Speaker 1: Are all your employees quitting on you? Can you not retain employees? Are you doing a really bad job at transitioning everyone to the new world of work? In this video, I'm going to share the seven trends that your company needs to stay on top of in 2022 if you want to increase employee retention. By the way, my name is Liam Martin. I run this YouTube channel and I talk about this stuff all day long. Let's go. Number one is fairness, equity and inclusion. The frequency of raising the issues of equity, fairness and inclusion has increased by 658% since 2018. These concepts include multiple aspects such as equal access to flexible work, geographic salary expectations. Location-based salaries is one of the most discussed topics in the running remote community and in the tech world. Compensation for new versus established employees in today's labor market. Companies are paying 20% compensation premiums to hire new employees. Is it fair to pay new employees so much more than established employees? Investments from different employee segments, companies are offering new targeted investments for specific segments of their workforce. For instance, additional financial resources to support employees with children. Number two, a lot of people are saying you should shorten the work week and it's actually better than getting a raise in salary. As inflation continues to rise, employers will find the compensation they offer is worth less and less in terms of purchasing power for employees. At the same time, the demand for a better work-life balance is growing higher. Four day work weeks are honestly becoming a common trend, not only for tech companies. Rather than trying to win the war for talent by increasing compensation, some employers will actually keep reducing the number of hours worked by employees and keeping compensation flat. Number three is hybrid and remote work becoming the norm for knowledge workers. Regardless of the return to the office plans, the prevalence of remote work has become irreversible. Honestly, the proverbial genie has popped out of the bottle. Most companies will have to allow their employees to work from home at least several days per month. Employers that don't offer flexibility will see increased turnover as employees move to organizations that offer a value proposition that better aligns with their desires. In addition, the hybrid and remote work norm, basically the geographic radius of the organization that someone can work for, will also inevitably expand. As the pool of potential employers increases, so does the attrition risk. Number four, wellness will become the new metric for companies to introduce. Wellness is not a new thing in itself. A Gartner 2020 survey of 52 HR executives found that 94% of companies made significant investments in their well-being programs. But unfortunately, most of these programs didn't get enough uptake in most organizations. Less than a half of employees actually took advantage of what their employers offered them. Now it's time to approach wellness as a new metric and measure the performance of such programs, as well as the key indices such as financial health, mental health and physical health of their employees to more accurately predict employee performance and retention. Number five, companies need to be intentional about D, E and I. Data shows that in a hybrid world, women and people of color prefer to work from home compared to white men, which are basically me, but I still like to work from home actually. And managers still have a bias against remote work and are more likely to promote and give bigger raises to their employees who come into the office compared to those who don't. Given that without intervention, gender wage gaps will widen and the degree of diversity within leadership benches will honestly weaken. Leadership needs to be taking a proactive measure to ensure that everyone in their company has equal career opportunities and access to networks that drive career growth. Number six, connected to that, I want to talk also about the distance bias that we uniquely see inside of hybrid and sometimes on-premise teams. Distance bias, which I think was effectively coined by Joel Gascoigne of buffer.com really talks about how inside of a hybrid work environment where you have some on-premise workers and some remote workers, the person who is closest to the decision maker will usually get access to more time with that particular manager. So case in point, let's say that I have eight people in a call with me, three of them are remote and the rest of them are in person. And let's say that we agree on strategy A. Well, after that meeting is actually over, a lot of those conversations happen off the books. They happen in that private kind of water cooler moment in which you might actually do program B. And then when that remote worker wakes up the next morning and opens up their email and says to themselves, why are we doing B when I thought we were doing A, that's a perfect example of distance bias. And this is really going to seriously impact the workers inside of your organization. And they're going to honestly want to go somewhere else. How you solve for that is make sure that there are no private undocumented conversations. All conversations should in essence be public. Every employee should be able to have access to the same amount of information as everyone else inside of the company, regardless of where they sit. This empowers not only employees to be able to understand what's going on inside of the business, but more importantly, when difficult decisions need to be made by the employer, a lot of the employees understand it a lot more because they actually have all the information in front of them. And the last trend, which I think is the most idiot proof trend, is allow your people to be able to work remotely, allow them to be able to do what they want to do with their time. If a worker can work remotely, then they're going to be way more happy than if they are stuck inside of an office. At least giving them the choice allows them to be able to say, I want to spend this amount of time in the office versus this amount of time remotely. They'll have time for their children. They'll have time for their family. And really long term, they're going to be a much happier, healthier employee. And you are going to be a much happier, healthier manager or business owner. So those are my thoughts. Please let me know if you completely agree or disagree with that. Pop them down in the comments below. And while you're down there, why don't you like this video and subscribe to this YouTube channel? It is indeed free. And we talk about this stuff all day long. See you next video.