We are in the middle of The Great Resignation. As per current statistics and studies roughly 40% of the employees across all industries are going to switch jobs this year. You might think that it is not just me. Every company is losing people. So why should I worry? Well you should worry and every company on the planet that is losing people should be more worried this time because of the people you are losing.

Your bottom performing talent is not leaving. This is quite obvious as the bottom seldom leaves voluntarily. The problem this time around is that your top is leaving more quickly than it ever did.

Is this a sudden resentment that people have developed or this is a sudden reaction to things that employees have been putting up with? It seems to be neither.

Firstly, let's look at what your employees value. Perks!! What perks do your employees value? What comes next to the paycheck?

The perk that perks up your employees

We recently ran a poll on LinkedIn to understand the pulse of what people wanted. We asked them a simple question on what they considered to be their biggest perk? We gave them the following options to vote on :

1. Free food at the office (Hey Google attracted many grads with this perk).
2. Limitless leaves (who gives it? Well we do it at CoSqrd. So does NetFlix)
3. Freedom to work from anywhere
4. Others

Let's jump right into the results. Shall we?

Freedom to work from anywhere trumped all the other perks by a huge margin. Employees have had enough with their HQ being the center of their universe. They have had this freedom for 18 months now and have started to value this above all.

In our opinion this was as expected. We have been seeing that employees were not waiting for permission to work from anywhere. They were just doing it. What was surprising is that free food at the office only got 8%. Well, if you don't want to be at the office, what do you do with the free food? You can't do a proxy on that one. 😃

We wanted to dig deeper to understand more trends. We classified all the participants of the survey based on their level (entry, middle or exec) and which industry they belonged to get more insights for you.

Perk preference by employee level

• 53% of the respondents who voted for "Free Food" were entry level employees.
• 53% of the respondents who voted for "Limitless leaves" were mid level employees
• 49% of the respondents who voted for "Freedom to work from anywhere" where mid level employees

SUMMARY : So if you want your mid-level employees to stay you will certainly have to offer them more flexibility on where to work and when to work.

Next we looked at the preferences by which industry the respondents were from, their gender, whether they were from India or outside. More on the analysis and the insights in part 2 of this post.

Over to you now

People want to switch because of the pandemic epiphany.

Many have suddenly realised that their work took them away from the life they wanted to live.

This is an epiphany that your mid level and senior management has had now. They certainly want to give more importance to their families and themselves than they gave before. They are certainly not keeping your job in the center of their universe.