“Unispace found that nearly half (42%) of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated.”
Some large companies are using return-to-office as a way to reduce their large workforce. Thus they welcome the attrition.
I totally transformed by operating model during COVID and moved to a 100% work-from-home arrangement. The biggest lesson I learned is that meeting in person with clients is far more important than working face-to-face with fellow employees.
Bulk attrition is like playing with nitro—not recommended.
The reason is that it is easier for the good employees to find jobs than the not-so-good employees.
The overall talent level drop can prove very damaging and in some cases fatal.
It is particularly dangerous in this modern age of specialization and computerization.
Losing a few key “experts” can cripple an organization—management may not even know how important some of these folks are—until they are gone.
I have told this story before.
I know one woman who retired a few years ago. She supervised a small staff (five folks or so) that did very obscure book-keeping work for a large organization.
Their computer system was installed in the 1960s and had never been updated—they were way below the radar, never had issues, so management didn’t bother to upgrade their system.
What management did not know is that this woman made manual adjustments before bills were sent to customers—maybe ten or so every day so a couple of hundred of adjustments a month. She had her own Excel spreadsheet that figured out the correct answer. This was necessary because the 1960s program had some bugs in it—and was never updated since the programmers had long since retired.
You may ask why she did not tell her bosses about this.
The answer was—she did—for many bosses, many different years, and they all told her the same thing.
“You are doing a great job fixing these issues manually. My boss does not want to hear about problems that we have already solved.”
Finally she gave up arguing with her bosses (who kept turning over—I think she went through seven of eight of them over thirty five years).
Her small staff turned over a lot as well—partially because they were overworked and underappreciated by senior management. This is what happens when you do your job so well that there are never problems—for decades.
Her staff did not want to learn about all the problems she fixed—they had enough to deal with....
Then she retired.
It took six months before the excrement met the rotating blades.
It cost the company millions of dollars and major reputational harm to fix the mess.
Senior management never knew what hit them.