Many employees have had enough and will
no longer endure poor working conditions and wrongdoing in the workplace.
The UK along with countries overseas
have witnessed the Great Resignation, with people in a post-pandemic
environment choosing not to go back to their old jobs and ways of working.
Sanjay Raja, chief UK economist at
Deutsche Bank, has been quoted as saying there are “historically elevated
levels of workers leaving the labour market entirely” with the level of
resignations being the highest since 2009.
A report just prior to the pandemic,
from the Film and TV Charity’s ‘Looking Glass research’, suggested 56% of
employees believed they had suffered bullying in the previous year.
When you look at Google search results
and see there are 20,000 searches per year for how to cope with ‘bullying in
the workplace’ in the UK.
So, it’s more than possible that some
of the Great Resignation results from employees simply not being prepared to go
back into those same poor working conditions.
It is no exaggeration to say Covid-19
has changed everything. The enforced isolation also provided a breathing-space
for employees to rethink their life. Many have taken a premeditated,
thought-through decision to change how they want to live and work. This led to
what has been termed the Great Resignation and which has become the Great
Attrition.
The Covid-19 pandemic
was the catalyst for employees to re-evaluate their working conditions when
they were being asked to return.
It enabled people to reassess what they
wanted from life, and many of them decided they literally did not want to
return to their jobs and would either start looking elsewhere for work or
drop-out of working life altogether.
It should come as no surprise that
smarter senior executives are spending a lot of time and effort providing
additional staff benefits, and improving working conditions, to retain
employees.
Many employers have beefed up their
employee packages by adding both physical and mental health care, social
benefits such as gym membership, retail discounts, and additional sick and
compassionate care benefits, as well as improving pay and flexibility working
hours.
But they are also trying to improve the
actual places where the employee works, and that sometimes means preventing or
dealing with some rather uncomfortable situations. For that, organisations
often require whistleblowing services.
We’ve seen a significant increase in
directors, general counsels, and HR managers approaching us to set up an
external whistleblowing hotline.
That’s because an outsourced hotline is
quicker and easier to set up and start managing than creating and staffing one
in-house.
We can often have a fully operational
whistleblowing hotline up and running for organisations within 24-hours.
That is world-wide, with multiple offices or work locations, in nearly every
language and dialect.
Every one of our call handlers is a
former police officer, and each has more than 25 years’ experience speaking
with people from all walks of life in all sorts of situations.
When anonymous whistleblowing services
are introduced, staff feel their managers are trying to do what’s right by
them. Lots of staff research shows the value of being seen to be a good
employer in a world where the employee can just walk away and start work
elsewhere.
No-one is saying whistleblowing is the
solution to employment issues facing businesses across the globally, Europe,
the EU, or even just the UK, but it should be part of a package of measures
that businesses can use to help retain their staff.
For
more information please visit whistleblowing hotline provider Safecall.