National Survey Finds Businesses Face Growing Back-Office Employee Deficit

By HRtech Analyst Last updated Apr 18, 2022

Ocrolus, the automation solution that helps financial services companies make high-quality decisions with trusted data and unparalleled efficiency, conducted a national survey on the current environment for back-office jobs. The new survey, conducted in February, included responses from 400+ professionals with management roles and above regarding back-office employee hiring and turnover in the past 12 months.

Key findings include:

58% of respondents said their organizations experienced shortages of back-office staff during the past year. Nearly half of the respondents (49%) saw an increase in turnover for these roles.
Salary ranked as the primary reason for turnover for back-office roles, selected by 65% of respondents; followed by employees “seeking more interesting work” (15%), followed by “monotony of work” (12%), “benefits” (10%), and “complexity of work” (9%).
46% of respondents say their customer resolution times have been negatively impacted due to shortages and an equal amount have found their ability to conduct business “less effective” due to worker shortages; 34% of respondents said their results have become less accurate due to employee shortages.
39% of respondents have resorted to giving employees overtime work and pay to fill existing staff shortages; 25% reduced office hours to accommodate for back-office staff shortages during the past year.
50% of respondents have seen hiring back-office team members become more difficult or significantly more difficult in the last twelve months.
59% of back-office staff leave within three years of being hired; 47% of organizations require more than a month to fully onboard back-office staff.

HR Technology News: Calendly Unveils New Developer Portal With API Suite

“It’s no secret that every industry has been negatively impacted by the Great Resignation; however, job categories that provide low wages, monotonous work and unfulfilling tasks have been hit the hardest, as fueled by massive employee burnout,” said Jackie Siqueiros, Chief People Officer, Ocrolus. “Clearly, the current model is not sustainable, and companies slow to adapt and provide their employees with the right tools to feel productive will continue to struggle, churning through staff by investing in a legacy model for business that is already obsolete. Organizations that leverage automation to reduce monotonous work will create better, more fulfilling jobs and a more effective workforce.”

For the purposes of this survey, “back-office” is described as ‘an office or center in which the administrative work of a business is carried out.’ Those tasks include records maintenance, settlements, accounts payables, and accounts receivables, to name a few. The survey was conducted via SurveyMonkey of people with manager-level roles and above across companies in every industry.

HR Technology News: Joblist Launches Job Postings To Help Employers Hire

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]