Help Your Customers Win the War Against Attrition

Losing superstar employees is not a fact of life– it’s a choice companies are making when they bury their head in the sand about employee retention. Why do otherwise smart, savvy business leaders allow expensive and disruptive employee attrition slow down their businesses?

Leaders and managers feel like they’re bending over backwards trying to accommodate skyrocketing wages, new standards for flexibility, and helping employees develop their careers.

Still, 60% of people are emotionally detached from work. 19% are actively disengaged.

Put simply, the majority of workers are not thriving in their workplaces, and in turn, the organizations they belong to aren’t thriving either. When team members are thriving, an organization will see significantly lower absenteeism and turnover. It’s not just good news within the organization– they will also see higher customer loyalty in turn. 

In 2022, worker stress reached an all-time high, and only 21% of employees reported feeling engaged at work. Unhappiness around work is everywhere, and shows no sign of slowing down. 

How can MSPs help their customers with the enormous problem of employee attrition? Know the facts, crunch the numbers, and bring your customer an easy-to-deploy solution. Our software can help you approach your customer as a business partner with real insight into the problems that harm their business. You can be the MSP that offers more than tech– you offer solutions. Read on to find out how to help your customers tackle turnover for good.

The True Cost of Turnover

According to Gallup, US businesses lose $1 trillion to voluntary turnover every year. Quits accounted for 70% of job separations in 2022, the highest portion in the history of the Job Openings and Labor Survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics.

Employee turnover has “soft” costs, like blows to employee morale and feelings of chaos within the organization. Attrition also seriously impacts a business’ bottom line.

The cost of replacing an employee can range from half to two times their annual salary. For example, take a Level 2 Engineer.

In 2022, the average salary for a Level 2 Engineer was $63,835 – $82,073, according to Bowman Williams. For this example, let’s say an engineer is making $70,000 when he quits. That means the cost of replacing him, training the replacement, and getting back to the level of productivity from before that engineer left could range from $35,000-$140,000. Imagine you have a customer who has 5 employees quit at that salary range. They just lost anywhere from $175,000-$700,000. This is a huge pain point for the businesses your MSP serves, especially SMBs.

Why Good Employees Quit

It’s no surprise that the number one cited reason employees give for quitting their jobs is that the pay is too low. However, compensation is just one piece of the puzzle. Other common reasons for leaving a job include feelings of career stagnation or feeling disrespected at work.

At the bottom, all three of these top reasons for quitting come down to a common human desire: to be valued and appreciated for the work we do. After all, according to McKinsey research, a person’s job satisfaction is the second-most-important determinant of their overall well-being.

Many MSP customers are leaking great employees at this very moment and are scrambling to try to plug the holes. Become a partner in their business by helping your customers understand why they are losing people, and helping them figure out how to prevent it.

Feelings of Unfair Treatment

57% of workers who quit a job in 2021 cited feelings of being disrespected at work as the most important or second most important reason they left a job, according to Pew. 

It turned out that most of those workers were validated for their decision to leave. 94% of people who quit a job said it was either somewhat easy or very easy to find a new job, and over 50% of the people at new jobs cited improvements in compensation, better work-life balance, opportunities for advancement, and flexibility. They left to find a work experience that made them feel valued and acknowledged. It’s an all-too-common story for businesses these days.

Management is in the Dark

The problems an employee experiences at a company are by no means insurmountable. Per Gallup, 51% of employees who quit said that in the three months before they left, they didn’t have any conversations with leaders or their direct managers about their future with the organization. This is especially troubling when 52% of quitting employees said that their manager could have done something to stop them from leaving.

Leaders can slow and even stop attrition by being proactive about employee happiness and engagement. According to McKinsey, the top factor in an employee’s job satisfaction is not compensation, but good relationships with their managers.

60% of hybrid employees say that their manager is their most direct connection to their organization and its culture. Add that to the fact that 75% of workers report that the most stressful aspect of their job is their direct manager, and it underlines the axiom that people join companies and quit managers.

Good News: You Can Catch them Before they Go

It is possible to reach employees before they quit without adding burdensome processes to a leader’s workload. It’s also necessary to the stability and operational maturity of a business to make sure their brightest stars are rewarded and treated as the valuable contributors they are.

Even in distributed workplaces, it’s possible for your business customers to have a good handle on how their employees are doing. When a business owner has the information they need, it is worlds easier for them to fix small issues before they become giant problems. Now it’s easier than ever for your MSP to be the source of that critical problem-solving data.

Promote Proactive Leadership with People Data

When an MSP’s hardware becomes outdated or overloaded, there are warning signs and protocols. Business owners don’t have that luxury with their people.

Resignations feel like they’re coming out of nowhere, when in reality, they’ve been building for months. The hard truth is that on-the-job loyalty has been disintegrating, and it goes both ways. While employers feel like they’re getting less worker buy-in than ever before, less than half of employees feel that the leaders of their organizations have their best interest at heart.

These days, it’s hard enough for a manager to push projects forward and organize teams, especially remote teams. How can they also answer questions or respond to concerns that never get voiced out loud? How can they be the proactive leaders they need to be to keep their best employees?

Leaders Need New Tools

New tools and ways of approaching the remote or hybrid workplace are needed more than ever. Now that many leaders don’t have their employees in sight, they need new ways to connect with their employees’ work experiences. MSPs can now help their customers take data-supported steps to slow employee attrition through Zorus.

Through Zorus Engagement, business owners have instant access to their people data. They can identify trends, spot problems before they become insurmountable, and rest easy knowing that their MSP is there to support them with these crucial insights.

In a remote or hybrid work environment where people and teams can feel fragmented, quick and easy people data is a lifesaver. It helps leaders take the critical steps to supporting their best employees, and building a stronger team than ever.

Proactive Acknowledgement and Recognition

Simple acknowledgment and recognition goes a long way to making employees feel valued at work. According to a survey of 1,500 working Americans, 63% of workers who feel recognized at work are very unlikely to pursue a new job. Not only can recognition slow down attrition, it will improve organizational output; 40% of workers said they would put more energy into their work if they were recognized more often.

Recognition does not have to be simply financial. Simple recognition is among the top contributors to a high employee retention rate. Prioritizing employee engagement across the board helps with turnover, reducing it by 24%.

When an MSP deploys Zorus for their customers, they can give them the people data they need to be proactive about employee recognition. Our dashboards make the data easy to visualize and understand, even for those less tech-savvy business owners. All an MSP needs to do is empower their customer to take advantage of these technological advances.You can suggest your customer spends 10 minutes every Monday morning doing a quick review of their people data.

The next time their superstar accountant spends 10 hours more than normal in a working week, they’ll be able to see it immediately, pull them aside, thank them for their hard work, and ask them how they can support them. Data shows that this will go a long way toward employee retention, which will in turn help a business move toward operational maturity.

Proactive Rest

Burnout is a buzzword for a reason: it’s been a huge problem that shows no sign of slowing down. Even as some employees are “quiet quitting,” others are working to pick up the slack, forgoing work-life balance and mental health to serve their companies until they quit out loud.

When organizations ensure that employee rest is available, accessible, and appropriate, employees perform at a 26% higher level. Businesses that bake proactive rest into their organization will find that only 2% of their employees are burned out.

WIth Zorus, businesses will no longer have to wonder which employees are in danger of burning out; they’ll know for sure. It’s easy to look at the data and see when someone is giving up their nights and weekends for work. Leaders can make sure these hard workers get the support and rest they need to improve their own wellness and the company’s operational maturity.

Proactive Processes

According to Gartner, despite what we hear about quiet quitting, the average employee works more than 9 extra hours of unpaid overtime each week. Almost 10% of an employee’s working time is spent opening, closing, and switching between technology applications.

When managers and employees are physically separated, only the occasional video meeting brings them together. (Not even accounting for Zoom fatigue, which could devalue these meetings.) How can a manager be proactive about problems they aren’t aware of?

It’s time for people data to become the standard bearer for best business practices. At a glance, people data as visualized by the Zorus Engagement tool can show a leader when an employee is not using the software that’s supposed to make their job easier. The leader can investigate the inefficiency, and offer training and support to get the worker and the process on the path of least resistance.  Zorus Engagement can show which software an organization is not using, and help get that software eliminated and those costs back toward the bottom line.

Be a Proactive Partner with Your Customers 

At the end of the day, business owners aren’t looking for tech– they’re looking for solutions to their problems. When your MSP steps up with information and solutions, they’ll see you as more than an SLA, they’ll see you as a partner.

When you bring Zorus Engagement to your customers as a solution to their people problems, you show them that you understand and care about their business. You understand their pain points, and you’re proactive about helping them find solutions. Elevate your MSP to a crucial partner in their business, helping both of your businesses flourish.

All-in-One Filtering and Engagement Tool

Alongside its best-in-class device-based content filtering, Zorus offers easy-to-access people data, allowing MSPs to create more value for their customers

Zorus’ mission is to help MSPs be better and more valuable partners to their customers. MSPs lead the way for our development, so our tools are easy for MSPs to deploy, and even easier for their customers to find value in.

It’s our goal to make it easy for MSPs not to just offer their customer cutting edge tech, but to be able to offer them solutions to the problems that plague their business. Zorus content filtering + engagement brings the best of security and people data into one fast, easy agent. We’ve created dashboards that make it easy for business leaders to access and understand insightful data about their workers, making it easier than ever to be proactive about their best people.

People data is crucial to building proactive management practices in remote and hybrid workplaces. Your MSP could be the first to bring the newest, best solution for people data to your customer. Schedule a demo of our transformative technology here.

Our mission at Zorus is to make it easy for MSPs to be proactive partners in their clients’ businesses. We can help you uplevel your service offering and your value proposition quickly, easily, and efficiently. Learn more about Zorus Engagement here.