Recovering From The Post-Holiday Employee Turnover

As the festive season runs its course and people start coming back to the grind. Recently cleared out empty desks, whispers of resignations and farewell present surface throughout, and the reality hits hard—it’s the post-holiday season, and employee turnover has struck again.

It’s not just ‘new year, new me’ for the workforce anymore; it’s ‘new year, new job’.

Employees are most likely to change jobs in January at the cusp of New Year, and a Glassdoor survey backs this up. Now that the post-holiday period is a salient time for an organization’s future avenues, spiking turnover rates can prove to be ghastly.

The fact that employee turnover directly impacts an organization’s revenue stream and employee morale speaks volumes. So, the question is how to suppress the epidemic of employee turnover post-holiday season? You’ll find the answers here. Let’s understand why the employees call it quits at the New Year.

Why the New Year, new nob attitude?

The answer to this question cannot be linked to one single factor as a spike in employee turnover results from a concoction of reasons. Let’s talk about the biggest catalyst that plays with an employee’s head—festive stress.

Yes, it’s real—and it leaves almost seventy percent of the workforce bickering, nagging, and irritated from the holiday preps, family dinners, and Christmas presents-shopping.

Stressed employees are more likely to put down their papers than someone with a calm attitude. But the ‘stress’ factor is out of the management’s control after its outset. Also, with employees receiving their year-end bonuses, they tend to look for avenues outside in organizations that only have a year-end-bonuses to offer.

One reason that’s often under the organization’s control but left secluded is employee engagement. Eight times out of ten, an employee’s decision to quit isn’t spontaneous. It’s well-thought-of, and there are plenty of tell-tale signs. Remember the Glassdoor survey above?

Not only is January a great month for a job change, but now that companies have set their objectives and calculated their workforce requirements for the next year, there are lots of fish in the corporate sea ready to jump into a new tank. All of that is fine from an employee’s perspective, but what can the management do in all its glory to stop the festive turnover spike?

In most cases, it’s simply the human psyche, and not every problem needs to be dug up if there’s a macro solution. What the organization can do, is try and seal the lid on rising employee turnover. Let’s see how.

Curbing post-festive employee turnover: A three-step plan

Here’s a three-step plan for the management to address escalating employee turnover after the holiday season. Retention and growing one’s team for the best are crucial for a manager.

Employee turnover must be curbed in both ways, a) by retaining your current workforce & b) hiring new prospects.

Step 1: Retention with purpose

The retention strategy has to be tactically sound and pinpoint what the organization has in mind and the best way to do that is to keep the organizational goals in mind.

An organization’s goals, targets, and objectives are conveyed well before the holiday season and the management should be nifty in communicating them. It’s a basic management principle to inculcate an employee’s personal goals into the organization’s goals.

If it’s done this way, then the management can wave the post-festive employee turnover goodbye. But if not, then the management should pay heed to it.

Let’s look at it this way—without a purpose, our lives would be shambolic. The same goes for an organization and its employees, who shall be left high and dry in case they don’t have a target to achieve.

Fabricate the organization’s goals in a way that the people who make it happen do it to fulfill their personal aspirations. From blossoming an employee’s skills to giving him/her a chance to develop in terms of hierarchical role in the organization, it’s the little corporate pleasures that keep him/her going. Even employees walking out the door can sway away from it when convinced right.

Step 2: Employee recognition

Employees have psychological needs of their own, and that thirst can be quenched by nothing but recognition. Recognition is crucial to develop a sense of belongingness in employees and it leads to profound efforts from their side to accomplish the given goals.

Retaining an unhappy employee is as good as fixing broken glass with a band-aid—it’s a nefarious fix that won’t last the shortest of times.

Recognize the work that your employees did in the past one year and dwell on it. Try to bring out the positives and assure that it can only get better. Sometimes, a healthy dose of autonomy can do the trick as well in terms of reward for the employee’s performance.

There’s always scope for the management to re-craft employee’s job roles and present them with a new scope to learn more than what they know about a job. This level of personal development really leaves the employee’s intrigued if they are content with their new responsibilities.

Step 3: Hiring New Prospects

You can’t stop them all, can you? Management shouldn’t stop shopping for prospects especially when the fear of post-holiday employee turnover looms at large. The most capable way of coping with turnover is gear up with the right replacements.

The time after the holiday season is one where teams bring up their workforce requirements, so the hiring would go on anyway. Post-festive employee turnover can be used in a prudent manner.

While a pool of candidates is available in HRs mailboxes and there’s a very clear record of who’ll stay and who shall leave, it makes hiring procedures a whole lot simpler. it is safe to assume that the management is done with all year-end formalities by now.

New Year, new team goals

Managing a group of high-flying individuals can turn out to be the most self-rewarding of tasks if done right. But in times of festivities that the New Year bestows upon us, many employees get set for their next expedition.

The post-holiday spike in employee turnover can very well be contained if:

• The employees are retained the right way
• Engagement strategies are spread steadfastly
• Plan-B stays in place, and
• HRs, Managers & Leaders build a happy workforce

Here’s to wishing you a joyous festive season and a very happy start to the new decade!