Don’t aim for employee retention, aim for happy leavers.

Whilst the global threat of coronavirus is forcing businesses to engage with remote working, the government is asking for people who resigned and retired to return — would your ex-employees come back if you asked them to? We explore moving from employee retention to businesses which create happy leavers.

Photo by Free To Use Sounds on Unsplash

As COVID-19 raises its head, the government planning response includes recalling ‘retirees and leavers’ from the NHS to ensure there’s adequate access to trained professionals to deal with the pandemic — yet the majority of people asked in a recent Guardian callout were violently reluctant to return, citing how poor their experience within the organisation had been, citing toxic cultures and bad managers.

How many people have left your business recently that would react in the same way if you asked them back? How many people are leaving your business and taking with them bad feeling about how they were treated?

There’s long been a metric in business called ‘employee churn’ — despite it’s disgusting name, it refers to how many people are leaving your business, resigning to go on to do other things…