Care Over Comp: Understanding Why Your People Are Looking Elsewhere For Work

* This article by MashTank’s founder, Michael White, originally appeared in Forbes.

People are quitting their jobs in droves.

This isn’t new information in 2022. We’ve all seen some version of the numbers on the “Great Resignation.” You have also seen that this isn’t just because of the pandemic. Yes, employees disproportionately affected by Covid-19 (frontline workers, women in caregiving roles) are facing increased levels of burnout. But it doesn’t stop with them, and it didn’t start with the pandemic.

This trend of quitting has been on the rise since 2009. Some might attribute this to the increased dialogue on mental health or the rising cost of living besides stagnant wages. As people get more confident leaving their 9-to-5s, companies (especially corporations that don’t quickly adapt to worker demands, such as being 100% remote) are scrambling to hire and retain to keep up with losing their people.

Ultimately, leadership teams have been tasked with hiring and retaining through two simple things: competitive wages and standardized perks such as tuition payback.

Here’s the problem, though: There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to employee retention, even raised wages. Yet this is often the only lever pulled by leadership.

Hang on, isn’t an increase in wages what everyone has been asking for? Yes, because the cost of living is high and increasing, even more so in desirable locations. But it’s hardly the best solution to employee retention and workforce happiness, which we should know by now has a clear correlation with productivity.

Compensation and perks are substitutes for actual care. If businesses want to survive an evolving working culture, they’ll have to get better at caring about their people.

Substituting care with compensation is a lot like knowing someone who’s nice but not kind; they’ll smile in the hallway but wouldn’t come to your aid in a time of crisis. Or, it’s like a person who’s generous but not genuine; they’ll send you an expensive bottle of wine, but if they bothered to get to know you, they’d discover that you’d much rather split that bottle with them and talk about space for an hour. It’s “if we pay you enough and give you gifts, you’ll think it’s the care and you’ll stay”—and workers see right through it.

So, what’s an actual solution? Genuine customized equity, instead of shallow check-box equality.

Corporate constructs (and legal teams) have rightfully led us over the years toward a focus on equal treatment. But treating everyone the same is a lazy person’s way of management. Plus, this employee benefits program is likely engineered by a group focused on cost (how little can we give in order to see a profitable result?). I call this weaponized benevolence, and get this, workforces are starting to expect better.

So if what we’re doing now isn’t working, we can’t just raise wages like our competitors, and we can’t keep providing the same equal benefits, what’s actually going to work long-term? What is genuine customized equity?

• Equal pay and benefits send two people to a steakhouse to get a nice prepaid meal. But if they both receive the same meal without an option to see what else is on the menu, one person is bound to be disappointed. For leaders, though, they both ate, and it cost the same, so, therefore, they did their job… right?
• Equal pay and benefits provide two people with the same sponsored investment class. While this is great for one person, the other person already knows plenty and would rather learn about the quantification side of marketing.

Do you see the underlying issue? Managers don’t know their people. They haven’t sat down with the first person to know they’re actually vegetarian, and the free meal at the steakhouse was more of an insult than a gift. They haven’t had a conversation with the second person to discover that, instead of an investment class, you could have just connected them to the marketing data person in another department and encouraged some mentorship.

Without knowing your people, without taking the time to sit down, have conversations, be genuine and show them that you care about them as a person, a raise isn’t going to cut it. You’ll lose them to a company that can—one that gives them the connection, purpose and self-actualization that drives happiness, not just the minimum resources for survival.

Lastly, what comes hand in hand with self-actualization, growth and happiness is discretionary time: the resources, communication and trust necessary for a person to spend more of their time (their life) with discretion. It’s freedom.

There is no simple, homogenous retention program that will work for a business. You (managers of teams) need to get to know your people enough to give them more of their lives back. We level up each time we move beyond equal pay and benefits or each time we make our business culture and employees’ jobs fulfilling. But giving someone more time to live the life they want is how you lock in the happiest, most productive, most aligned, most loyal employees.

If you’re unsure about how well you’re caring for your people, ask yourself:

1. Have I asked them what they want? If I gave $500 to each person on my team to spend on education, do I know what courses they would choose?
2. Do they trust me? Do they know that I have their best interest in mind, that I am competent in helping them achieve their goals and have more discretionary time?
3. Do they know why they’re here instead of with [competitor]?

What’s harder to copy in the market—pay or care?

The only true strategic advantage one can have in 2022 and beyond, the only way to attract and keep the best people, is by paying attention to the individual instead of substituting pay for care. There’s no one-size-fits-all for employee retention because retention has become so much more than pay and benefits. It’s become about growth, happiness and discretionary time.

The businesses that survive and thrive will be those that demonstrate genuine care.

* This article by MashTank’s founder, Michael White, originally appeared in Forbes.