the total direct cost to replace an employee is less than that interim reduction in labor costs. And so we believe that if you can even figure out how to quantify any of those indirect costs, you can actually come up with that truer cost from Floyd turnover. So thank you for that, Matt. We're going to go on to our second insight here, which is around understanding the importance of psychological contracts. And I know that word might sound psychological contracts. You're like, what is that, Robin? Well, a psychological contract is an implicit agreement between an employee and an employer that defines the expectations, the behaviors, and the perspectives of that new employment relationship. But the psychological contracts ultimately impact turnover intentions. And so let me explain. First, if you look on the left circle, it says the implicit expectations of the employee. So that's when the employer is expected to provide respect, fair pay, job stability and career progression. So that's what employees are assuming when they take a new job. Then if you look the middle circles, it talks about the implicit expectations of the employer. So what does the employer expect? Will they expect that the employee will provide quality work, loyalty and a high level of engagement? Another factor here is that you know, you'll give notice when you quit or you know you're you're going to really work. The employees will be working hard to try to get to achieve the organization's mission. So then, you know, if you have psychological contracts that are not broken and talk about that in a minute. So what do you get? So that's the fulfillment and that's where the employee feels valued by and values their employer. So it in many, many ways it comes down to the value that is perceived. So if we look at the next slide, so why is our psychological contracts really important to employee retention? Well, that sense of belonging and value, it leads to increased job satisfaction and higher levels of retention. You also have to think about the psychological contracts can be breached just like formal contracts. And what will breach or break a psychological contract? The things like layoffs, a restructuring of an organization that the employee doesn't feel advantages them. If a new leader comes on board and the employee doesn't like the new leadership, that can break. Their psychological contract. And also just simply merging with another organization that said different, you know, when the employee joined an organization, they didn't know that they were going to be part of another organization. So that has the potential to break a psychological contract as well. So then once that psychological contract is broken, how do you what do you do with that? Well, the employer needs to work with the employees to rebuild that psychological contract. So it's a two way street, right? It's not just the employer trying to rebuild the psychological contract. The employee has to want it to rebuild it as well in order to to stay, right. So what will help maintain and rebuild psychological contracts? Well, it's modeling behaviors that promote a culture of caring and respect. So it's important to communicate values of the organization at the outset. So what is that? Well, Barbara and Matt were speaking earlier about new hires, right? So it's important to be thinking, how are you demonstrating the organization's values to new hires right from the start? The next one is to build trust. And you know that that's not always spoken about, but if an employee starts out trusting their organization, their employer, and then that psychological contracts broken, that trust will also be hard to build. And the thing about trust is that it is hard to build. It takes a long time, but trust can be broken in an instant. And so that's, that's an important one. The third thing organizations and leaders can do to maintain and rebuild psychological contracts is to engage in open dialogue. What does that mean? Well, think about your listening style. How are you listening to what your employees are saying through your employee engagement surveys, through pulse surveys and, and the conversations right that that that leaders have with their employees. There's also a sense of transparency and authenticity that's needed, and so that that that provides sort of that space for open dialogue. The fourth way that you can maintain and rebuild psychological contracts is to prioritize recognition of employees, making sure that when employees do a great job, they are being praised and they know it. Especially for organizations that are going through a hard time, it's important to recognize those employees achievements and that will help maintain or rebuild a psychological contract. And then last but definitely not least, it's the importance of adapting to change and modelling agility, maybe doing some training around resilience, helping your employees be more agile. And it's very important to be thinking about. So how do you best help your employees adapt to change? And there's changes all the time, and they're coming so fast. So before we go on, Matt or Barbara, do you have anything that you'd like to add or that I might have forgotten here? You know, Robin, I'll just add almost as a foreshadowing that later on we're going to talk about the ways you can operationalize retention and really translate the drivers of retention into your approaches that work. And a lot of what you're putting, you know, you're, you're reminding us about psychological contracts is very much related to those drivers. Terrific. Well, thank you, Matt. Anything that you wanted to add? At the outset doesn't necessarily need to be when they're new hire. It could be when there's a leadership change, it could be when there's that merger, it could be when there's the start of something new. And so the idea there is that, you know, all of these are they're fluid. They can, they can. They can be done and and and and acted upon as time progresses. It's a great reminder. Thank you for that, Matt. So we actually are going to move on to our third insight here, which is what Barbara was just saying about implementing the four recommendations to increase retention. We'd love to know if you have any questions about retention at your organization, feel free to put them in the Q&A widget that you see there. But before we get started here, we're going to do a quick poll. So here's the question. Besides competitive total rewards, what's your compensation? What which factor you only get to pick one do you believe drives employee retention the most at your organization? And I know it's very hard because we only have three choices, opportunities for growth and development, workplace flexibility, leadership and culture or I don't know. So those are your responses, Barbara. What do you expect we're going to hear from this data? Oh, I always hate to think that I'm going to influence the outcome, but I am going to guest leadership and culture. OK. And Matt, what do you think? That that's that I would, I would have guessed workplace flexibility. I think, I think when we when we, I mean the question is, I think the question, the question designed well then that we by removing competitive total rewards. I think that's like a Tier 1. And then for me, I'd rather have to guess workplace flexibility, but we'll see. Yeah. No, this is very interesting. We haven't asked this question before. So that's why we're excited to have you all here today and answering these polling questions. So we have over 63% of you who've answered. I'll give you just 5 seconds and I will close the poll counting down from 554321. I know that was fast, but here we go. Here are the results. Oh, look at that. Wow. So guys, opportunities for growth and development 36% and then it's a dead heat between workplace flexibility and leadership and culture and only 3% didn't said said I don't know which is awesome, right. That is very, very interesting. Matt. What is the most sort of interesting thing that comes to mind when we look at these results? I did not. I mean, yes, there were, there were three main options aside from the I don't know. So it was natural for it to sort of be more even of a distribution, but I was really expecting there to be a stand alone sort of leader of the of of the pack. And seeing that that it means is that seeing that the sort of all three are, are are are tied together means that you really have to think about focusing on all three of them as opposed to like prioritizing one, one or two. Definitely. Well, we're going to turn it over to Barbara, who's going to walk through each of these four recommendations. Thanks, Robin. And though the reason we had those as the options for you in the poll is because our research, our research consistently points to those factors as the things that Dr. Retention as those of you who have heard us talk about our research before know we often when we start a study on a topic, we'll do a survey, you know, do some original research based on that topic, in this case, retention. However, for this study, we realized everything else we study has to do with retention. Our salary increase budget study is related to retention. Our Reimagined Workplace annual study has really strong findings around retention. If you read about the work we did around hybrid, you see the relationship with retention. Our annual job satisfaction survey has some really compelling data around what drives retention. A rapid response survey, which are like kind of pulse surveys that we do throughout the year have things to tell us about retention. And then our internal marketplace report, something that we worked on in the latter half of last year has a lot to say about retention. So what I'm about to share with you draws on all of those studies and I'll, I'll mention we don't have, you know, the charts up to show you, but I'll mention really compelling data points that really make tell the, the strong story that other than comp and benefits, which is sort of the, you know, the give. And these are the three things that Dr. retention, workplace flexibility, leadership and culture growth and development. And one of the things I was going to say, Robin, about the poll results and that you pointed out how it was pretty even distribution is these things are not discreet. They're interrelated, which is why I think sometimes you, you know, you see that that even distribution across them, they impact one another. One last thing I want to say about retention and that this is something, you know, we've talked a lot about in the months that we've been working on this study. And it, it, it's really important to me. I think that our organizations and even we as researchers tend to talk about retention and think about retention and worry about retention in a hot job market. And that's because of that, that data that Robin shared with you, you know her, her famous ex that shows that really high correlation between voluntary turnover. And when we have a hot job market, you know, low unemployment, that's when employees feel empowered to leave. But we shouldn't just be worried about retention in hot job markets. We should be. It's an Evergreen issue. And the reason for that is all of those things that Matt pointed out to you that are the costs of turnover, you know, turnover has really long term. It's got a long tail, it's got short term impacts, it's got long term impacts. So really structuring an organization and programmatically embedding these factors that Dr. retention have benefits irrespective of what kind of, you know, the job market goes up and down, unemployment goes up and down, retention matters. It's an Evergreen topic and, and I, I just really think that's important to point out. So let me share with you, I'm going to walk you through each of these four drivers. And 1st I'll talk about comp and benefits because I don't think the story is complete without, you know, talking about this kind of very obvious retention driver, which is competitive compensation. And we drew on the work that our colleagues have done around salary, increased budgets and total rewards in the last year. And it's a recurring study, I think an annual survey to really look at what about comp and benefits drives retention. And I want to tell you there's some guiding principles which really can be summarized and take a tailored approach. These guiding principles are transparency around the program and what leads to higher comp, what leads to bonuses, you know what what employees have to do in order to enhance their, you know, financial compensation. Equity is really important. Addressing pay equity through, you know, consistent pay audits and looking at equity across the organization is really critical. One thing we realized when we did our Gen. Z study a while ago is that that the generation Gen. Z is going to be like a third of the workforce, you know, any day now as boomers retire and as more and more Gen. Z, you know, workers join the workforce, they talk with one another about their comp in a way that higher generations never did that they, they, they're very transparent with one another, which kind of forces the hand of the organization to also be transparent about equity. So in a way that's, it's a really good thing because it's driving that, that equity. Third guiding principle is recurring and iterative assessment and adjustment. You see, we talk about doing audits, adjusting according to market conditions. This is something that you, you know, you're always looking at and fine tuning. And that's really, you know, part of how you, you can drive retention with Total Rewards. And then finally, as I've you've heard me mention this word, a tailored approach, kind of customized. You don't. And I think all of you who work in Total rewards know this. You know, spreading the peanut butter evenly over the bread and distributing like let's say, you know, cost of living adjustment equally across all employees isn't very effective. What you want to do is really tailor the approach to different job categories, you know, people at different stages of their career and making sure that the, the whole package, the total rewards package of comp and benefits is responsive to those needs. I think one example I want to share around a tailored approach is an example of there's a, there's an organization represented by a member of one of the council's that I support as a program director. And what they're doing is they really recognize that with generational diversity in the workplace that different generations have different priorities about, you know, what they value. So they include in their in their total rewards, for example, parental leave because adults that are starting families, that's really important to them and they can take advantage of that. They provide caregiver leave for members of the organization who might be caring for, you know, parents, elder parents. They provide sabbaticals which are which resonate, you know, with different generations at different stages of of their career. So that recognition that there isn't anyone, you know, benefit that matters to all employees and that even with just with generational diversity, those vary is really significant to driving content benefits. Are there any questions? Should I pause before I go on to the others? There are. And it's about. So the question is in the research, do you see compensation retirement provisions helping or hurting overall retention? So it's about the part of total rewards that's around retirement. Does do they help or hurt overall retention? And just to clarify, when we talk about like retirement benefits, we talking about kind of four O 1 KS deferred comp plans is that? I I would assume. That I know you. I will assume that and I would say definitively, yes, yeah, absolutely. And and I didn't. You know. I was just especially for the different generations, right? Gen. Z might not be as interested in retirement savings, although they should be since they, you know, very much increase over time. But. You know, older employees are they might take a specific job or stay at a specific job if they have a pension or if they have a good four O 1K match. So I, I would agree with you, Barbara, that I think it's very much affected. Matt, was there anything you wanted to jump in and add? That and and and and and. I don't know, in a way it can sort of increase, I guess a short term retention, right? Because if you say that to be fully vested, you need to be at an organization say for five years, you can sort of like use that to entice a little bit of of like a short term retention. But I don't know if that alone is enough. I mean, I think you need to focus on, especially for, I mean work workers who may not be as interested in that at the time. It'll be it'll be like something that is part of the puzzle, but not enough on its own. That's a really good point. And I actually anticipated that the question was going to be about retention bonuses which are are often asked about same thing. Just what you you said Matt kind of short term effective, long term not so much. So I'm going to move on to the next driver of retention, which is workplace flexibility. And we did, we, we did ask in a survey in our reimagined workplace, we asked the respondents beyond competitive pay what? And we gave them the same kind of list that you saw with other things as well. You know, what do you value most as a top benefit from your organization? And the answer very definitively was workplace flexibility. And it was above all these other factors that you saw. It was even I think above like bonuses as a top factor. Yeah. So very much a driver and a couple things to talk about with respect to workplace flexibility. I think, you know, the the key here is choice. An agency employees want a choice we had and we have a we, we have a chart in the report tied to this, what we're talking about today and also our reimagined workplace study that shows you that where there IT companies or organizations that have a mandated policy around workplace. It doesn't matter what that policy is, but if it's mandated, if it's a, a strong mandate, those organizations reported 45% different, like 45% of them reported difficulty retaining workers. And then those organizations that reported that they gave their employees a choice. Choice is an agency, you know, kind of like self-directed. Only 15% of those reported difficulty with retention. So you see this that's, that's a 3X difference between when choices involved, you know, choice agency, self direction versus kind of mandates and compliance. That really is the, the, the driver here. So what are the keys to making hybrid or you know, hybrid work, whatever that looks like where there's a choice involved or there there is even some remote work and some, you know, office presence We found. And there we, based on the study we did around Hybrid 2.0, there's really very specific drivers of how you can create a workplace policy that drives your attention first around transparency and being clear about the rationale for whatever your policy is. Be clear about that, communicate really specific expectations about what's OK and what's not OK, even when there is choice involved. And one of my favorite things is I think of it as like work fit, like recognize and acknowledge and, and really make possible that certain kinds of work lend themselves to being in the office and other kinds of work lend themselves to maybe doing autonomously and remotely, like data analysis, content generation, you know, collaboration, brainstorming, idea exchange done in the office. One of our favorite Robin and I both love this phrase, you know, that that came out of our conversations around workplace flexibility and hybrid work is the the office is the new off site, like using the office as the off site, the time and the place that you very intentionally gather your team, you know, to do team building and to really do relationship building and collaboration. That's primary and great use of, you know, time in the office. So making that match between the work and the place is really important. Other drivers that are, are kind of guiding principles around how you build a workplace flexibility policy that's effective in driving retention are executive support. You know, as, as with all things, executive sponsorship is so important to bring people on board and to really like kind of believe and have that trust that you mentioned earlier, Robin, that, you know, the, the way I do my work and where I do my work is being supported, you know, by my leadership. And then performance management systems are really critical that that's being found in, in terms of creating a, a really good hybrid strategy. Because one of the main objections is leaders will say, what are, what are people? I don't know what they're doing when they're not in the office. What are they doing? Are they working? And a performance management system that isn't just an annual check in, but that has, you know, very frequent touch points between manager and employee are really critical to having a hybrid work system. Hybrid work that works. So those are the things, you know, that that drive it. Now, here's another thing that I think often comes up in our conversations about workplace flexibility. I saw not our own data, but in, in a different study, 58% of jobs in the US can't be done remotely. They have to be done on site. And I remember one of my, my council members saying, and she's from Michelin, she said, you know, you can't make tires in your living room. Like there are limits to what work can be done remotely. So are there ways that we can provide choice and agency to workers who jobs cannot be done remotely? And yes, there is. And that's around time flexibility, you know, it's place and time. And if I have agency and choice around when I work my some scheduling flexibility, that's a great way to, you know, provide this kind of flexibility to all those employees. And there are many, you know, who remote work is really just not an option. So I want to, I want to be mindful of time and I'm going to go on to the third. Barbara, hold on. I'm sorry, Barbara. Yeah, we did get an. Important. Question and and that is. It's a two-part question. Why do you think corporations are ignoring this data and mandating A5 day return to the office and then this one's a little bit more difficult? What's the key to changing that policy? It's a little bit of a zinger, that second one, but the first. One, yeah, I'll try, I'm going to try to answer the the first one. I think a, a, a really powerful driver here is real estate investment. You know, a lot of organizations have invested huge investments in their leases of their office space. And there are some organizations and I visit, I've had the great privilege of visiting many of them of our members have invested in beautiful corporate campuses. That are designed to create a really wonderful employee experience so they're very vested financially in, you know, creating space for work to be done. And as much as I'm an advocate of workplace flexibility and I love working remotely, I really get it that leadership that's invested and made those kinds of investments would want to reap the benefits of that investment they made in that space. So I'm going to, I'm going to punt to you or Matt to go up to answer that second one. Matt, what do you think is the key to changing that policy? I think time sadly, but I mean they're the hybrid work has not been as well researched as like the traditional in office work and it has not had same number of years. So I think there's going to need to be a lot of time before we can sort of make solid conclusions. At the same time, it it also requires just like an openness to to to like the acquiring of that data. If if you give if you give hybrid work a try and say you, you discover that it has not been as productive right now. Well, that doesn't necessarily mean that like you need to throw, throw it out. You can just sort of make a change in test and and and move on and move forth and and find what works for your specific organization, but it is definitely going to be something that is going to require a dedicated effort. Completely agree with both of you. And I would just add that I think that another key is that when organizations start to have high levels of attrition, a lot of. Employees who are leaving, I think they will. Try to figure out well, how can we entice workers and one of the ways that you can entice many workers, you know knowledge workers, professional and. Office workers is is to offer. Flexibility, and we saw that during the Great Recession when organizations had to offer flexibility as well as higher salaries in order to entice employees. So it'll be interesting to see if in fact we have the Great Resignation 2 point O which. I think we will have. At some point in the relatively near future. But that's not our research speaking, that's just my prediction. But Barbara, I know you've got few more slides to get through, and so I'm going to let you. Let you take it away. Thanks, Robin. And you know, I feel like we could spend a whole webcast on any one of these retention drivers because they're complex, they're interrelated, as I said earlier, feel like we we can't do them justice in the short time we have. But let me just mention the other two and a little bit of insight about each of them. Next one is what we call relational factors. And actually that that term we can't take credit for. It came from a McKinsey study that showed that it really wasn't the transactional factors that led to retention. And, you know, performance and engagement and transaction would be like, you know, comp and benefits, like if you, you have adequacy there, then this other stuff. Relational factors are what really matter. And what do we mean by relational factors? I, it's about leadership and it's about culture. And I, I mentioned our studies that really revealed all this insight about these drivers of retention. So our annual job satisfaction survey showed a gap in satisfaction levels between, I'll call them leavers and stairs. So we asked the respondents, are you, you know what, what's the likelihood that you will leave your organization in the next, I think it was year. And if they, if that was high, we put them in the leavers category, the stairs, where are the ones who said, no, I'm not likely to leave. And the satisfaction level between those two categories with quality of leadership and organizational culture was a massive gap. So you could see that culture and leadership, which are interrelated, and that they have to do with these relational factors around a sense of belonging, sense of purpose, shared identity, interpersonal connections. Those matter greatly when it comes to retention and culture. I like to think about and talk about culture as it's the way we treat each other every day at work. So how we get treated every day at work and how leaders model behaviors that then gets cascaded down and imitated and reinforced, you know, by everyone else in the organization. That's what creates the culture. And that is so inherent to people's decisions around leaving and staying at, as our our research has indicated. So leaders, you know, two other points I'll make really quick. One is that the way leaders behave and modeling of behaviors and how they treat each other and their employees every day is so important to this. We, we use the term culture of value and caring that really, really is this, you know, kind of connective tissue that creates your attention. And then finally, there's there's strategies that you can use to demonstrate and to create and reinforce a value of culture and caring. It starts with onboarding. We talked about that before and you can see more on that in our report. Stay interviews are really effective way that managers can programmatically, you know, implement touch points with their direct reports around what would 'cause them to stay at the organization. That's a way to model, you know, value and a a culture of value and caring and well-being programs and the way they're designed as well, just to to name a few. OK. Any questions on this one or should I go on with the last one? Let's go on with the last one. All right, let's do it 'cause I am, I am at time, I know I am. All right, last, and this is the one that you all said was the most important driver, opportunities for growth and development. And just a few things I'll say about this. That satisfaction survey I told you about, you know, with the gaps in satisfaction between the leavers and the stairs, guess what was third after culture and leadership, opportunities for growth and growth and development go hand in hand. Now you think of growth as like my opportunity to get promoted, maybe get, you know, other experiences in the organization, but do that. You can't do that without good development opportunities. So those things are, are really strongly interrelated and go hand in hand. My so, so we had, we saw a study that, or we did a study that we referenced in our report that showed that many workers reported that they would leave a job if their development needs aren't met, that would be a reason for them to leave. And in times of disruption, especially when like disruptive technologies happen. AI is just the latest of those, by the way, but it is one now that becomes especially important that workers have the trust that you will provide them with, you know, the skills they need to succeed and thrive even with these disruptive factors and and to, you know, be able to leverage them. And then it goes way beyond providing just content on an LMS and just some of the ways that you can drive growth and development beyond just, you know, providing content and training opportunities are, well, just to name a few there. There are apprenticeships, shadowing, rotational assignments, tuition, tuition pay plans, especially those that are direct pay as opposed to reimbursement are especially effective where you have a workforce that has a lot of workers without college degrees. And then last thing, we have a whole paper on this for you if you're interested, is an internal talent marketplace platform is a wonderful way to drive growth, development and, and retention. It enables internal mobility. It can, it, you know, gives you transparency of opportunity and you can do career mapping. You can. The way I think of it is I can see my future at this organization and an internal marketplace helps me do that. So with that, Robin, I think we'll go on. Is it to you next I believe. It is. It is, yes. So we are going to very quickly go through a turnover calculator and I'm going to skip. The poll because. We want to make sure that we have a few minutes for your questions, but before we start looking at these at the, you know, how to calculate the value of turnover, I just wanted to mention one of the questions that came in which was curious how you all view retention versus attrition. Might the drivers of retention be different from the drivers of attrition? For example, could culture be a reason people stay? But. Career growth opportunities, the reason people leave and IA 100% believe that there can be some differences. I think that perhaps the top five reasons might be the same, but there might be a different order of priority. But that's an actually we should, we should do that. Barbara and Matt, in one of our upcoming surveys, we should say, what would it take to get you to leave and what would it get to take you to stay? So we we should do that soon. But interesting, I think of them as inverse, like the absence of something or the presence of something. We could see, yeah. So I'm going to fly through this. The good news is, is that you have all of this content that you can download and we are happy to answer questions that come in afterward. So we're going to skip the poll. Sorry. So looking at, you know, this calculator, like voluntary turnover reduces direct labor costs in the short term. So we've found some data and where we are. Feel. Comfortable citing it. So all of the sources are at the bottom if you're interested in where we got these figures. But you know, we found that if it takes 54 days to fill a position and your cost per employee is 46.21 dollars per hour, the average annual labor costs, then you've got an interim reduction in labor costs. So you're going to save that money if someone leaves. However, the total direct cost of hiring an employee offsets those savings, right? Because it doesn't cost as much to hire as I had mentioned earlier on. So again, Matt went through these and you've got to, we have a lot of indirect costs. That if you're able to. Quantify any of these, you'll be able to calculate a truer cost of turnover for your organization. And the one that we picked to try to quantify is is lost productivity. And So what does that mean? So if you have a manager who quits their job and it takes 54 days or more, perhaps. To. Replace that employee, then you're losing the productivity of that manager from those 54 days as well as it's going to take them time to get up to speed of the and they may never get up to speed to the level where the, the lats where the manager who left was. So we, we looked at, So what, what's the lost productivity? How long does it take to get to full productivity? And again, we've got some figures as examples there. You can see that if your lost productivity time is 282 days because you've got your average time to fill is 54 on the left, your average time to full productivity is 228 days. So you can see on the right that that comes to a pretty big number, right? You've got a lost productivity cost here of over $200,000. So why is that important? Well, when you start to think about formula to calculate, you can whatever cost that you can put in for those indirect costs. So this one has lost productivity. But you got your total direct cost to replace an employee. Of around 5700 is on an average, you got an interim reduction in your labor cost. So again, remember that that's the $7000 that bean counters think they're going to be saving, but nobody's paying attention to the time that's lost through productivity because it takes so long to bring a new employee up to full productivity. So there you can see that there's a truer cost of employee turnover for exiting employee is $229,000, which is a pretty big number. So this is a quick example. If an organization can decrease its voluntary turnover by just 1%, it can save nearly $57 million in one year. So this is a big organization. You got 25 thousands in your 25,000 employees in your organization. You have an average turnover and turnover is almost $230,000. What's the potential cost to the organization? Well, you take your number of employees times your average turnover rate times the total cost of employee turnover, and you come up with a really staggering number of $572.7 million in one year. So if this. Organization was able. To. Decrease its voluntary turnover by just 1%. It could save nearly $57 million in one year, which makes a really good business case for trying to help your organization think about supporting retention efforts with all of those things that we were just going through and retention does cost less than attrition. So before I turn it over to Matt to take us. Home. Did we have any questions come in? We did and that go ahead, Matt, are you going to say? They're just generally about retention rather than the calculator, so if you want we can circle back to them now or or after we do the closing, whatever you prefer. Let's That's a good. Idea. Yeah. Well, that's a great idea. We'll circle back to them so. I'm going to turn it over to you, Matt. So then super quickly just just sort of in in summary of of of of what you heard this morning slash afternoon with us. There are a a significant number of indirect costs associated with voluntary turnover and it is worth your while to sort of invest the time to learn how to, to quantify and and subsequently improve upon that that turnover. And, and we have 4 specific drivers that we think can can assist you in doing so. Being that tailored approach to compensation and benefits workplace flexibility when possible and also schedule flexibility to Barbara touched on that as well, focusing on relate those relationship relational factors and then opportunities for growth and development. And the idea is that if you use these 4, you can help build a better and retained workforce that will result in not only business success, but organizational success as well. And then to just as some additional resources that were sort of touched upon in, in this, this present this webcast and as well in, in the reports is that this, this, this research comes from a series called Cracking the Code. So if you're on our website and you type that in, you'll easily find these three pieces. And then the other additional sources that Barbara sort of mentioned when going through those slides. Additionally, we have we have upcoming web casts. The next three are looking at the ROI of employer of employer branding efforts. The critical role of Chr was in the boardroom in April and in the state of US job satisfaction, another one of our annual surveys. And in May we have our Navigating Washington hub. If you'd like to sign up for, for emails from us to stay ahead of the new policy landscape with, with all that is going on, please feel free to register on our website. And then we have upcoming events as always. So we have our people first to do transformation event in, in May in Brooklyn, NY. We have our people first opportunity access in June and then people first reimagining talent and rewards in October. So with that, we can sort of dig in to those questions. Yeah. I'm going to just take us back to the insights page as we answer the questions that came in and. Matt, I have a question for you, which was, you know when? We did the job satisfaction survey looking at the levers and the stairs. Did we look at the 10 year trends to see if there was an impact? I don't believe we did, but that's, that's a good, a good like area to go back to. We, we looked at general, general tenure to see where people at different stages in their tenure were satisfied with different facets of their, their experience. And just from memory of like what I can recall that I think was super important was that the, or relevant to, to retention was that workers who stayed and had a higher tenure were more satisfied with their work life balance. They are more satisfied with their organizational culture. And so some of the similar variables and factors that we talked about being important also, I mean naturally led to workers being retained for longer. And you know, that can that can be a two way correlation like that two way causation, I should say, right, they kind of influence each other. And real quick and Lee, you had two great questions. The one about that's a great trends, 10 year trends. Your other question was about what our thoughts are around the return to work policies being used as a way to get people to voluntarily leave. And I think one way I will answer that is to say that, you know, we, we've, we've talked a lot today about transparency and about trust and about open communication and being really clear about the intention behind actions. And I think that those kinds of policies are not consistent with those attributes that we've been talking about. Rob, what would you add? Yeah, I would just add that any organization that admits this formally or informally. Remember social media? Goes a long way. It will break the psychological contract of your remaining employees. So I think it's really important to be thinking about if you are doing this, then it it makes sense to, you know, offer better plans, right? Better buyouts of people leave because we do. I mean, everything that we were talking about earlier around flexibility. A lot of employees, especially those who are farther along in their careers are really looking for the flexibility and appreciate the ability to work from home some days of the week because it better fits their lifestyle. And so that's how I would answer that. Matt, anything that you'd like to add as we close this out? Just that whoever, if they are making that decision, I hope that they have spent a vested time in like making sure that, that that data is leading them to that right conclusion. Because as we saw just a little bit earlier, that over the long run, turnover is not going to like a be a good way to save you money. So if you're just doing it as an immediate short term, make sure that like your numbers are absolutely correct. And with that, well, thank you all for being here. I'd like to thank. Barbara and Matt, my co-authors. For these reports and we hope you all have a wonderful day. Thanks so much. _1740164680857