IKEA has come up with an ingenious solution to boost employees' work-life balance

Employees need a work-life balance and certain comforts to maintain their work quality. Acknowledgment and rewards are crucial for boosting morale. Unfortunately, renowned home and spaces chain IKEA faced significant challenges in retaining employees, reports Fortune. In recent years, many employees quit, affecting the brand’s efficiency and costing the company tens of thousands of dollars. To address this, IKEA’s CEO, Jon Abrahamsson Ring, recently introduced a productive idea.

With over 62,000 employees quitting in a short span, Ring’s strategy helped reverse this trend. He recalled, “workers were becoming scarce.” Additionally, new hires began quitting within a few months. The situation was dire, necessitating the implementation and improvement of policies to retain employees. Ring decided to provide incentives and a better plan for employee well-being, including boosting pay, offering flexibility, and making work less exhausting.

Darren Taylor, Country People and Culture Manager at IKEA, shared that things worsened during the pandemic and post-pandemic period, reports The Daily Mail. It cautioned them to take feedback from employees, managers and other personnel to understand the root problem. “Coming out of Covid, people re-evaluated what was important to them, and work-life balance became more important,” he said. He added that it would require significant improvisations per the feedback to bring people back into a healthy working space. As a result of the change, the company decided to go big on raises and increase their workers’ pay.

Apart from this, they also looked into other fields that could use restructuring. A few examples include orientation for new hires, flexibility in scheduling and AI tools to help managers understand when employees are possibly thoughts of quitting. HR overseeing one of Ikea’s franchises, Neena Potenza, chimed in, “Many times, people come into the world of retail thinking that this is a role I will take on until I find something better. But at Ikea, we want people to grow and develop.” The improvements were a big win for the company. The rate of employees quitting has reduced to a quarter. The low wages were a prime reason why employees were quitting across the globe. Ikea restructured the pay and bonuses and several chains have even closed gender gaps in pay.

While increased pay is a direct benefit, employees are happy to be back after having their needs met. Natasha Williams, one of the employees, shared that flexibility in shifts has a major travel load off her back. “That changed everything — I was much happier at work,” she exclaimed. Right from choosing the number of hours for shifts, being able to call in sick and opt for other leaves and managing workdays with other responsibilities, things are back to normal again. The reinvented scheduling has transformed the lives of employees. Being able to juggle working with several roles as students, parents and more, employees are satisfied to a considerable extent.