It’s easy for employers to view the much-discussed big resignation as a simple example of already in-demand knowledge workers realizing their value and moving for better wages and benefits. If you accept this assumption, the obvious answer is to bite the bullet and come up with your own offer. And that has been the stock’s response to all the labor shortages that have strangely erupted as the world tries to return to some sort of normalcy in the wake of the pandemic. No wonder economists and other labor market analysts are confused. One would have thought that after months of leave or total unemployment, workers would have been eager to return to almost any conditions.

As noted here, some organizations have sought to find out what is really going on. According to McKinsey & Co, the consulting firm, the Great Attrition – as he prefers to call it – is real and likely to get worse. The consulting firm says traditional tactics organizations adopt are doomed because leaders don’t understand what really motivates employees. In the UK, the shortage of truck drivers and others would be compounded by Brexit and the resulting return to their home countries of so many workers. But it looks like the shortages exist elsewhere, so something else is happening. One clue is provided by reports that drivers have been dissuaded from returning to the UK under a special visa regime, not out of disappointment over wages, but by washing and other quality facilities lower than where they must stop to transport their loads.

Rightly so, human resources specialists refer to “hygiene factors” when discussing compensation and benefits. Competitive salaries and benefits are, of course, a must when recruiting and retaining staff, they say. But what’s more important than leaders think are less tangible things, like being valued and treated fairly.

Omer Glass is the co-founder and CEO of GrowthSpace, a start-up that uses technology to help companies provide all employees with the kind of training and development normally reserved for senior executives. Stressing that the company is “not an actor of well-being”, he nevertheless affirms that by helping employers and employees to work better, it found itself confronted with stress and its consequences. The Great Resignation is in part a response to these – people have taken the time to re-evaluate what they want out of life, which has led to the talk of the Great Reassessment.

But Glass says other factors are also at play. The first is that, amid the challenges facing national economies, investors have made capital available to new businesses. This has created a lot of opportunities, especially in technology roles, making it difficult for established companies to retain their staff.

In such an environment, companies are going to have to shed old staffing habits, says Glass. Drawing on the thinking of Seth Godin, the marketing guru who coined the term “edge crafting,” he says companies should consider going to extremes in their attempts to hire and retain staff. For example, an employer could offer a four-day week instead of the conventional five-day week. “It sounds crazy, but it could be very effective.” Alternatively, senior executives could go to applicants for junior positions like they do senior executives or go one step further and take people from academies when they have no experience at all. Such policies could be risky, but they could create the genuine loyalty and sense of belonging that today’s employees are supposed to seek.

His argument is that in a world where most businesses offer the same types of benefits, it is as difficult for them to stand out as it is for hotels to distinguish themselves from their competition. It refers to the principle of seven stars adopted by Airbnb in order to take customer service to new levels. With often fairly ordinary hotels receiving four stars, five stars was not a big enough jump for guests to rave about the service they received. The founders therefore devised standards that deserve six and even seven stars.

It is not clear whether pushing things to such extremes will contribute to recruitment or retention or simply produce other as yet unforeseen problems. But a report released this week suggests that organizations could do a lot to address the lack of sense of fairness or belonging by being more explicit about upholding an ethical culture.

In an interview on the eve of the publication of the document, Ty Francis, advisory director of LRN, a consultancy that advises organizations around the world on ethics and regulatory compliance, said people working in lower sectors of companies often did not feel the culture the way middle and senior managers did. This is not a new development, of course. But there is a feeling that the pandemic has helped widen the divide as many workers who had no choice but to continue working face-to-face feel underestimated by those who might choose to work remotely. Francis thinks the problem is a lack of communication. “It’s all about the stunt,” he says. “The councils understand the culture and what it is. They realize it’s important, but they don’t really understand how it is communicated. More importantly, it is not measured. And, in the words of management gurus, what gets measured gets done.

LRN claims new report – The LRN benchmark for ethical culture – innovates, in addition to showing how a strong culture improves the performance of the company, by providing a framework to measure it. Its ethical performance model examines aspects such as the extent to which an organization is motivated and ethical, whether ethical behavior is a reward factor, whether standards of conduct are applied consistently across the organization, levels of trust and transparency and whether leadership shapes an ethical culture. It also assesses areas such as employee retention, customer satisfaction, innovation, adaptability and business growth. LRN’s extensive investigations led him to divide organizations into four groups, or archetypes, based on their progress towards achieving ethical cultures. These range from Inspired in that they exemplify all aspects of an ethical culture, to Competent, which covers organizations that are on track to Inspired by building the right structures and the like, and Requisite, which has established cultures but do not inspire employees. , at Nascent, who lag behind others and may in fact be toxic, with employees unable to accept that corporate ethics, leadership support or a healthy work atmosphere are present. Those at the top outnumber the rest by around 40% by conventional business criteria, making a strong case for investing.

Francis commented that while many organizations, including charities and nonprofits, seemed to struggle to create the right environment, the culture was “really simple” in the sense that it was about “fairness. “. He added: “It’s a question of morale. It’s about creating the feeling that we are there for you as you are for us.