Turkey #1: Employee Exit Surveys

If five is the maximum number of turkey icons we would use as a rating metric, exit surveys would win all five of those gobblers. The often-applied medical metaphor is that exit surveys are autopsies, meaning they provide the real reasons employees quit so management can fix those reasons and turnover then falls. But to keep up the medical jargon, let’s call exit surveys toe tags instead.

Too harsh? Many times I’ve polled HR audiences on their use of exit surveys by asking these two probes:

1. Please raise your hand if your company does employee exit surveys in any form…to which 90%-plus raise their hands.
2. Now please raise your hand again if you can think of one good outcome for your company as a result of your conducting exit surveys…and less than 5% raise their hands a second time.

On the surface, exit surveys should become strong tools to improve employee retention as long as…

• Surveys are designed to elicit the real reasons employees leave.
• Employees tell the truth.
• And organizations address these newly-discovered leave reasons by solving the problems at their roots.

But none of those things happen and here’s why.

“Better Opportunity”

Some time ago I went on a google quest to learn the supposed #1 reason employees quit their jobs…and better opportunity was the winner. And it’s the winner because nearly every exit interview questionnaire contains this response, whether the questionnaire is delivered by a person, by an online program, or by a third-person interviewer.

Since we associate opportunity with pay or career, the resulting assumption is that some other company swooped in and made our employee an offer…and that offer was financially enticing or included an exciting, higher-level job. So there’s absolutely nothing we could have done to stop that. Especially the assumed much-higher-pay part.

The truth is that “better opportunity” could have also meant a shorter commute, working with nicer people, or abandoning a jerk boss. Accepting that phrase as a leave reason is mush.

But the greater point beyond “better opportunity” being misleading is that it also implies that a new job just appeared.  And those who are leaving us know this is a safe answer because any short explanation that they provide for accepting their “better opportunity” ends the discussion.

The outcome is that “better opportunity” avoids the more deeply-rooted, drill-down discussions that come from asking questions like “Why did you look?”

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Further Reading: Exit Interviews – More Like Autopsies or Toe Tags?

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Most job changes today require the job-changer to go online and click. That first click is the first step toward changing jobs. For a very select few this first step is instead a direct inquiry from another company pitching a job that your employee didn’t know was available and had never considered. But for the great majority of job-changers, the first step is that proactive click. So much better exit interview questions become…

• When did you initiate your job search?
• Why did you initially decide to leave us?
• Was there one trigger event that caused you to seek out other jobs?
• What’s the single-best thing we could have done to keep you?

The one overlap between exit interviews and Stay Interviews is that qualified interviewers must bring great probing skills. They must recognize which broad responses contain juicy behind-the-scenes details that lead to solutions, and then probe their ways down that cookie-crumb trail to learn deep-seated truths…regardless of whether that interview’s objective is to learn why an employee is leaving or how to better help an employee to stay.

So conducting exit interviews in a way that will actually help your company is not, let’s say, an entry-level job, but instead one that requires training, practice, and feedback on how effectively that exit interviewer can seek out the real reason each employee has chosen to look and then to leave.

Little Truth-Telling

While the above section addresses a common exit survey design flaw, employees still have little reason to tell their real-life-story full truths…especially when inputting data into a computer or talking to a stranger.

Let’s make a safe assumption here that employees’ greatest frustration with employee engagement surveys…that I told you and you didn’t address my complaint…applies to employee exit surveys as well. Then why would an employee who has already checked out of her job believe that re-canting her story will make things better, for her or the person who replaces here? Besides, she’s already told her story to a few work peers and outside friends and she’s ready to move on with her life.

The survey design flaws combined with many employees’ reluctancy to be open make for an easy way out. If they can get by with “better opportunity” or by clicking just a few keys during an online survey, then telling abbreviated stories or misleading ones becomes easy and OK.

Provide Real Solutions

In most companies, exit survey results are tabulated into a report that is delivered upstream monthly or quarterly depending on turnover volume. That report rank-orders the reasons employees leave, often placing “better opportunity”, pay, or career at the top. Next steps are usually to build a few one-size-fits-all programs or to do nothing at all.

The contrast here is that the number one reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their managers…and rarely are exit survey results delivered to that employee’s supervisor. And if they are, the results are left to that supervisor to read, interpret, and decide what if any future changes he should make to his supervisor style, with little or no coaching coming from above.

So while exit surveys bring a concept that at first glance should be helpful to our overall retention quest, the combination of poor survey design, minimal truth-telling, and the absence of constructive follow-up all dilute their value.

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Further Reading: Requiem: The End of Exit Interviews

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The Best Exit Solution I Know

Years ago, I was speaking at the Chicago University Club to about a hundred senior managers who were attending a conference there. The topic of exit surveys came up and after extensive group discussion a man in the back right corner raised his arm, stood up and spoke…with great wisdom.

This man explained that he was CEO of a 400-employee consulting firm in Portland, Oregon, and that he needed and cherished every talented employee for his firm to successfully win over and retain top clients. So when an employee quit, he had established a protocol which was widely known throughout his management ranks. No re-hire could begin until he as CEO signed the new-hire requisition order, and his managers understood he wouldn’t sign that order until they had scheduled an in-person meeting with him to discuss why that employee had left and what that manager could have done to retain that employee.

This CEO’s method worked because (1) he was skilled such that he would ask tough questions regarding why each employee left, (2) he was immediately following-up at the likely root cause, and (3) his managers knew that any exit led to an uncomfortable interaction with the CEO, so they were motivated to build trusting relationships with each employee in order to keep them.

If you’re still using exit surveys, it’s time for a better playbook.

In Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis. It connects the dots from workforce math to line-leader accountability, with the how-to for embedding Stay Interviews and Finnegan’s Arrow.

Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

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No, Barry our Bernadoodle is very OK, but some folks who work too hard are not. A quick google peek tells us that more than half of us feel burnout sometime, young workers experience it more often, and there are various math calculations that say employee burnout costs employers a lot of money.

It’s easy to wonder if worker burnout is an old concept that is suddenly in the media because we now have a name for it. More likely, though, it’s another outcome of our ever-shrinking labor force, and maybe too a symptom of the best workers working too hard to make up for the rest. Plus there are brazen employers who are posting jobs like this:

• Shopify wants a product manager who can “keep up with an unrelenting pace.”
• Software company Rilla tells applicants not to join unless they are eager to work 70 hours per week…in person.
• Solace, a healthcare company, tells job-seekers, “If you’re looking for work/life balance, this isn’t it.”[i]

What kind of a healthcare company is that?

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Further reading: What’s a Direct Route to Distinguishing Your Culture?

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Let’s Assume We’ve All Been There

Who among us hasn’t been fed up with our job, whether for a day or for so long that we abandon that job for another job? And re-reading the part above that young workers feel burnout more often reminds me of that four-letter word that is most associated with our massive baby boomer work group which is GRIT. That the baby boomer reputation is to show up on time and stay till the job is done, no facial expressions required. More than a few of us would say that succeeding generations are different.

Referencing a popular old movie, this is where Tom Hanks would whine that there’s no crying in baseball. But having said that, we’ve all wanted to raise a finger to our bosses or our jobs at least one time.

And the Best Recommended Solutions Are…

For employers, suggested solutions are to offer more time off, hold annual retreats, and offer an employee assistance program. And for our stressed-out employees it’s (1) seek support, (2) try a relaxing activity, (3) get some exercise, (4) get some sleep, and (5) practice mindfulness.[ii]

Ironically, employees who work for employers that offer unlimited time off tend to take fewer days off than a traditional PTO policy would offer, and those same employees lose out because their employers are never responsible for paying for unused vacation time.[iii] So these initially-appealing policies are a rip-off for most.

So There Is No Real Solution

Let’s suppose an employee…we’ll call her Teresa… leaves work after long days, goes home to prepare dinner, and then sits behind a closed door picking up her left-behind work while her family plays games or watches TV. And this happens at least three nights per week for a couple of months. An annual retreat won’t help, taking time off would likely deepen her guilt, and she’s unlikely to practice mindfulness. This is burnout at its worst, and whether she ultimately quits or freaks out in the office, she’s probably not performing her job well despite the hours she puts into it.

It Always Comes Back to the Supervisor-Employee Relationship

I’ve read five articles on how companies should manage employee burnout, and none of them said that employees should talk to their boss. This connects back to organizations designing what appears to be first-line leaders’ deliberate absence on solving turnover, on improving employee engagement, and now taking the lead to address employee burnout. Just as we think we can retain and engage employees with one-size-fits-all programs like pay, benefits, and ping pong tables, now we are turning to retreats and time off to address the most human of all emotions which is fear. Fear of failure, fear of being discovered as an imperfect employee, fear of failing to support our families, and the ultimate fear of losing our job.

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Further reading: Young Worker Safety Perceptions and Supervisor Trust

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Why “Psychological Safety” Is in Quotes

Being a big fan of the English language, I quiver when someone says “incentivize” when we already had the verb “incent”…or “more unique” when “unique” is not comparative, meaning it’s either one of a kind or it’s not. So “psychological safety” initially sounded to me like another invention of useless jargon to define something we already knew. But I was wrong.

McKinsey’s research defines psychological safety as feeling safe to take interpersonal risks, to speak up, to disagree openly, to surface concerns without fear of negative repercussions or pressure to sugarcoat bad news. They go on to say that psychological safety is both a driver of worker productivity and also that we have too little of it. McKinsey’s studies make clear that a psychological-safe environment improves retention, engagement, and more.^[iv]

So peeling back to our hard-worker Teresa who is frequently absent from her family’s lives, wouldn’t it make sense if she talked with her manager with hope of getting some work relief? Or at least being told that her job is safe, that her performance is above par, and that her manager is grateful for her efforts? And it’s likely, too, that her manager would reduce Teresa’s workload by eliminating some assignments, finding her some help, or helping her build additional skills so she can contribute the same or more with less stress?

This Is Another Reason Why Stay Interviews Work

I invented Stay Interviews with a top-selling book in 2012, inspired by an industrial psychology professor who sent me study after study that proved the number one reason employees stay or leave, or engage or disengage, is how much they trust their direct supervisor. Gallup data says the same. Stay Interviews’ purpose is that a manager will look each employee in the eye and ask why he stays, why he might leave, and what that manager can do to make things better. Stay Interviews’ accumulative benefit, though, is they crush down the door such that employees learn they can talk with their managers about important things that impact their work, that their manager’s door is always open, that they now have that psychological safety net when they need it.

Someone once told me there are only two kinds of meetings, did you do your work and here’s more work. Stay Interviews are a third kind of meeting, and a type of meeting that is long overdue.

Ready to Make Stay Interviews a Part of Your Retention Plan?

Email me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and let’s figure out how to implement Stay Interviews to start reducing turnover by 30% or more this year.

Dick Finnegan’s new book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis, publishes this September. Pre-order your copy now to get ahead of the looming workforce retention challenge.

[i] https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/job-listings-labor-market-373b4331?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=ASWzDAjxB0vrhY4rryJHdFuwvBFVUp8CL7AZb_86nj6s4z5eS1ZW36z8SsukhPUcSjU%3D&gaa_ts=68728ac6&gaa_sig=1gkSzV2vGMHIBdsVhpDQ3yTqMm_CBY3WV1eZT84R-AFBBLZC_I4L-E4htcsqZI7gKTo64IepGfpe8I8Zr7MA-A%3D%3D

[ii] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/burnout/art-20046642

[iii] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unlimited-vacation-bad-deal-companies-save-billions/

[iv] “What is psychological safety?” McKinsey & Company, July 17, 2023; https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-psychological-safety

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Cost of Turnover and Cost of Referral Correlation

We have developed very specific, most-wouldn’t-think-of-them strategies to increase referrals such that up to half of all of our client companies’ hires come from referrals. One of those client companies connected the dots between referrals and the cost of turnover. And their outcome is brilliant.

Thinking backwards for a minute, consider those times when you debated how much to pay for referrals, maybe slugging it out with your CFO regarding how many hard dollars might fly out the door if you were fortunate enough to get any referrals at all. And I would guess when HR challenges finance over something involving money, HR usually loses. That’s where placing a dollar cost on turnover comes in…and doing so is the very first step we take with our clients.

Want to calculate your cost of turnover? You can do so for free here by using our proprietary turnover calculator.

This client provides a service to its customers delivered by skilled tradespeople, the type of worker who was in high demand even before the current applicant crunch. Nationally, there are a limited number of technicians who can do this work…and there is no easy pathway for hiring interested people and training them. Many earn greater than $100,000 per year and can find jobs with other companies in an hour. Our client has over 100 locations across the U.S. and each location is vulnerable to technicians leaving on any given day.

Buy In on Cost of Turnover and Conversion to Cost of Referral

“Leaving” is where the cost of turnover comes in. This executive team totally buys into that losing one technician for a month results in lost revenue greater than $60,000. And sometimes these jobs stay open for longer than one month. So if you knew this same type of data for your company, would you be sparring with finance over whether to pay $500 or $1,000 for each referral? Probably not.

So our client company made fast policy decisions to fill jobs quickly with employee referrals. For example…

1. The referring employee will earn $1 dollar per hour extra for one full year, resulting in a total bump of $2,000 to $3,000 depending on overtime.
2. The payout begins when the new hire joins and the only “stay” requirement is the referring employee must stay the full year to receive the continuously-paid bonus.

So this means if I refer someone who gets hired, I just earned a large chunk of cash regardless of how long my referred employee stays…because this client company smartly said it’s the company’s job to decide if the candidate will stay and not the job of the referring employee.

Is the Cost of Referral Tied to Cost of Turnover Too Radical?

But then comes the extraordinary policy part. This is a policy feature I’ve suggested to scores of clients who saw this idea as too radical…but this client said “absolutely”. When any technician refers five new hires…who must only get hired with no “stay” requirement…that technician gets double payouts for any future referrals. So instead of earning one extra dollar an hour for a year, any employee who refers five technicians who get hired would now earn two. And these referring employees have the potential to continually “recruit” new hires and consequently keep increasing their pay…with no limits.

Bold maybe? A better word is “smart”. Imagine a competitor CEO telling her board of directors, “We lose $60,000 per month when a technician job is open so we’ve initiated an employee referral program where we will pay any technician who refers a new hire a full $500 for each referral”. Not so smart…but common among most companies who don’t connect their referral payout amount to their cost of turnover data.

The key point is the top team has determined the cost of turnover and realizes paying up to $6,000 to fill those jobs is a win/win, and actually a bigger win for the company. And their cost analysis beats back any objection that these represent “soft costs”. Real revenue is flying out their one-hundred-plus doors.

The Dollar Value of Turnover is Key to Understanding the Cost of Turnover

Why is our first step with new clients that we place a dollar value on turnover? Because it’s the ice-cold-bucket-of-water dumped on their executive teams’ heads, the wake-up call that turnover is likely their second or third greatest overall expense. Finance traditionally has no interest in turnover because they see it as HR’s job, all while finance is trying to find coins in the couch to cut costs. And HR makes their top team’s understanding worse by disclosing turnover “benchmarks” which only stifle corrective actions. Compare these two scenarios:

Scenario #1:

HR: Our turnover is 28% and the benchmark is 30%.

CEO: Great work, HR!

Scenario #2:

HR: Our turnover is 28% and it’s costing us $3.4 MM per year.

CEO: We have to fix this!!!

Costing turnover is the genesis, the beginning for gaining vigorous support from your c-suite to then establish retention goals for leaders, implement Stay Interviews, and all other solutions that are part of Finnegan’s Arrow®.

Our Comprehensive Turnover Solution is designed to get results for companies like yours by cutting turnover 20% and more. Write me or connect with me if you want to learn more…DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.

This updated blog was originally published September 21, 2021.

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Service Is Suffering During The Great Resignation

Given the data regarding The Great Resignation, it’s clear that service is worse all over. And that same data makes clear these service snafus will be with us for the long haul.

Then comes this phrase “Quiet Quitters.”, introduced to us by Sona Movsesian who is Conan O’Brien’s assistant.[i] Sona is so proud of her job neglect that she wrote a book about it called The World’s Worst Assistant that is said to be a New York Times bestseller. In a recent interview…yes, Sona is also doing interviews…she said this:

“I realized very early on, I’m just going to be mediocre…and that’s totally fine with me. Most people are mediocre.”

Sona’s slacker pride comes at a good time for her fellow slackers across our country because replacements are so hard to find that the number of workers getting fired is at an all-time low.[ii]

Quiet Quitting and The Great Resignation

So what to do if you are managing our now ex-drugstore that loses prescriptions where no employees seem to care?

1. Coach them, coach them, then coach them some more
2. Treat them gently knowing how hard it is to replace them
3. Counsel them once, maybe twice, then fire them the next time

The correct answer can only be C because if you let one employee slide, peer employees will also slide while the best ones will quit. I wrote about this several months ago and it appears nothing much has changed. Maybe Sona is right that most people are mediocre.

But then, maybe she’s not right at all. Employee accountability is a wonderful thing because it is the bedrock of great organizations. The reason why Chick-fil-A® employees say “my pleasure” is so they don’t say “no problem”, differentiating them from their peers at McDonald’s. And hearing them say “my pleasure” is as consistent as the beat of a drum because their manager holds them accountable for saying it.

Can We Overcome Quiet Quitting Ennui?

I’m convinced that only those CEOs who fully understand the causes, depths, and projected lifespan of The Great Resignation can truly understand there will be winning and losing companies as a result. While journalists write about inflation, supply chain woes and a potential recession, only the sharpest economists know that our national workforce shortage is the genesis of them all. Two contributing pre-pandemic trends have been staring us in the face for a long time, that our birthrate has been plummeting for 70 years and young workers are far less loyal than the baby boomers they replace. Then the pandemic tossed in millions of early retirees, parents staying home with kids, and one million-plus non-expected COVID deaths. This chart will pop your eyes open regarding our nation’s declining birthrate:[iii]

If not for immigration we would be Japan, living with a declining population and a similarly declining economy.[iv]

Few, too, understand how many former corporate employees chose entrepreneurship in the face of pandemic layoffs and subsequently rethinking one’s priorities. This chart shows the incredible increase in business licenses once the pandemic hit:

And many work-for-yourself jobs don’t require a license, with just one example being the 4 million-plus Uber and Lyft drivers who seem to be pleased with non-corporate jobs.

Quiet Quitters = Retention Opportunity for Best Workers

In the face of The Great Resignation, nothing matters more than retaining your best and even good workers.

“Nothing matters more” covers a lot of ground. But I can’t think of one thing businesses do…customer service, product development, increasing sales, etc…that actually matters more than retaining workers. A recent study of HR professionals reveals that the top assignment from the CEO list is improving retention. And retention is not only the solution to keeping good workers but also to reducing the number of open jobs.

Stay Interviews as part of a comprehensive retention solution puts direct supervisors in the driver’s seat by addressing each employee as individuals and as people who can build trust, whether they are “mediocre” or not. Is it hard to counsel and work to retain Quiet Quitters? Absolutely. But if you don’t, you’ll be surrounded by them, and your company will fail.Building trust with employees and having direct managers accountable for that retention is a good way to overcome lamenting the Quiet Quitters to focus on the opportunity to keep your best workers.

Need help establishing retention goals based on manager accountability to retain your top employees? Schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and we’ll discuss the numbers and needs you should have to evaluate your retention goals. We work with companies in every type of industry to cut turnover by 20% and more by building trust and accountabilities.

This updated blog was originally published September 22, 2022.

[i] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/conan-o-brien-s-assistant-who-s-quiet-quit-her-job-for-over-a-decade-says-it-s-okay-to-be-mediocre-and-find-ways-to-do-the-minimal-amount-of-work-possible/ar-AA11oUXH?cvid=96ddc06886b84d61ab9f1587deef8f80

[ii] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost

[iii] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6901a5.htm

[iv] https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/3188348/japans-population-drops-most-9-years-number-over-65s-hits

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