Employee retention has become a matter of critical focus in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the Great Resignation continues to impact every industry. With insights into key elements that build a workforce for the future and how Aon is advising clients on supporting more resilient and agile employees, today’s guest understands that being Aon United is more important today than ever before. Innovative solutions to skills shortages, effective rescaling and more valuable employee propositions are all part of the work of Aon’s Human Capital Strategy Leader Marinus van Driel. He has joined this week’s host, Aon’s North America Chief Operations Officer Kevin Johnson, to discuss employee retention and the results from Aon's 2022 Global HR Pulse Survey.
Employee retention has become a matter of critical focus in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the Great Resignation continues to impact every industry. With insights into key elements that build a workforce for the future and how Aon is advising clients on supporting more resilient and agile employees, today’s guest understands that being Aon United is more important today than ever before.
Innovative solutions to skills shortages, effective rescaling and more valuable employee propositions are all part of the work of Aon’s Human Capital Strategy Lead Marinus van Driel. He has joined this week’s host, Aon’s North America Chief Operations Officer Kevin Johnson, to discuss employee retention and the results from Aon's 2022 Global HR Pulse Survey.
Additional Resources:
Aon's 2022 Global HR Pulse Survey
Video: How Are Companies Addressing the Great Resignation?
Four Strategies to Win and Retain Talent Amid the Great Resignation
LinkedIn Article around the Great Resignation
Reflecting on the Biggest HR Challenges of 2021 and Looking Ahead to 2022
Tweetables:
“Employee resilience is more important now than ever before.” — Marinus van Driel
“Every day we’re having conversations with clients about supporting their employees in better ways.” — Marinus van Driel
“Our goal is to address any of our client’s biggest challenges in relation to retaining talent.” — Marinus van Driel
Voiceover:
Welcome to “On Aon,” a podcast featuring conversations between colleagues on, well, Aon. This week, we hear from Marinus van Driel, to discuss employee resilience and Aon's HR Pulse Survey. And now, this week’s host, Kevin Johnson.
Kevin Johnson:
Hi colleagues. My name is Kevin Johnson. I've been a colleague at Aon for 11 years and was recently appointed to the role of North American Chief Operations Officer. I would have to tell you that I'm really excited about this new role. There's so many things that we're going to accomplish in North America and just happen to be a part of what's happening within Aon today. Enough about me though, with me today is Marinus van Driel, he is the Human Capital Strategy leader in Aon's Human Capital Solutions practice, where he serves as the leader for North America workforce optimization practice. Marinus has unique perspective in today's topic, Aon's most recent global HR Pulse Survey on managing the great resignation because of his vast experience in the talent assessment space, he has helped clients reimagine the future for over 15 years. Thanks for being here today Marinus. Now, before we get started, it's a tradition on “On Aon” for hosts to ask guests a quick warm-up question. So here we go. For the benefit of our listeners today, can you please tell us a little about your role in the firm?
Marinus van Driel:
Certainly. Well, I think the easiest way to describe it is that I have the coolest job in Aon, I think. I get to dream about what the best elements of our Human Capital practice I can bring to our clients to address their needs. I truly get to work very, very creatively with our team to build really novel and innovative solutions to address things like skill shortages or how to think through things like reskilling or even how to build better, more compelling employee value propositions, which I'm sure as we'll discuss today is really a hot button topic for all of our clients to start thinking through how best to retain and to attract new talent as well.
Kevin Johnson:
Great. Thanks for sharing that Marinus. With that why don't we just jump right in to the first question. You were the second guest, so I've heard ever to join this show when the podcast launched in 2021. In that episode, you spoke specifically about resiliency in the workplace during very uncertain times. A lot has changed since then. What have you noticed about employee resilience since you were here the last time?
Marinus van Driel:
I think for me, the short answer is that it's more important now than it's ever been before. I mean, when I joined “On Aon” now more than a year ago, we were still kind of in the midst of the pandemic, trying to figure out what's next and what was going to happen and what became really clear during those couple of months, both preceding and following that recording is that resilience was something that each and every one of us as individuals were concerned about. We were just kind of managing through every day at work and trying to figure out what's next and how to keep one foot in front of the other. And our clients were actually doing the same thing as well. They were just thinking through, well, gosh, what is next? How do we need to support our employees?
Marinus van Driel:
Building on that a little bit more what I'll also share is that there are a couple of other things that have become equally important. So if you think about resilience – it’s the ability to bounce back from setbacks. Certainly we've had a huge setback societally and economically and also in our lives as a consequence of the pandemic. The other things that have become important are agility and belongingness. So, a lot of our clients are now starting to think through, well, okay, we've gone through this, this one really compelling, disruptive event, there may be others that are looming ahead. So how do we build a workforce that is agile and that can bounce forward in order to meet the challenges that are ahead. And this is a really, really big thing. Organizations are starting to think through the skills that they need to build internally, skills that they need to attain in order to evolve their business models.
Marinus van Driel:
And then also in parallel to the pandemic, obviously there were a lot of societal issues that occurred that brought the divisions across the entire U.S. society and globally and to stark focus for everybody and therefore belongingness is another element that has become really important as well as a key component to helping foster resilience in workforces. So, if you can start thinking about these three things in combinations. So, we've got resilience, which is that ability to bounce back from setbacks, agility to bounce forward and belongingness as the other magic ingredient here in terms of building a more well-rounded workforce. Those are really the core tenets of what it means to build a workforce for the future and those are the things that we're really focusing on with our clients today.
Kevin Johnson:
Thank you so much for that Marinus. I mean, it's really interesting, those three components that you've talked about. This idea of bouncing back is one thing. Everybody can kind of get that, but the notion of bouncing forward is somewhat of a new concept. And I've heard this a bit with our new, Chief Wellbeing Officer with Rachel Fellowes. She first mentioned that. So, it's really interesting to what extent are our clients really asking us to dig in deeper for that. What are you doing with that information? I imagine that it is pretty challenging for all of us.
Marinus van Driel:
Yeah. Well, I mean, we're working with clients right now in our space to reimagine their entire workforce to be able to be more agile. So, for instance, we're working with a large FinTech organization where they've asked us to think through their entire job architecture. So, a job architecture for those not in the know is the entire collection of jobs in an organization and how they structure and also how those jobs get paid for. So, this client realized that they needed to rethink the types of jobs that they have in their business, but more importantly, they also needed to rethink the skills that they have within their organization, so they have the hardiness, they have the agility in order to rise to whatever is next. And we're helping with that work. And then fundamentally what the client will then do with the information that we provide to them is they will then build an employee value proposition based on those insights that is more compelling, so they can retain the talent that they want to retain and also attract the talent that they want to have from outside of the organization.
Marinus van Driel:
And then in addition to that too, we will actually activate a tool that we call our Pathfinder tool, which is a career navigation tool for every employee in the organization whereby they can go and they can figure out, well, what does my path look like forward? What are the jobs that I can get? What does my career trajectory look like within the organization? And also, what are the very discreet tactical things that I need to do in order to develop my job or myself rather in order to get to whatever those next jobs are, whether it's next job, the second job or the third job in the chain. So, if you start thinking about that's a really compelling story to tell around how we are helping our clients to become more agile. And that's just one example, we're doing it with numerous clients at the moment.
Kevin Johnson:
Thank you for that. I mean, obviously retaining talent is a struggle and no industry, or no client is unaffected by. Everyone is impacted by this. Can you just explain maybe a little bit more for our listeners what's contributing to that, what's underneath this challenge?
Marinus van Driel:
Certainly. Yeah, I can probably reflect on a couple of mega trends that we've seen. So, I've alluded to the notion of skills being really important. So, if you think about skills, all organizations currently are looking for very specific skill sets. So those skills can be things like programming skills, coding skills, they are data analytics skills, they are cybersecurity skills and what's really driving the importance of the skills is that we're seeing so many organizations or so many industries converging on becoming technology companies. So historically these skills and these abilities that folks have would've been the remit of technology firms. Now, every bank is looking for these skills, even your friendly grocer down the street in your neighborhood, they are looking for these skills because they have become a technology firm where even working with consumer goods companies that are moving into this space where they're looking for these skills, where they're rebranding themselves, not as consumer good company or a branding company, but a technology company.
Marinus van Driel:
So that's really one of the most compelling drivers, but there are also other things that are really driving this as well. So, if you start thinking about the macroeconomic labor market trends, we're at full employment right now. We've got 3.6 percent unemployment across the economy. And if you look at the last 12 months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that there are about 77 million jobs that have been posted and there have been 71 to 72 million terminations of jobs or turnover points across the economy. Well, what that indicates to us is that talent is hyper mobile. Some of these folks who've changed jobs have done so more than once. And that's really challenging declines because people who have skills are in high demand, and they have a lot of optionality in terms of where they can go for employment. So certainly, this is really kind of helping us bring this narrative regarding agility and belongingness and resilience to our clients, because they really have to think about those things in connection with one another to attract and retain talent.
Kevin Johnson:
Great. This is so interesting. And I just hear it more and more every day. What are you seeing as some of the emerging best practices amongst employers to try and really retain the talent that they want to keep?
Marinus van Driel:
Absolutely. So, I think the first thing is this focus on skills. So, I've touched on that a couple of times, that's really becoming a best practice. We are moving into an economy where skills will become the new molar level of talent management, if you will so as an individual, we're all a collection of skills that we bring to the table. So, our clients are trying to figure that out. We're working with them to do so. I think another one that I'll touch on is thinking about the whole person in the workplace. So, thinking about what it is that drives a great work life experience. So, if you start thinking about those elements of agility, resilience and belongingness, all of those things are driving a person's work life experience and how we as talent practitioners facilitate better working life is by combining better talent management practices, by driving better wealth practices, so pay and retirement practices and certainly by offering folks better benefits as well.
Marinus van Driel:
Benefits that are tailored to their individual needs, where they are in terms of their life and certainly their career trajectory. So really thinking about the person as a whole and thinking about what all the different levers are in connection with one another, rather than an isolation.
Kevin Johnson:
Great. Let's shift just a little bit more here and can you speak to some of Aon’s recent HR pulse survey data and what it's saying about employee retention?
Marinus van Driel:
Absolutely. I'd be glad to. So, we collected some of this data in December of 2021 and there were three really compelling trends that we found there. The main reason why folks were leaving jobs was because they were able to get better pay elsewhere. So that's a product of people just being in the mend. If you have skills, you have opportunities. The other trend that we saw, the second most common reason for why people left their jobs was that folks were perceiving that they have career opportunities elsewhere that are better than at their present employer. And then the third reason is kind of related to that too, is that folks just perceived a lack of career growth within their current employer. So, for me, these are all imminently fixable things if you're an employer.
Marinus van Driel:
Employers can start looking at these things and say, well, okay, well, we can provide more competitive pay or yes, we can articulate what the career opportunities are available within our firm, so folks aren't tempted to start looking elsewhere. So, it really comes down to really and truly making those opportunities visible for our employees and starting to think through, well, how can we enable our employees to see a career path beyond the next job with us? How can we provide them with the support in order to get there and do so in a very tangible and practical way?
Kevin Johnson:
Great. It's interesting Marinus, I would've thought that some of the things that you would've just shared now, would've included things like balance, like the wellbeing components of that, but it seems as though it's all still gearing towards that everyday colleague who wants to better themselves, who wants more pay, wants more opportunity who wants to have greater impact. I'm just a little bit surprised that this whole wellbeing piece of it didn't emerge as one of the pieces that you shared as most prominent.
Marinus van Driel:
Yeah. I think you're onto something there in the sense that those are, those are things that probably were perceived as less important at the time point at which we collected this data. But every day, we're having discussions with clients where they're talking about these things as well, where they're saying, well, gosh, how can we support our employees in a better way? I think those topics will only become more important as time goes on rather than less, but at the same token, I also think that the leverage of pay and career growth will also remain important as well. So, in collection, I think these are the things that we need to be considering to have conversations with our clients about and certainly the areas where we need to focus, where we can help them.
Kevin Johnson:
Great. Well, thank you so much Marinus. This was really insightful and frankly for me, a few surprising points that you've thrown out there, but listen, before we sign off, I'd love to ask you just one more question and since we are on the theme of talent and retaining talent and things of that nature, what excites you most about Aon's future?
Marinus van Driel:
No, I think there really are two words that summarizes, I guess, my excitement for what's ahead and its integration and innovation. From day one at Aon, my career trajectory at Aon has been one that has been characterized by those two words. And I think that's the journey that Aon has been on. We're integrating our capabilities, we're integrating our services, we're integrating the insights so we can provide to clients by bringing more of our data together. As data scientists that truly excites me because we can give better insights, better capabilities to our clients. But then on top of that, based on those insights, we can innovate in really, really cool ways. We can help our clients to help develop their workforces. We can help our clients to see what's ahead. We can help them see around the corners and figure out what the best levers are pull to address any of the biggest challenges that they have in relation to talent.
Kevin Johnson:
Well, hey, you know what, I couldn't echo those words any clearer. I feel the exact same way. And I think the opportunity for us is just so incredible when you think about delivering Aon United and everything that we're doing to become a more integrated firm. And as you been listening to clients as of late, they're becoming more integrated too. So, this strategy, this foresight that our leaders had around being more Aon United plays really well into where the industry and where our clients are going. And so that brings a ton of excitement for me.
Voiceover:
This has been a conversation “On Aon” and Aon's HR Pulse Survey. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this week’s episode, tune in in two weeks for another new episode To learn more about Aon, its colleagues, solutions and news, check out our show notes, and visit our website at Aon.com.