Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Drew Carter
When more than 47 million people voluntarily left their jobs in 2021, the exodus became known as the Great Resignation. But experts who’ve studied the movement would say that’s a misnomer. It was really more of a Great Reshuffling. People weren’t leaving the workforce so much as they were seeking better opportunities and employers. “It’s actually something that transcends the pandemic,” says Drew Carter, co-founder of St. Louis–based startup Whistle, an app intended to help employers support employees with onboarding, training, and incentive programs. Even before COVID-19 changed the way people work, the things that made a job gratifying—or a nightmare—weren’t so much the hours or the pay, but the experience. “All of a sudden, millions of people were forced to think, Is this the dynamic that I want?” Carter says. “It accelerated that trend of saying, No, this isn’t what I want. I don’t feel valued.” That’s where Carter and co-founder Chris Dornfeld think their company can help.
Given what we’ve learned about the Great Resignation, why have so many companies had a difficult time understanding the root causes of employee departures? There are two parts. First, there is a bad feedback loop. When someone quits your company, you do an exit interview. At that moment, that person has a choice: They can either tell you about your bad manager that’s still working for you, or they feel like they can take the easy way out and just say, “I got a job that will pay me more money.”
What’s the second part? For decades, it was viewed as a privilege to have a job. Employers could dictate a lot of terms. It’s hard for them to get their arms around this idea that expectations are changing. They don’t want to hear that. Running a company is hard enough, and for some of these employers that have done things one way for many years, they’re saying, “Now you’re telling me I have to cater to all these picky needs of these individual employees?” It can feel overwhelming.
How does Whistle believe it can create better experiences at work? We focus on employee loyalty, and that takes the form of things like better onboarding, better training, wellness programs, improving culture, and generally providing better rewards in the form of payments. A typical client comes to us because they feel like attrition is hurting their bottom line. They’ll say, “My HR team says we need to pay more because everyone who leaves says they’re being paid more.” But it’s not pay that caused them to start looking. It’s the dynamics of the company, typically the manager. We say that retention begins with onboarding.
What does better onboarding look like? The typical onboarding experience lasts half a day. Like: “Here’s the bathroom. Let me see your paperwork. Here’s when you’ll get paid.” We provide a software platform that onboards someone as if they were a relative. It might include messages from the CEO about mission and values. It might include a survey. It includes training, which might take days, weeks, or even months. And because there are often upfront costs for new employees, we have a payment program where an employer can pay for their employee’s incidentals. We have clients who will say, “Here’s $40 for lunch this week for you. Pick any of your colleagues and go to lunch.”
Do you think employees expect too much from their jobs? No, employers have been expected to provide too little. It makes business sense to treat your employees better. Happier employees drive better results. I think it’s a cop-out to say employees are asking for too much. You have to look deeper, and the answer can’t just be to pay people more.
Can you give an example? We recently wrote a blog post about why the pizza party is a bad idea. The idea is that if the CEO says, “Well, I’m going to solve this culture thing with pizza parties,” what you miss out on is the nuance that some of your people will like that but a lot of your people will not.
On the other hand, maybe the pizza party is a way for employees to become friends. There’s evidence that having a friend in the workplace is a driving factor in retention. You can still have the pizza party. Whether it’s a pizza party or anything else, it just has to be relevant for that group.
Which pandemic-era workplace changes do you see becoming permanent? I think both hybrid teams and remote work will be persistent. The majority of folks say: “Working remotely is at least as productive as being in the office, and it’s much more convenient. I won’t take a job that doesn’t allow me that flexibility.” One of the things that’s interesting about hybrid teams and remote work is you need density. You can’t tell everyone to come into the office whenever they want. You need to have everyone there at the same time so that you can have that serendipitous interaction.
