How to Know If Your Organization or Company Has Stress Fractures
I don’t know about you, but I am tired of reading about the Great Resignation and hearing people complain that they can’t do anything about it. Researchers have clearly identified a few things about the folks that resigned. In the article below, Anthony Klotz a professor of management offers four reasons: 1. delayed departures 2. burnout 3. pandemic epiphanies, and 4. aversions to reentering the office.
“In a recent Washington Post Live webcast, Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University credited with coining the term the “Great Resignation,” attributed the departures to four main causes: a backlog of workers who wanted to resign before the pandemic but held on a bit longer; burnout, particularly among frontline workers in health care, food service and retail; “pandemic epiphanies” in which people experienced major shifts in identity and purpose that led them to pursue new careers and start their own businesses; and an aversion to returning to offices after a year or more of working remotely.” - During the ‘Great Resignation,’ workers refuse to accept the unacceptable, Washington Post, Karla Miller September 30, 2021 Link to full article
Here’s what got me thinking - there are lots of stories that are buried about organizations and companies that are NOT having issues - some are growing or at least maintaining and swamped with resumes for new positions. So how can we predict those that will and what separates them? It isn’t always industry, although we know that retail and food-service have been hit particularly hard. But, in the Richmond area, there is a restaurant that survived the pandemic and was so successful they opened another restaurant - so what made them different? Culture, pay/benefits, and empathy towards employees.
When I was training for a ½ marathon a few years ago, I battled stress fractures in my shins. I was moving too often and too fast and I hadn’t built enough muscles to support the strain of the new endeavor. I ended up having to go backward and engage in strength training, got some fancy shin sleeves, and slowed down in order to go faster. The lesson here - I didn’t have enough of the basics to weather the trauma of these runs.
What does this mean for you? Odds are if you are having struggles with culture or hiring you have shin splints - or maybe you are even all the way to stress fractures.
Tools for Fractures and Pains
Have the right tools, just like you need good shoes for running, you need the right tools for your employees - an office, remote work strategies - allot the right tools for the right environment.
Sometimes organizational shin splints are to be expected - like if you are in the middle of a merger. Here your task is to care for the issue, invest in culture, be aware of the stresses, and work to provide supports to avoid bigger problems.
If you are all the way into fracture then you need to take a big massive pause and get to the root of the issue. Sometimes, we have to shrink in order to move forward - or go slower in order to go further.