News flash: Most of what we read about the Great Resignation simply isn’t true. Why? Because a lot of Great Resignation data is based on intent-to-quit surveys—which simply aren’t the best predictors of actual employee attrition risk.
Instead, as Gianni Giacomelli, Chief Innovation Officer at Genpact and Head of Innovation Design at MIT Collective Intelligence Design Lab, writes in his insightful article “Why some quit, and some stay: a surprising take”, analysing network strength—especially as it relates to emotional support and the ability to make an impact—is a more reliable predictor of employee attrition risk.
What Is Employee Attrition Risk?
Employee attrition risk is the probability that employees will leave the organization. The term “employee attrition” is usually used interchangeably with “employee turnover”, however, it’s important to remember that while both relate to employees leaving the organization, attrition refers to voluntary exits while turnover refers to all kinds of exits from the organization.
An employee’s level of attrition risk can be determined using parameters such as demographic data, the circumstances surrounding their team and manager, position and seniority, and requests for time off, among others.
The Role of Networks and Human Connections to Employee Attrition Risk
Emotional Support
According to Giacomelli, it’s important to ensure your people feel like they’re part of a group, and that both strong and weak network ties give them a sense of emotional support, group “flow”, and functional help.
Ability to Make an Impact
Are your people able to make a recognized and rewarded impact where they’re currently at? Giacomelli notes that people’s impact depends on:
- Being associated with the right things to do
- Getting access to knowledge and learning
- Doing work frictionlessly
- Getting access to the right people to influence actions
The Secret to Getting People to Stay
People who fail to create a strong network in their current company often can’t make enough impact, therefore they feel they have less to lose and could end up leaving. As Giacomelli states, “For them, the skills that they have—not the network and the related social capital—are the biggest asset. Those skills are marketable externally, and the loss of a company network doesn’t penalise them much.”
In other words, interconnectedness within an organisation—whether it be a corporation, industry body, or NFP—is the secret to getting people to stay! The more supported and “part of a real team” your people feel, the more inclined they are to stay.
How Personal Advisory Boards Can Help
This is why, with Mentorloop, we encourage building Personal Advisory Boards (PAB). What’s a Personal Advisory Board, you might ask?
A PAB consists of not one mentor, but many. Instead of having one “master mentor”, your people will have access to a range of people with different perspectives and lived experiences. This allows them to build a support network they can turn to and lean on—in both good times and bad—with each member having their own distinct skills and areas of expertise.
PABs may include the following types of mentors:
- A more traditional, “master mentor”: Someone who is older and more professionally experienced than you are.
- A peer-to-peer mentor: Someone about the same age and/or at the same professional stage as you who is going through the same battles and challenges you are.
- A reverse mentor: Someone more junior than you that can help you adjust to technological and cultural shifts.
- A subject matter expert mentor: Someone with loads of experience in a field or topic you’d like to learn more about/become an expert in yourself.
- A cheer squad mentor: Someone who is there to encourage and support you every step of the way.
This diversity of support is why we never limit the number of mentoring matches an individual can have; we believe that with more connections, everyone wins! In fact, we find our customers’ cohorts want more connections instead of the traditional setup of one mentor and one mentee.
Everyone Wins
Ultimately, everyone wins with mentoring Personal Advisory Boards: organisations win because their people feel supported and that they’re actively making an impact—leading to increases in retention—and individuals win because they have access to a diversity of ideas whenever they need them.
So how can you get started? After all, you may be thinking: finding one mentor can be tough, let alone multiple! Thankfully, Mentorloop’s Self Match feature provides an easy place for people to browse and connect with the right mentoring partners with the right advice, at the right time. This means your people will have the opportunity to build a support network of individuals with their own distinct skills and areas of expertise that they can turn to and lean on.
Learn how the Mentorloop platform can help your people create Personal Advisory Boards today. Schedule a demo to see how Mentorloop does matching.
