This is my first month back at work after taking a sabbatical. Luckily for me, as I step back into the role, not much has changed. Same desk, same office space. The one thing that has changed is me—but that’s a story for another time. It did get me thinking, however, about other members of our team who moved on from LifeLine only to return to us in time, sometimes many years later. I’ve come to call these employees boomerangs.
The idea of an employee returning to a previous place of work happens more than we’d think. UKG reported that, in the USA in 2022, nearly 1 in 5 people who resigned during the pandemic returned to their old job. They also found that 62% of people who left jobs said the job they quit was better than their new job.
In the world of sports or entertainment, returning to a former role is commonplace—a reunion, a comeback. Now, we don’t usually make a big song and dance when someone returns to a previous role, but I think we should. We need to see this as a positive step on a person’s career.
There are two things I love about boomerangs. First is that they’re already quite familiar with our office culture. Second, and most importantly, they’ve usually gained some new skills that they share with us.
Someone once told me that “People aren’t looking for the right job. They’re looking for the right organisation.” When we interview someone for a vacancy, of course we want them to be a good fit for their role. But more than that, we want them to be a good fit for LifeLine.
In a 2018 Quantum Workplace survey, more than half a million employees were asked what words best describe their office culture. The top twenty words were: fun, challenging, friendly, engaging, rewarding, collaborative, flexible, supportive, exciting, caring, family, professional, busy, fast-paced, innovative, teamwork, motivating, positive, comfortable, and integrity.
I feel that a major driver for people returning to us is that the work we do not only gives them a strong sense of purpose, but it also gives them the freedom to be part of the solution.
I’m not saying that we ticks all the boxes but a lot of those top twenty words come up repeatedly when we ask our employees what they love about working here. If you’ve been reading our spotlights on staff members, you’ll see that words like family, teamwork, caring, supportive, friendly, rewarding and positive are what they use to describe LifeLine and its staff.
To round us out, we asked a couple of our boomerang staff members to tell us a bit more about their own experience with leaving and returning to us.
