How Purolator Worked to Curb Employee Attrition

Employee turnover is an costly business. In 2022, it value the common Canadian employer $41,000 to rehire and retrain a employee changing one who’d left. (In 10 per cent of circumstances, these bills, which additionally think about misplaced productiveness, high $100,000.) 

According to a 2022 Randstad survey, 36 per cent of blue collar employees and 21 per cent of white collar employees had modified employers within the final 12 months. While motivations range—greater wage, higher advantages, extra flexibility—the message is evident: In at the moment’s tight labour market employers have to be proactive about tackling worker attrition, stat. 

Employee retention has been on Purolator’s radar since earlier than the pandemic. In 2019, the 63-year-old Canadian courier was going by means of what president and CEO John Ferguson calls “a period of significant change.” The development of e-commerce meant a serious shift for an organization that had primarily performed business-to-business supply. To sustain with client demand, they have been re-training present staff, and employed 3,000 new ones over three years, bringing the workforce as much as 15,000 throughout Canada.

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Ferguson realized Purolator was more and more turning into a “people-focussed” business, the place regardless of automation and expertise, the well being of the corporate was immediately tied to the wellbeing of the people who received a package deal from A to B. “How you treat people can define you as a company. It can differentiate you and build long-term success,” says Ferguson, who noticed investing in worker wellbeing initiatives as a proactive step, reasonably than a response to any points attracting and retaining employees. 

So Purolator tapped health-care supplier Cleveland Clinic Canada in 2019 to construct a well being and security program with a better deal with worker help. Combining its personal analysis on making a psychologically secure work atmosphere with worker suggestions—together with surveys despatched out to employees and their households—Cleveland Clinic’s Dr. Shaan Chugh labored to create an attrition technique that took under consideration psychological, bodily and social wellness. 

A key a part of this was an elevated deal with psychological wellbeing. For occasion, whereas the courier business as a complete tends to deal with supporting bodily wellness as a result of demanding nature of many roles, Purolator added extra psychological well being help to its advantages program after they acknowledged it was an worker want, growing annual limits for these providers by at the very least 100 per cent throughout all plans. 

Related: How to Encourage Employees to Return to the Office

The firm additionally added digital remedy as an choice, and widened the checklist of practitioners lined by advantages to social employees and counselors. As a end result, worker use of those psychological well being sources went up 150 per cent between 2020 and 2022. “When people are healthy and happy, they’re more committed and dedicated to their work on a day-to-day basis,” says Dr. Chugh.

When the pandemic hit, the techniques they’d put in place helped Purolator—whose workforce have been designated frontline employees—and enabled the corporate to reply rapidly to the wants of its workers, whether or not that was rolling out entry to digital well being care and on-line programs instructing psychological well being administration methods, or sending “meditation trucks” out to supply depots that enabled employees to spend ten minutes chatting to an skilled about mindfulness. 

“If we had not done this, and just said, ‘We don’t care what you’re going through, you’ve got a job to do,’ we could have lost half our workforce”

Post pandemic, this system that got here to be often called “Purolator Health” continues to evolve. One of the most recent issues Purolator has launched is the Mood Insights cell app, which asks drivers to test in on how they’re feeling all through their day. Using AI-based predictive temper monitoring, this anonymized knowledge is then shared with group leaders to assist them acknowledge any rising points and deal with them with the mandatory help. (There’s a direct hyperlink between driver stress and office accidents, so it’s thought this can enhance worker bodily security too.) Piloted in Calgary and Windsor, Ont., it will likely be rolled out throughout the 5,000 driver fleet this 12 months. 

The numbers validated their method: In a time interval characterised by the Great Resignation—when staff have been extra open to leaving roles, between 2021 and 2022, Purolator noticed a 12 per cent discount in attrition. “We did so much trying to put our arms around our people, and it really did insulate us,” Ferguson says. “If we had not done this, and just said, ‘We don’t care what you’re going through, you’ve got a job to do,’ we could have lost half our workforce.”