How employers can manage the growing 'talent debt' they've accumulated

Employers have been fighting to retain their workers, but lingering workplace stressors are leaving them indebted with disengaged, checked-out talent.

The level of actively disengaged U.S. employees is the highest it has been in over 10 years, according to a 2022 report from Gallup. The current ratio of engaged employees to disengaged employees is 1.8 to 1 — down from 2.1 to 1 in 2021 and 2.6 to 1 in 2020. This lack of enthusiasm is creating what is being described as a "talent debt." 

"The workforce stopped moving, then it started moving again," says Jesse Murray, senior vice president of employee experience at business insight company Rightpoint. "And we started accumulating this debt in the same sense as when we're talking about taking on debt in a financial sense. We have this growing talent [disengagement] bubble, but what are we doing? How can we not inflate that bubble?" 

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Talent debt refers to a demographic of disengaged talent that is not only unproductive, but costly to hold onto. The concept is similar to that of the Great Resignation — the 2021 realization that employees weren't happy with their jobs — in that it refers to the movement or loss of talent. But unlike the Great Resignation, which was a direct result of the pandemic, the talent debt more specifically refers to the concept of talent suppression in unsustainable work environments.

Because of current geopolitical tensions, market imbalances, persistent inflation and rising interest rates, employees may not feel they have the option to leave their jobs, which could be creating a false sense of security for employers. 

"Nobody's officially claimed that we're in a recession anywhere yet — but we're acting like it," Murray says. "Those that are still employed are probably hunkering down and sheltering in place. But when the economy picks up, you'll see an uptick in talent movement, because all the people that didn't move over the previous 12 or 18 months will all of a sudden take their opportunity." 

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Murray says employers haven't even begun to see the effects of the perceived talent debt, which he anticipates could cause just as many if not more walkouts than the Great Resignation. And whether they realize it or not, employers are still inflating their talent debt bubble, so the first step is to attempt to re-engage their workforce to not only keep the numbers from growing, but in an effort to deflate it as well. 

"When employers talk about employee engagement it usually means they're doing internal surveys," Murray says. "They should continue doing those, but combine them with operational metrics, too. Integrate your technologies with each other and make them personalized so as to find the pockets where you can improve efficiency, engagement and reduce burnout." 

Despite their best efforts, however, tackling disengagement can sometimes be an insurmountable feat and may still result in the loss of a chunk of a company's workforce. In that case, financial debt management techniques can apply to the talent debt scenario, too, according to Murray. This means using or seeking out available resources and being proactive and purposeful about how and where they invest their time and money.  

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For example, the hardest part about talent loss for a company is the loss of the information that exits alongside workers. While investing in more progressive technologies like artificial intelligence may be attractive, it may be safer to use existing technology to create a better system to retain that information and relay it to new employees, such as building reliable databases.

In either case, the key to managing the growing talent debt is for employers to put in the effort of recognizing the work their employees do while they still have them, whether it's to keep them or it's to have a grasp on the hole they'll leave in their wake. 

"If you can make investments to  build a better knowledge set and capture it, that can blunt some of the operational issues," Murray says. "Make your systems work with each other. There are things that you currently solely use your people to do. If you don't need them to do that, then you don't lose as much when people leave."