“Upwards of 40% of workers are thinking about quitting their jobs.” 

Source: Axios

LinkedIn makes money by making sure the “grass looks greener” outside of your company. During this unique time in history, many organizations are fearing what’s been called “The Great Resignation." For organizations where the ability to keep talent on the team is critical to future success, LinkedIn might be a bigger threat than direct competitors. 

Here are three of LinkedIn’s best strategies for getting your people to quit and what you can do about it. 

Strategy 1: The Magic of the Profile

The underlying magic of LinkedIn is the profile. There are over 740 million of them.

LinkedIn makes it easy for a person to promote themselves to others, build up endorsements, add skills, and promote interests. 

Does your organization offer everyone this basic step towards establishing themselves internally at your organization? 

Organizations have been trying and failing at this for years. Most have managed to silo all of the different data available on employees - CRM activity, project history, internal business system data, and more, rather than bringing it together in one place. Ultimately, this leads to an incomplete and nearly useless summary of each individual. 

What’s more, organizations and vendors that do attempt to provide a holistic view of individual employees using profiles and directories continue to face the “profile dilemma” internally, where they ask employees to “update your profile” and find that few people will do it on a consistent basis.

There is a solution to the profile dilemma.

Structural’s clients have found that the only reliable way to create and maintain rich employee profiles is to make the creation and maintenance of profiles automatic. If everyone in an organization starts with a great profile, 60-80% of people will invest time in making those profiles even better. If a profile starts empty, organizations will struggle to get even 25% of people to fill them out. 

Strategy 2: The Power of Connections

A profile is only useful if it makes it easy to find others and to be found. LinkedIn has made the outside world a place where connections are easy to make and leverage. Connection requests pour in and a search can be done in seconds.

Why do we seek out connections professionally? There are many reasons. We want to solve problems faster, find employees and customers, test our ideas, build our network for later, make friends with similar interests, strengthen existing friendships, and more. We don’t want to feel stuck in the dreaded “silo.” 

Does your organization make it easy to belong by empowering people to connect internally across teams, tenures, locations, skill sets, interests, and work arrangements? 

We interviewed individuals from organizations of 200 to 200,000 employees, and it uncovered the following challenges:

“We rely on internal networks for connections to be made. If you’ve been here a while or are just a good networker, you can make connections.”

“Everyone has to go through our hierarchy to find connections. If you want to talk to someone on another team, you need to go through your boss first.”

“Our newer team members get frustrated trying to make connections and find opportunities because managers tend to go to the same people for projects and help over and over again.”

Even in hybrid and dispersed work arrangements, you can connect your people:

• Create a network that is useful and relevant internally by having profiles in place
• Allow every employee to search for others, make connections, and be found
• Streamline the creation of affiliations by automating connections by group, team, skill set, and more
• Automate internal connections by providing recommendations based on background, interest, and skill sets

There are two big reasons to make this happen:

1. Connected employees are more likely to stay
   According to a study by BetterUp called “The Value of Belonging at Work,” workers with a strong sense of belonging show a 56% increase in job performance and a 50% decrease in turnover risk. The data also showed that employees who feel as though they belong are 167% more likely to recommend their employer as a great place to work.
   
2. Connected employees are more productive employees.
   According to McKinsey, the average interaction worker wastes the equivalent of one day a week looking for the right people and information. Unless you applied for a job as “Internal Detective,” this is a frustrating and outdated way to work.

Strategy 3: You find Opportunity and Opportunity finds you

One of the top reasons people leave a job is that they think there is more opportunity elsewhere. 

Here’s the painful truth: after a bad day of work or a long project doing something they’ve done a thousand times before, your employees are more likely to search LinkedIn for opportunity than they are to look inside your organization. Your people inaccurately think that they are already aware of what’s available internally and, to be clear, the outside world is a much bigger place than the one inside your organization. 

According to a recent research report published by MIT Sloan, in collaboration with Deloitte Insights, people find it 2x easier to look outside their organization for roles and opportunities than to look internally.  

Even if you don’t go looking for opportunities on LinkedIn, opportunity will find you. Recruiters will reach out looking for someone with your skill set, posted jobs that are a fit for you might appear automatically, and learning opportunities show up in your feed. In all of these ways, LinkedIn is telling your people that the world outside of your organization is a better place to connect, learn, and advance than the world inside your organization.

Our experience shows that there are three things organizations can do to fight back against the “World of Opportunity” that LinkedIn offers. 

1. Think about opportunity expansively. Career paths and long-term training programs are great, but they are not a replacement for the opportunities available to your employees right now. You need to think about all of the learning, volunteering, potential project / gig work, small contributions, and big jobs that your organization offers existing employees. Our experience suggests that most organizations have far more opportunities than employees think when the very definition of opportunity is expanded in this way.
2. Embed opportunity in work. By solving the profile dilemma and investing in connections, you already have created a place where people will be found and will find others more often. This creates a more inclusive and expansive experience for your people. Now, it’s time to post most opportunities openly so people can raise their hand and indicate an interest.
3. Let opportunities find people. Some people will not raise their hand for an opportunity on a job board or in an opportunity marketplace even if they are qualified. Make sure you leverage what you know about your people (remember those important profiles) to create a data-driven way to recommend opportunities to those who should be most interested. People who are invited to an opportunity are more than twice as likely to indicate an interest than those who just see a listing.  

“The grass isn’t greener on the other side, it’s green where you water it.” 

-Anonymous

We built our platform to help connect people to each other and to opportunity where they work. It started by solving the “profile dilemma” and now allows organizations to fully empower their people in a way that makes the world inside the organization more appealing than the world outside. If you’re ready for an “Internal LinkedIn” of your own, request a demonstration here. Otherwise, visit our website or download our "Thriving at Hybrid Work" ebook to learn more about how to strengthen your organization.