Annual Review: Did We Cut Turnover During The Great Resignation?

Each year during the first week of January, we gather our C-Suite Analytics team to ask how much we helped our clients the previous year. We are tough on ourselves, asking each other whether we implemented our Finnegan’s Arrow retention solution completely and creatively…or might we have missed an idea along the way.

Of course, we also identify what did work. Which parts of Finnegan’s Arrow did we improve spontaneously to give it extra juice, extra power to cut turnover, retain top talent, and improve our clients’ financial performance? Fortunately, this part of our meeting lasts longest and generates our most creative thinking. Here are a few of those successes I’m proud to share, along with short tales of the specific obstacles we faced with solutions to overcome them:

• OBSTACLES: A five-location commercial laundry in the northeast US faced high turnover and shrinking revenues due to Covid-related restaurant closings in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington DC. Prior to my tour there I never realized the challenge of cleansing hospital laundry…you can imagine…and the pressure to load and deliver scores of truckloads of clean sheets, towels, aprons, and tablecloths each day, every day. Amazon of course was building a nearby warehouse while another big-box warehouse was under construction within walking distance.
  
  OUTCOMES: After six months we measured turnover in a unique way by calculating how many employees whose managers conducted a Stay Interview with them had remained, versus the number of employees whose managers intended to conduct a Stay Interview but did not. The outcome was a full 89% of those employees who had a Stay Interview were still coming to work after six months whereas just 52% of those who did not have a stay interview remained. And our work there isn’t finished.

• OBSTACLES: I’ve long-believed HR professionals in healthcare drew the short straw, that their retention challenges exceed all others. Never was that more true than during 2021 when hospitals and their nurses faced the debilitating combination of surging Covid, fear of catching the deadly disease or taking it home to families, vaccination mandates, and the great resignation’s impact of constant job offers from competitors.
  
  Standing in the face of these hurricane-like obstacles was our client company, a major New England healthcare organization with three hospitals and twelve non-acute facilities, 7,000 employees overall. And because of Covid’s impact, we were restricted to providing all training and all coaching virtually, working with professionals who have become close friends who we’ve yet to meet in person.
  
  OUTCOME: Prior to our intervention, their finance department had calculated turnover to cost $315,159 each year for each one percent of turnover. Our results at year-end indicated turnover had decreased by 22%, saving this healthcare company just short of $7 million. These savings will repeat year to year, and we are continuing to work with this company to cut turnover even more.

• OBSTACLES: The cost of call center turnover is traditionally high during the first six months because (1) training requires weeks in classrooms where those trainees provide no productivity in return, and (2) some new hires freeze and quit during the first weeks after training when they are live on the phones talking with customers. Call center turnover also spiked during the pandemic because agents were forced to work from home, causing supervision to be more distant and more challenging.
  
  A Fortune 500 medical company asked us to cut their new-hire turnover, realizing not just their turnover’s high cost but also that they could never provide required service levels for patients if they couldn’t improve new-hire retention. Their initial calculation of turnover’s cost was $24,662 per agent…and six-month retention when we started was just 53%.
  
  OUTCOME: Six-month retention has now increased to 74% representing a 40% improvement. And we haven’t yet implemented all of our solutions.

• OBSTACLES: This last client example represents our greatest uphill climb. Few if any US jobs are less appealing and more turnover-prone than those in meat processing. You might recall the constant news stories in early pandemic times regarding one plant in South Dakota that had major Covid breakouts resulting in several employee deaths. One lingering outcome is some employees who previously took on those jobs no longer want to, realizing the risks to themselves and to their families. These fears are adding to pre-pandemic annual turnover that can reach 100% and more…so these pandemic times tend to make that turnover even higher.
  
  OUTCOME: Given this backdrop is our client, a multiple-plant chicken processing company that provides the chicken we all eat at Chik-Fil-A. Implementing our Finnegan’s Arrow solution of Dollars/Goals/Stay Interviews/Forecasts/Accountability required persistence for each plant manager and their supervisory team. But that group rose above persistence to creativity as well, as you might recall a recent blog about their stenciling their retention goals onto each supervisor’s helmets so those supervisors would be constantly reminded of their retention goals when speaking with each other…or looking in the mirror. You can read more about that specific retention tactic here.
  
  The outcome is turnover has decreased by 22% and new-hire retention has improved by 21%…and again we are not finished as we have more retention solutions to put into place.

Don’t just take my word for it! We have key senior representatives from our client companies willing to share with you one-on-one the details of exactly how they were able to cut turnover during The Great Resignation, improve retention, and save their company A LOT of money and time. Contact me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and I’ll connect you.

• Here is a bonus win from 2021.
  OBSTACLES: We recently started working with a national-chain vehicle repair company that calculated that turnover for just one technician results in lost revenue of $67,000 per month. So how much does total turnover cost for that position?
  
  OUTCOME: This company immediately took our suggestions to improve their employee referral program and has since gained 130 technician referrals and hired over half of them. Think of the value of those referral program improvements just 60 days so far. Forbes Magazine published a column on my ideas for improving employee referrals and you can read that column here: https://c-suiteanalytics.com/forbes-agrees-with-finnegan/

The key word that drives all of these retention improvement outcomes is science. Respected research discloses that the number one reason employees stay or leave…or engage or disengage…is how much they trust their immediate supervisors. I invented Stay Interviews to provide those supervisors with opportunities to build trust…by training them to ask five specific questions and then listening, probing to learn more, and taking notes. Most importantly, though, those supervisors then fix one or more problems such that their employees grow to trust them and want to continue working with them.

And I suggest you remember this. What matters most is what employees talk about over dinner…far more important than any reports you read from exit surveys or engagement surveys. And over dinner employees talk about their bosses, their colleagues, and their duties. How long they stay is directly correlated to what they say over dinner over time, the repeated good and bad stories they tell over weeks, months, and years. And Stay Interviews help supervisors create good stories over dinner.