Employee turnover is an costly business. In 2022, it value the common Canadian employer $41,000 to rehire and retrain a employee changing one who’d left. (In 10 per cent of instances, these bills, which additionally think about misplaced productiveness, prime $100,000.)
According to a 2022 Randstad survey, 36 per cent of blue collar staff and 21 per cent of white collar staff had modified employers within the final 12 months. While motivations differ—larger wage, higher advantages, extra flexibility—the message is obvious: In immediately’s tight labour market employers should be proactive about tackling worker attrition, stat.
Employee retention has been on Purolator’s radar since earlier than the pandemic. In 2019, the 63-year-old Canadian courier was going via what president and CEO John Ferguson calls “a period of significant change.” The progress of e-commerce meant a serious shift for an organization that had primarily performed business-to-business supply. To sustain with shopper demand, they had been re-training current staff, and employed 3,000 new ones over three years, bringing the workforce as much as 15,000 throughout Canada.
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Ferguson realized Purolator was more and more changing into a “people-focussed” business, the place regardless of automation and know-how, the well being of the corporate was straight tied to the wellbeing of the people who bought a package deal from A to B. “How you treat people can define you as a company. It can differentiate you and build long-term success,” says Ferguson, who noticed investing in worker wellbeing initiatives as a proactive step, fairly than a response to any points attracting and retaining staff.
So Purolator tapped health-care supplier Cleveland Clinic Canada in 2019 to construct a well being and security program with a larger deal with worker help. Combining its personal analysis on making a psychologically protected work surroundings with worker suggestions—together with surveys despatched out to staff and their households—Cleveland Clinic’s Dr. Shaan Chugh labored to create an attrition technique that took under consideration psychological, bodily and social wellness.
A key a part of this was an elevated deal with psychological wellbeing. For occasion, whereas the courier trade as an entire tends to deal with supporting bodily wellness because of the demanding nature of many roles, Purolator added extra psychological well being help to its advantages program once they acknowledged it was an worker want, rising annual limits for these companies by not less than 100 per cent throughout all plans.
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The firm additionally added digital remedy as an possibility, and widened the record of practitioners coated by advantages to social staff and counselors. As a outcome, worker use of those psychological well being assets went up 150 per cent between 2020 and 2022. “When people are healthy and happy, they’re more committed and dedicated to their work on a day-to-day basis,” says Dr. Chugh.
When the pandemic hit, the methods they’d put in place helped Purolator—whose workforce had been designated frontline staff—and enabled the corporate to reply rapidly to the wants of its workers, whether or not that was rolling out entry to digital well being care and on-line programs instructing psychological well being administration methods, or sending “meditation trucks” out to supply depots that enabled staff to spend ten minutes chatting to an professional about mindfulness.
“If we had not done this, and just said, ‘We don’t care what you’re going through, you’ve got a job to do,’ we could have lost half our workforce”
Post pandemic, this system that got here to be often known as “Purolator Health” continues to evolve. One of the most recent issues Purolator has launched is the Mood Insights cellular app, which asks drivers to examine in on how they’re feeling all through their day. Using AI-based predictive temper monitoring, this anonymized information is then shared with crew leaders to assist them acknowledge any rising points and sort out them with the required help. (There’s a direct hyperlink between driver stress and office accidents, so it’s thought it will enhance worker bodily security too.) Piloted in Calgary and Windsor, Ont., it will likely be rolled out throughout the 5,000 driver fleet this yr.
The numbers validated their strategy: In a time interval characterised by the Great Resignation—when staff had been extra open to leaving roles, between 2021 and 2022, Purolator noticed a 12 per cent discount in attrition. “We did so much trying to put our arms around our people, and it really did insulate us,” Ferguson says. “If we had not done this, and just said, ‘We don’t care what you’re going through, you’ve got a job to do,’ we could have lost half our workforce.”
Source: canadianbusiness.com