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Your biggest challenges for 2023

Your biggest challenges for 2023
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Feedback is foundational to our culture here at Impact. Every programme we run is not only a learning experience for our clients, but also for us. With this in mind, we would like to thank all of you who took part in our recent Global Client Experience Survey. 

We are delighted that 98% of you rated us as excellent or outstanding in helping you to achieve your results as a client partner. One of the most interesting findings was the reasoning behind the net promotor score you gave us. Three of the top four reasons behind our score of 90.8% related to our approach as a human-centred organisation, including: our people, customer care and collaboration, and quality facilitation by our consultants. An organisation is, fundamentally, a group of people; and an organisation’s success is their people’s success. Nothing could have made this clearer.  

Finally, we asked you what your biggest people challenges are for the year ahead. This is what you said:   

  1. Retention 

  1. Leadership development 

  1. Culture  

  1. Change 

  1. Talent attraction and recruitment 

  1. Engagement 

  1. Hybrid environment 

  1. Wellbeing and overwhelm 

  1. Behaviour change 

  1. Training  

Retention 

Retention emerged as a clear leader, with 32% of you sharing that this is your biggest people challenge. Let’s take a deeper dive on this… 

High turnover is extremely damaging for any organisation, with profound consequences for not only productivity and performance, but also culture, brand, and employee morale. So why is this something that so many organisations are struggling with right now?  

The post-pandemic shift in values and priorities has led to an increase in people seeking a new role or new employer. As the world of work has revolutionised, those companies who have not kept up with shifts in remote and hybrid working are losing out. As are organisations with unethical practices, as individuals start to make more decisions based on their values. Indeed, nearly two-thirds of employees will leave if they do not see their values reflected in their employer.  

For many, as the cost of living crisis hits, salary and benefits have become a key crunch point. Further, career growth potential and learning and development opportunities also play a critical role in job satisfaction. Even pre-pandemic there was a strong correlation between employees resigning because they could not see a future in the business, and this trend has only strengthened as remote working has afforded people a much wider range of possibilities for their future. 

Feeling valued as an employee is vital, and this depends on a variety of factors, such as salary and benefits, recognition and progress, and continuous feedback. Employee appreciation is a hugely powerful but often neglected aspect of leadership, and employees who feel they are not valued enough are twice as likely to quit within a year. 

Finally, as wellbeing has risen up the agenda, organisations frequently lose out if they fail to prioritise this. Accepting stress and burnout as part of an employment contract is a thing of the past, and employers must double down on their communication, expectations, leadership, and wellbeing offering if they are to safeguard their people’s health and prevent them from walking out the door.  

A human-centred approach for retention 

From the great resignation of 2021 to the emergence of quiet quitting, it’s clear that people engagement and retention is a problem that is here to stay. But it’s a problem that can be solved, and the best place to start is by adopting a human-centred approach.  

A human-centred organisation is one that puts its people at the heart of everything it does. Through a key blend of challenge, support and empathy, employees feel valued and engaged, as well as motivated to learn and grow. A human-centred organisation is one that prioritises knowing its employees as individual human beings, and providing each of them with a clear, tailored pathway for their future – crucially, one that is within the business, not outside of it.  

Read more about a human-centred approach, as well as taking a look at our white paper on human-centred organisations.  

Get in touch to find out how we could help you.