Today’s workforce challenge isn’t mass quitting. It’s something more complicated, and, in many ways, more dangerous. It’s a blend of stubborn labor shortages, historically low birth rates, lower immigration, declining engagement, and what I call The Great Detachment: employees who may not quit, but who are mentally checked out.

And one of the quietest but most meaningful indicators of this shift is how few people are being fired.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that U.S. discharges remain at historic lows, consistently under 1%. In some recent months, the rate dipped near the record set during The Great Resignation. That means 99% of workers were deemed “good enough” to keep…even though our experience as consumers clearly suggests otherwise.

Restaurants, retail stores, service centers, you’ve seen it. Skills aren’t always there. Interest isn’t always there. Dedication is hit-or-miss. Yet employees aren’t being removed. Why? Because managers are scared. Scared that if they fire a poor performer, the job will sit open for months. Scared the next hire may be worse. Scared they won’t get any candidates at all.

So they muscle through it. They tolerate mediocrity. They quietly lower the bar.

But here’s the real danger, one that gets far less attention than it should.

The Hidden Cost of Keeping Poor Performers

Keeping poor performers doesn’t just hurt customers.
It drives away your best employees.

In Targeting Turnover, I present decades of research showing that top performers out-produce average performers by four to one. One long-running academic analysis found that the top 5% generated 26% of total company output across industries. Your top people are literally doing the work of five employees. They’re your informal leaders. They set the pace. They keep you competitive.

And nothing demoralizes them faster than working alongside someone who doesn’t carry their weight.

—–

Further Reading: Pay or Disrespect – What Drives High Performer Turnover?

—–

What Your Employees Really Talk About Over Dinner

If you want to know what your employees really feel, ask yourself one simple question: What are they talking about over dinner?

Because it’s not survey questions.
It’s not mission statements.
It’s not the new PTO policy.

They talk about their bosses.
They talk about their colleagues.
And they talk about the daily frustrations that accumulate, quietly and relentlessly.

Every team has that one person. And every time your top performers go home and complain about that person, you’ve lost a little more of their commitment.

When you keep a low performer, you tell your top performers something they hear loud and clear:

“We won’t protect you.”

And when your best employees stop feeling supported, they stop staying loyal.

What Happens When You Keep the Wrong People

Yes, retaining poor performers puts you at risk of retaining only poor performers.

Far too many organizations today treat accountability as optional in a tight labor market. But accountability isn’t optional. It’s foundational. And companies that hold onto substandard workers eventually stall, through slower service, weaker culture, and the loss of their strongest contributors.

—–

Further Reading: From Resignation to Detachment: The Workforce Crisis Has Evolved

—–

The Real Fix: Reduce Turnover First

The solution is not firing more employees.
The solution is reducing turnover so managers can hold employees accountable again.

This is the core argument in Targeting Turnover: you restore accountability by first restoring stability.

When employees trust their supervisors, the #1 reason people stay or leave, turnover falls. When turnover falls, your open-jobs list shrinks. And when that list shrinks, managers finally gain the confidence to act on poor performance instead of avoiding it.

This is what gives organizations the leverage they’ve lost.

Additional Steps That Strengthen Accountability

1. Keep hiring standards high, even when someone says “I just need a body.”
2. Give new hires the skill training they need to succeed.
3. Hold managers accountable for retaining poor performers, and coach or remove the managers who refuse to manage.

Because the risk of letting poor performers slide is always the same:

You end up with a workforce full of people who can’t or won’t do the job.

Ready to Rebuild Accountability on Your Teams?

If you want the research, strategies, and practical steps to rebuild accountability, and dramatically reduce employee turnover, explore my new book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis. Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

It shows how leaders across industries are cutting turnover by 30% or more, even in a labor market defined by scarcity. And more importantly, it shows how you can apply the same principles to restore performance, retention, and results in your organization.

The post Dilemma: Should You Fire Poor Performers in Today’s Talent Crisis? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

My interest isn’t academic. It’s tied directly to a core challenge we address with clients every day: how to retain employees who come from tough, disadvantaged backgrounds, especially in a labor market where the workforce is shrinking and turnover hits harder than ever.

A Personal Starting Point

I grew up in a run-down neighborhood on the north side of Pittsburgh. We weren’t poor; we were lower middle class with parents who made sure we had what we needed. Like most kids, we assumed our world was normal.

But it wasn’t poverty.

In Bridges Out of Poverty, authors Payne, DeVol, and Smith define poverty as “the extent to which an individual does without resources.” And they list nine resource categories that go far beyond money: emotional, mental, spiritual, physical, support systems, relationships/role models, knowledge of hidden rules, and coping strategies.

These are the resources that determine whether someone can show up to work consistently – not because they lack commitment, but because they lack stability.

The Reality Many Employers Miss

In my early management years, I clung to a naïve equation:
work = money = a way out of poverty
Therefore, I assumed employees battling poverty would protect their jobs at all costs.

But stories like this corrected that thinking:

“Like many individuals who live in poverty, Sally doesn’t know the middle-class rules about not missing work or being late. She has brought her poverty-culture rules to work…The supervisor, operating from a middle-class orientation, is baffled by Sally’s chaotic lifestyle, unreliable childcare, and lack of consistent transportation.”

Sally wasn’t lazy. She was operating with scarce emotional and practical resources. And in today’s labor market – one defined by low population growth, low immigration, and persistent shortages in frontline roles – Sally is not rare. She is increasingly the backbone of the U.S. workforce.

Workforce Realities Have Shifted – Turnover Has Not

In Targeting Turnover, I make the point that the top reason employees stay or quit is the same today as it was 30 years ago: trust in their immediate supervisor. That hasn’t changed.

But the context around attendance has.

Employers today take bigger chances on imperfect candidates because they must. Retention has become an economic imperative, and one absence-prone employee can cost far more than their paycheck.

So the question becomes:
How can we hire and retain candidates who may not have the resources or “hidden rules” of middle-class work culture?

Here are proven strategies.

Before Hire: Set Clear Expectations and Screen for Realities

Clarity saves everyone disappointment. Here’s what works:

• Make your attendance policy painfully clear. Don’t bury it. Say it out loud. Put it in writing.
• Tell a true story about an ex-employee who didn’t make it because of attendance – no names, full context.
• Explain your call-out procedure and make clear that communication is required.
• Ask directly about transportation and childcare, then probe for reliability.
• Ask for a confidence rating (1–10) on meeting your attendance expectations for the first 90 days.
• Invite the candidate to opt out if they can’t commit.

These steps don’t eliminate risk – but they help candidates make an honest assessment before you hire them.

After Hire: Coach to the Real Issues

Once on board, you can ask more specific questions – always with supportive tone, not interrogation:

• What’s your back-up childcare plan?
• What’s your back-up transportation plan?
• What happens on mornings when things go wrong?
• What do you wish you had in place that would make it easier to get here consistently?

Talk through options. Solutions that seem obvious to you may not be visible to someone navigating daily instability.

This coaching builds trust – and trust builds retention.

—–

Further Reading: From Resignation to Detachment: The Workforce Crisis Has Evolved

——

Accountability Matters: Change “Attendance” to “Attendance/Bad Hire”

One of the central themes in Targeting Turnover is that retention improves when managers own accountability.

If a new hire washes out in the first 90 days because of attendance and we mark the exit reason simply as “attendance,” we learn nothing. The category provides no solutions and no responsibility for hiring decisions.

Changing the exit reason to “attendance/bad hire” signals this:

• We controlled the selection process.
• We took the risk.
• We need to improve how we assess attendance reliability.

Sometimes HR screens more carefully; sometimes hiring managers do. What matters is shifting from “the employee failed us” to “we chose the wrong candidate based on the information we had.”

Accountability raises decision quality. Decision quality raises retention.

—–

Further Reading: Stop Chasing “Fuzzy” Engagement Scores – Start Driving Accountability

——

The Bigger Message

As the U.S. workforce continues to shrink and competition intensifies, organizations cannot afford to ignore the realities of poverty – or to hope attendance challenges solve themselves.

We can’t fix every challenge in a new hire’s life.
But we can control:

• How clearly we set expectations
• How we screen for reliability
• How we coach early
• How we hold ourselves accountable for hiring decisions

And those levers move retention.

Want to Cut Turnover in Your Frontline Roles?

If you’re struggling with attendance, early exits, or frontline retention, let’s talk.

Email me at dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com to schedule a free strategy session. I’ll listen, probe deeply, and work with you to identify the exact levers that will reduce turnover and strengthen your workforce.

Connect engagement, retention, and accountability in your organization.
Read Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis.
Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

The post Poverty, Attendance, Hidden Rules, and the Truth About Retention appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Today we’ll look at who it matters to most, drawing from an excerpt of my new book, Targeting Turnover. This is thoughtful, research-driven work, and I think you’ll find it fascinating.

A Job, a Career, or a Calling?

Yale professor Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski has studied how individuals identify with their work and found three distinct mindsets: job, career, and calling. Each one shapes how much compensation matters.

• JOB: A job provides pay, benefits, and perhaps some social perks. It’s primarily about earning a paycheck. People in this category are more invested in their lives outside of work; the job funds what they love to do beyond it.
• CAREER: A job is something you do for others; a career is what you build for yourself. Career professionals still work for the paycheck, but they’re also motivated by advancement and recognition.
• CALLING: People who see their work as a calling feel a deep alignment between what they do and who they are. They find meaning and personal fulfillment in their work itself.[i]

You likely know people who fit each category. Dr. Wrzesniewski emphasizes that all three are honorable – dissonance arises only when we find ourselves misaligned. If you simply want to do good work and go home, the “job” mindset can bring satisfaction. But if you crave deeper purpose and find yourself in a purely transactional environment, frustration follows.

Compensation, of course, plays a role in all three. But it’s more central for some than others. Those with a career mindset often chase higher pay and promotions, while those with a calling are driven by meaning and impact.

For instance, social service agencies might seek people motivated by a sense of purpose, while investment banks may thrive by attracting career-driven employees who compete for higher earnings.

So ask yourself: which of these three work contexts best fits your organization’s highest-turnover roles?

—–

Further Reading: Are You Hiring for a Calling or a Job? It Impacts Retention

——

The Impact on Minimum-Wage Workers

We often classify U.S. workers as exempt vs. non-exempt, or white collar vs. blue collar, but minimum-wage jobs stand apart. Many of these roles offer limited advancement opportunity and are assumed to be “just for the money.”

But that assumption misses something vital.

UCLA professor Mike Rose, in his book The Mind at Work, explored the intelligence and craft of America’s working class, from waitresses to welders. His research challenges the idea that manual jobs are low-skill.

Here’s how one hair stylist, Sharon, described her approach to cutting hair:

“You’ve got to add up all these pieces of the puzzle, and then at the end you’ve got to come up with a thought, OK, it’s gotta be this length, it’s gotta be layered here, it’s got to be textured there, it can have a fringe, it can’t have a fringe, you know, so the thought process goes…It’s not like we just start cutting. By the time I take my client to the shampoo bowl, after the consultation, I already have a little road map as to how I’m going to cut this haircut.”[ii]

It’s hard not to see Sharon’s work as a calling.

——

Further Reading: Why Stay Interviews Q2 is Deceptively Simple – and Powerful

——

Dr. Wrzesniewski found the same potential among hospital custodians.
One, named Luke, cleaned a patient’s room a second time so the patient’s father, who had missed the first cleaning, could see it done. Another, Carlotta, changed the artwork on the walls of comatose patients’ rooms so that when they woke, they would see something new.

Carlotta explained:

“I enjoy entertaining patients. That’s what I enjoy the most. And that is not really part of my job description. But I like putting on a show for them, per se. Dancing if there is a certain song on, I get to dance and if a talk show is on, I get to talk about that talk show or whatever. That’s what I enjoy most. I enjoy making people laugh.”[iii]

Their stories remind us that meaning and pride can exist at any pay level. Even among minimum-wage workers, pay alone rarely drives engagement or retention.

The Metrics That Matter Most

I wrote my book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis, after years of waiting to see what challenge would define our post-pandemic workforce. What I found had little to do with COVID-19. It was demographic.

Economists have long warned about the twin forces of mass baby-boomer retirements and declining birthrates – but the numbers hadn’t been fully translated into real workforce math. After months of digging and direct conversations with the U.S. Census Bureau, I uncovered the full picture.

Here it is in one sentence:

The U.S. will add only one-fifth as many working-age adults going forward as it has in the past.

That shift begins now, in 2025.

Every employee who quits today isn’t just a vacancy – it’s a labor-market loss that may never be replaced. The countries and companies that retain talent will win. Those that don’t will fall behind economically.

Perks won’t fix this. Slogans won’t either.

The only sustainable solution is leadership accountability – holding managers responsible for the experiences they create and the trust they build.

That’s where Targeting Turnover comes in: connecting engagement, retention, and accountability into one actionable model for leaders at every level.

Connect engagement, retention, and accountability in your organization.
Read Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis.
Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold – including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

[i] Katharine Brooks, “Job, Career, Calling: Key to Happiness and Meaning at Work?” Psychology Today, June 29, 2012; https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/career-transitions/201206/job-career-calling-key-happiness-and-meaning-work

[ii] Mike Rose, The Mind At Work, New York: Penguin Books, 2004

[iii] Barry Schwartz, Why We Work. New York: Simon & Schuster, TED Books, 2015

The post Does Pay Matter More for Some Jobs Than Others? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Fewer people are quitting now, but more are quietly checking out. U.S. engagement has dropped to its lowest level in a decade, with only 31 percent of employees engaged and 17 percent actively disengaged.[i] And though monthly quits have fallen to around 3.2 million[ii], half of employees still say they are watching or actively seeking new jobs.[iii]

The resignation wave may have crested, but the detachment tide is still rising. To lead through it, managers must understand why this is happening and how to take ownership. Here are ten forces that turned a short-term labor shock into a long-term mindset shift.

1. Cultural Shifts That Rewired Worker Expectations

Movements like #MeToo and racial-justice protests permanently changed how people expect to be treated at work. Employees no longer tolerate toxic leaders or inequitable systems. They want psychological safety and transparency, and will quietly disengage if they don’t get it.

2. Pandemic Aftershocks and the Meaning-of-Work Reckoning

The pandemic caused millions to rethink priorities. Even as routines returned, the existential question, “What am I working for?”, remains. That question didn’t vanish with vaccines; it’s now woven into every retention challenge.

3. Women and Caregivers Still Demand Flexibility

Women left the workforce in record numbers in 2021, and while many returned, flexibility has become a permanent expectation. Organizations that treat flexibility as a perk instead of a core policy are watching women, and their discretionary effort, drift away.

4. Entrepreneurship and the Freedom Factor

Entrepreneurship surged by 24 percent during the Great Resignation[iv], and the spirit hasn’t faded. Side hustles and independent work continue to redefine what “job security” means. Detachment thrives when employees feel trapped by bureaucracy rather than inspired by purpose.

5. Retirements Reshaped the Labor Market

More than 2 million excess retirements during and after the pandemic created permanent knowledge gaps.[v] Younger employees have stepped in, but without the mentoring and trust networks retirees once provided, many feel untethered from institutional purpose.

6. A Shrinking Labor Pool

America’s population growth has slowed to historic lows. The labor force participation rate remains about 1 percentage point below pre-pandemic levels[vi], and immigration shortfalls have compounded the strain. Fewer workers mean higher pressure on the ones who remain, and higher burnout risk.

——

Further Reading: The Workforce Crisis Just Got Worse: Immigration, Retention & The Future of Work

——

7. Global Talent Declines and “Toxic Politics”

The United States still struggles to attract global talent at pre-2016 levels. High-skilled visas have not rebounded, and international researchers and clinicians continue to cite political and cultural polarization as reasons to work elsewhere. Detachment isn’t only emotional, it’s demographic.

8. The Lingering Human Toll of the Pandemic

Beyond the tragic loss of life, the pandemic altered how workers view health, risk, and loyalty. “Workplace safety” now means both physical and psychological safety. When leaders ignore that evolution, employees disengage, not necessarily out of defiance, but self-preservation.

——

Further Reading: Young Worker Safety Perceptions and Supervisor Trust

——

9. An Overabundance of Options

Even today, over 8 million job openings remain across the U.S. economy.[vii] Hybrid and remote work expanded the map of opportunity. Detachment accelerates when employees feel they always have somewhere else to go, without ever having to leave home.

10. Generational Power and the Detachment Mindset

Millennials and Gen Z now make up more than half of the workforce, with millennials alone reaching 75 percent by 2025.[viii] These workers are redefining success around fulfillment and flexibility, not loyalty. Their power in the labor market has created a new normal: people don’t quit because of bad companies, they detach because of bad leadership.

The Permanent Shift: From Turnover to Trust

The Wall Street Journal once warned that labor shortages might be “permanent.”[ix] Three years later, we see the deeper permanence: employees’ expectations of leadership have changed forever. The Great Detachment is less about people leaving jobs and more about them losing faith in leaders.

Workforce clouds will stay dark until organizations rebuild trust one manager at a time. Those who measure and manage that trust will out-recruit, out-retain, and out-perform everyone else.

Let’s make The Great Detachment our wake-up call – not our new normal.

The Bottom Line

That’s why the core principle of my new book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis, is simple but urgent: Retention is a manager-accountability issue.

Turnover doesn’t start in the boardroom, it starts in the relationship between an employee and their leader. The antidote to detachment isn’t another perk or pay bump. It’s trust, conversation, and connection.

Read 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.

[i] HR Dive. (2024, June). U.S. employee engagement falls to 10-year low. https://www.hrdive.com/news/us-employee-engagement-falls-to-10-year-low/737270

[ii] Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025, May). Job openings and labor turnover summary. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

[iii] Gallup. (2024, August). Employee turnover: Preventable but often ignored. Gallup Workplace. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/646538/employee-turnover-preventable-often-ignored.aspx

[iv] U.S. Census Bureau. (2024). Business formation statistics (BFS). https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/

[v] Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. (2023, March). Excess retirements during the pandemic era. https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications

[vi] Pew Research Center. (2024). Trends in U.S. labor force participation and demographics. https://www.pewresearch.org

[vii] Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025, May). Job openings and labor turnover summary. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm

[viii] EY. (2024). Workforce demographic report 2024. Ernst & Young Global Limited. https://www.ey.com

[ix] Wall Street Journal. (2022, November). Economists warn labor shortage may be permanent. https://www.wsj.com

The post From Resignation to Detachment: The Workforce Crisis Has Evolved appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

If we’re honest, that stagnation tells us something powerful: our traditional engagement strategies don’t work. And until we fix how leaders connect with people, no new survey or benefit will move the needle.

Why Engagement Stays Flat

The reasons are simple – and frustratingly familiar.

1. Reliance on anonymous surveys.
By design, engagement surveys treat every response equally – your top performer’s insight counts the same as your next termination. Surveys tell you “what” is happening, not “why” or “how to fix it.” They create data, not solutions.

2. Benchmarking against mediocrity.
Many organizations are happy to land in the middle of the pack. But imagine a CEO settling for “average” in sales or service. When HR leaders accept “average” engagement, they send the message that engagement can’t improve. It can. It must.

The CFO Connection

In Targeting Turnover, I argue that CFOs – not just HR – should own employee retention and engagement. Engagement impacts productivity and profitability as directly as any operational metric.

When CFOs track turnover and engagement alongside margin and revenue, accountability follows. When they don’t, people metrics stay second-class, even though people drive every other number on the balance sheet.

It’s time to treat engagement as a business issue, not a culture perk.

—–

Further Reading: Imagine If CFOs Measured the Cost of Turnover

—–

The Manager Multiplier

Gallup’s data continues to prove what we see every day: managers make or break engagement.

Engaged employees overwhelmingly report strong relationships with their bosses. Actively disengaged employees – those who sabotage culture and performance – report the opposite.

If engagement rises or falls at the team level, it follows that the solution must happen there too – one conversation, one manager, one employee at a time.

The Real Fix: Stay Interviews

Here’s the truth: no one stays longer or works harder because of pizza parties or pet insurance. They stay because they trust their boss.

Stay Interviews remain the single most powerful way to build that trust. They aren’t surveys. They’re structured, one-on-one conversations where managers learn what each employee needs most to stay and thrive.

Our clients who commit to Stay Interviews see average turnover reductions of 30% or more. Even during the pandemic, those results held steady because conversations continued – even virtually.

When managers ask, listen, and act, engagement follows. When they don’t, it stalls.

—–

Further Reading: Stop Chasing “Fuzzy” Engagement Scores – Start Driving Accountability

——

From Engagement to Accountability

Employee engagement will never improve until leaders are held accountable for it. That’s the thesis behind Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis.

The book shows how to connect engagement, retention, and business results so that every manager understands: your team’s engagement is your number. Not HR’s, not corporate’s – yours.

And when managers are measured, coached, and rewarded for engagement the same way they are for productivity or safety, everything changes.

Where to Start

If you want to move engagement from stagnation to success:

1. Stop hiding behind surveys. Start talking directly to employees.
2. Reframe engagement as a financial opportunity. Get your CFO involved.
3. Hold managers accountable. They control the outcome.

You can cut turnover by 30% or more – no matter your industry. And that’s not theory; it’s proven data from our clients across healthcare, manufacturing, and service sectors.

Connect engagement, retention, and accountability in your organization.

Read 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.

The post Stop Measuring Engagement. Start Owning It. appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Engagement Scores vs. Real Productivity

There’s no question that engagement matters. In fact, employee engagement impacts productivity more than pay, benefits, or other tangible perks. Gallup has long called the link between engagement and performance “substantial and highly generalizable,” showing top-quartile organizations consistently outperform those at the bottom on productivity, safety, quality, and retention. MIT Sloan found that companies with consistent profit growth had more engaged employees, while disengaged workforces correlated directly with flat or negative growth.

These correlations should make CFOs salivate. After all, employees don’t work harder because companies are profitable – companies are profitable because employees are engaged. Yet too often, organizations spend more time debating survey scores than implementing strategies that improve trust, performance, and retention.

——

Further Reading: The Workforce Crisis Solution: 4 Ways to Turn Engagement into Retention

——-

Why Engagement Surveys Fail Leaders

Engagement surveys, when used well, can point to areas for improvement. But here’s where most organizations go wrong:

1. Data without accountability. Leaders receive their team’s survey results, but no one holds them responsible for acting on them.
2. Questions that miss the mark. Surveys don’t ask enough about trust in the immediate supervisor – the single biggest driver of engagement.
3. Dangerous comparisons. Benchmarking against other companies lowers ambition and excuses poor performance.
4. Activity over outcomes. Engagement plans filled with events and perks don’t move the needle on productivity or retention.

The result? Leadership teams comfort themselves with “middle of the pack” scores instead of demanding improvement.

What Works: Engagement + Accountability

In Targeting Turnover, I make the case that surveys alone will never solve disengagement. The missing link is accountability. Leaders must be measured and held responsible for improving engagement, just as they are for sales, service, or safety.

That means:

• Every leader, at every level, receives their team’s engagement data.
• At least one-third of survey questions focus on trust, recognition, communication, and coaching.
• Leaders create improvement plans centered on relationships, not just events or free food.
• Performance is tracked across surveys. Leaders who don’t improve are coached – and if they still can’t deliver, they’re replaced.

No CEO would tolerate a manager who consistently misses sales goals. Engagement, which drives productivity and retention, should be treated the same way.

——

Further Reading: Two Ways to Cut Turnover. Only One Will Always Work.

——-

Beyond Surveys: Stay Interviews

The most effective way to link engagement with retention is through Stay Interviews. Instead of guessing at what employees need, managers ask them directly: What will keep you here? What might cause you to leave? What can I do to make your job better?

When paired with accountability, Stay Interviews as part of Finnegan’s Arrow with goals, forecasts, and consequences, is proven to transform leaders. They stop managing by assumption and start managing by listening. And when executives enforce accountability for engagement and retention – backed by the undeniable data linking both to productivity – they finally move from fuzzy metrics to real outcomes.

Final Word: The Workforce Crisis Won’t Wait

The U.S. is running out of workers. Thirty million Americans are reaching retirement age this decade, and the only lever companies truly control is retention. Engagement surveys are only useful if they lead to accountability and action. Without that, they’re just another fuzzy metric in a world that now demands hard results.

The Playbook for Making Managers Accountable

If you need a playbook for making managers accountable – not just aware – see my new book 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.

The post Stop Chasing “Fuzzy” Engagement Scores – Start Driving Accountability appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

The US economy has stalled, though that news is sometimes shielded by the significant major stock market gains that impact the relatively few. Inflation is up, hiring is down, and companies are sitting on the sidelines rather than aggressively chasing growth, all wondering where administration decisions are heading regarding immigration and tariffs.

Chapter one of my new book, Targeting Turnover, now available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal, has received broad acclaim for reporting hard data on how the near-future economies of all first-world countries will depend 100% on their success at immigrating the most and the best-qualified. Quotes from that chapter and the included “Great Gully” chart regarding our actual number of future workers include the following:

• Over thirty million Americans will reach retirement age between 2024 and 2030, representing nearly 20 percent of our total workforce.
• For the first time in our history, older adults will out-number children by 2034.
• The U.S. population will begin to decrease in 2080, while the number of working-age Americans will decrease before then.
• As we progress deeper into this century, the race will be on for developed nations as they compete with each other for immigrant talent.
• Can the United States maintain its global economic dominance in the next twenty years and beyond while our number of working-age citizens remains relatively flat?

And then this direct quote from the U.S. Census Bureau: “Beginning in 2030, immigration is projected to overtake natural increase (the excess of births over deaths) as the primary driver of population growth for our country.”

—–

Further Reading: One Reason the US Added Only 73,000 Jobs in July: Immigration

——

The New Reality Is More Bleak

But this week comes a report from Axios with an alarming title: Without Immigration, U.S. Population Could Start to Decline As Early As 2031.[i]

The report tells us that updated analyses from our government’s Congressional Budget Office says the U.S. population will be smaller and grow more slowly than previously projected, “a result of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.” Note that the source of this report is from inside our own government, our own current administration.

This weekly Targeting Turnover column is never intended to drift into politics but instead focuses on the skinny topic of how to retain the workers we want to keep…but in this case this major subject of immigration policy has a major impact on our actual number of future workers.

The Axios report continues to tell us that the CBO now projects 290,000 immigrants will be “removed” from our country and another 30,000 will leave voluntarily…and also that deaths will begin exceeding births in 2031 which is two years than earlier projections, again related to this current immigration crackdown.

How One Policy Decision Impacts Another

I’d like to say that our government is making a policy decision, that reducing immigration is seen as more important than growing our economy and helping individual businesses thrive. But I’m not certain they understand how one set of decisions will impact the other.

In the meantime, the number of foreign students attending US colleges is down by 40%[ii], and various reports tell us that fewer foreigners applied to enter the US during the first Trump administration.

Yet surprisingly, Americans have done a complete flip-flop in recent months regarding their immigration opinions. A year ago, 55% of Americans wanted less immigration and just 16% wanted more. But today a full 79% of Americans say immigration is a good thing.[iii]

—–

Further Reading: Without Immigrants, U.S. Working-Age Population Would Shrink

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What is an Immigrant, Anyhow?

One thing clear is that Americans and maybe other world citizens are having trouble identifying what “immigrant” really means. Most debates center on legal status with little discussion about another group we refer to as refugees, while those of us interested in workforce only know that there are not and will never be enough native Americans to fill our jobs and drive our economy forward.

How This Impacts Your Company

Let me venture forward with this extreme statement:

Never in the history of the United States nor in the history of our world has retaining your top employees mattered more.

The math is clear. US births have consistently decreased since 1955…that’s 70 years…and we fell below the replacement rate way back in 1972. Then baby boomers, our largest generational group, are now removing 30 million grit-committed employees from our workforce. Our production future is in the hands of those who weren’t born here, and they have scores of countries to move to. And too many of them are choosing those countries over ours.

Ready to face the workforce crisis head-on?
Get your copy of Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis today. Available in e-book, audio, and paperback wherever books are sold — including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and BookPal for group sales.

[i] https://www.axios.com/2025/09/10/trump-ice-big-beautiful-bill-immigration

[ii] https://theconversation.com/fewer-international-students-are-coming-to-the-us-costing-universities-and-communities-that-benefit-from-these-visitors-264012

[iii] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/poll-shows-how-u-s-views-of-immigration-have-changed-since-trump-took-office

The post The Workforce Crisis Just Got Worse: Immigration, Retention & The Future of Work appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

If you ask today’s CEOs to name their biggest challenge, they’ll tell you: people. They can’t find enough of them, they can’t engage them, and – most urgently – they can’t keep them.

Retention isn’t a side issue anymore. It’s the issue. And while engagement scores have been stuck in neutral for over two decades, turnover has only accelerated. Billions have been spent trying to fix these problems. Gallup alone reports U.S. employers spend $1.5 billion each year on engagement strategies, but the needle hasn’t moved.

We’ve measured everything. Surveyed endlessly. Diagnosed the symptoms. What we haven’t done, until Stay Interviews, is get to the solution.

Engagement Fads Fade. But Retention Requires Trust.

If you’ve worked in HR or operations anytime in the last 15 years, you’ve likely seen the cycle:

• A new engagement solution emerges.
• A flurry of adoption follows.
• The results underwhelm.
• Then it disappears into the “remember when?” file.

Let’s review a few that have come and gone:

• Pulse surveys (remember when more surveys were the answer to bad survey results?)
• Gamification platforms promising to motivate employees with badges and leaderboards
• Free snacks, nap pods, and wellness stipends that were supposed to signal a caring culture
• Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) as the north star metric
• AI chatbots built to “boost engagement” by automating recognition
• Anonymous feedback apps that made it easier to vent, but not to solve

Each had a moment. Most had budgets. None had lasting impact.

That’s why companies that want real retention return to what works: trust, built through conversation. And that’s why Stay Interviews still lead the way.

—–

Further Reading: Young Worker Safety Perceptions and Supervisor Trust

—–

Stay Interviews Are Still the Most Effective Retention Strategy

I developed Stay Interviews more than a decade and a half ago and wrote my first book on them for SHRM in 2012, The Power of Stay Interviews, and another book on them, The Stay Interview: A Manger’s Guide to Keeping the Best and Brightest in 2015.

In those books, I outlined the foundation of a Stay Interview as a structured one-on-one conversation where managers ask five proven questions – known as the SI5 – to uncover what really matters to each employee.

The goal? Build trust, address concerns, and take meaningful action before someone decides to leave.

While trends come and go, the fundamentals haven’t changed:

The #1 driver of retention is whether employees trust their boss.

Surveys can’t build that. Perks can’t buy it.
Only direct, intentional leadership can create it.

The SI5: Still the Gold Standard in 2025

The five Stay Interview questions are built on research and real-world results. The SI5 consists of five research-backed questions that uncover what matters most to your employees:

• What makes them stay
• What might cause them to leave
• What they need to feel more engaged
• What obstacles get in their way
• What you, as their leader, can do better

The conversation doesn’t end with the questions. Managers are trained to probe:
“Tell me more.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“How important is that to you?”
These are the moments where trust is built – and where real insight lives.

From there, managers collaborate with employees on solutions, create accountability, and set goals that make a difference. The result? Turnover reductions of 30% or more, no matter what is happening in the workforce.

That’s the difference between engagement tactics and trust-building leadership.

—–

Further Reading: To Retain Your People, Supervisor Trust Stands Alone

—–

Still Getting Results – Even Now

When NBC News reported on Stay Interviews in action at Quest Diagnostics, viewers saw the full emotional arc – from employee skepticism to genuine relief at being heard. It’s a moment that’s played out thousands of times across companies who implement this method:

Employees don’t want perfection.
They want to be seen, heard, and supported.

The workforce has changed, but the human needs behind retention haven’t.

In an age of AI and automation, genuine human connection is more valuable than ever. Stay Interviews make that connection part of the culture.

If You’re Serious About Retention, Start Here

Stay Interviews aren’t trendy. They’re timeless.
They’ve outlasted every engagement fad because they’re rooted in something real: trust, clarity, and accountability.

Ready to talk about how Stay Interviews could work for your team?

Reach out to me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com to learn how leading organizations are making retention a reality – without relying on the next big trend.

———–

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.

The post Why Stay Interviews Outlast Every Engagement Trend appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Now let’s imagine it’s October, and 24 second-graders are about to meet their third teacher for this same school year. Their original teacher left just before his students arrived, and the replacement lasted six weeks before deciding that teaching “wasn’t for her.” Now these 24 children, already struggling with major disruption, must build trust with a third educator while trying to master reading and math.

This story isn’t unique. Across hallways in schools nationwide, similar scenes unfold daily that leave students confused, parents frustrated, and remaining teachers stretched thin as they cover extra duties and mentor replacement after replacement.

Most of our readers don’t work in schools but many of you have children there, or you have clear memories of returning to school in the fall to a slate of new faces.

The Crisis Behind the Classroom Door

A few statistics paint the devastating picture of our education system’s instability. The U.S. faces a shortage of over 400,000 teachers, with many positions filled by educators lacking proper certification. Even more alarming is that 90% of teacher turnover results in educators leaving the profession entirely¹. These aren’t just career changes though, as they represent thousands of professionals abandoning years of preparation and student loan debt, concluding that teaching has been an unsustainable profession for them.

Thinking more broadly, research consistently shows that teacher turnover negatively impacts student achievement, school climate, and the professional learning communities that drive educational excellence. When experienced teachers leave, they take with them institutional knowledge, established relationships with families, and the deep understanding of their students’ individual learning needs.

——

Further reading – SHRM25: Engagement “Solutions” Are Failures, Do This Instead

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Why Well-Intentioned Solutions Fall Short

Educational leaders and policy experts have identified numerous strategies to address teacher retention. A quick search reveals these thoughtful recommendations from respected organizations:

• The Learning Policy Institute suggests raising pay, providing mentors, offering targeted financial incentives, and establishing teacher residency programs².

• Panorama Education recommends collaborative problem-solving, recognition programs, self-care support, peer observations, and shared vision development³.

• TNTP (The New Teacher Project) emphasizes regular positive feedback, recognizing high performers, and encouraging commitment to staying at the same school⁴.

• American University’s research highlights mentorship, increased compensation, improved teaching conditions, positive school climate monitoring, and autonomy with professional growth opportunities⁵.

These are all evidence-based, valuable strategies. Yet despite widespread awareness of these approaches, teacher turnover continues to devastate schools nationwide. The missing element isn’t knowledge of what works – it’s consistent implementation driven by clear accountability and genuine relationships between teachers and their school leaders.

The Missing Piece: Accountability Plus Authentic Relationships

We’ve applied our Finnegan’s Arrow^TM model to reduce employee turnover very successfully to companies in healthcare, manufacturing, food processing, and more, reducing turnover by an average of 34%…and saving companies millions of dollars. I developed the model’s core components at mid-career with the help of professor who opened my mind to employee retention’s leading research which taught me this:

The #1 reason employees stay or leave…or engage or disengage…

is how much they trust their immediate supervisors.

Gallup’s research says the same, that supervisor’s impact more than 50% of the reasons why employees stay or quit and up to 70% of why they engage or don’t engage in their work.

This insight led to the development of the Finnegan’s Arrow^TM model, which we successfully applied to Osceola County Schools in Florida – a district serving Walt Disney World and extending into diverse communities with varying socioeconomic levels.

The model focuses on five critical components:

• Dollars indicates the importance of converting turnover percentages to dollars in order to gain top executives’ attention.

• Goals directs organizations to establish retention goals and identify who should be accountable for achieving those goals, beginning with first-line supervisors.

• Stay Interviews are the one-on-one structured sessions those leaders then facilitate with each member of their teams to identify why that employee stays, might leave, and what that leader can do to keep them, resulting in a written stay plan for each employee who needs one. These are structured retention sessions that result in a stay plan as opposed to “employee rounding”, “check-ins”, or other nonstructured drive-by interactions.

• Forecasts direct those same leaders to then predict how long each employee will stay.

• Accountability then relates to both goals and forecasts, as executives track how effectively each leader achieves their retention goals and also their forecast accuracy for employees who leave.

Osceola County: When Accountability Met Authentic Care

In August 2017, Osceola County’s forward-thinking superintendent gathered 75 principals and assistant principals for an intensive professional learning session. She began by presenting the district’s turnover data – not just percentages but the real impact on students, families, and school communities. Then came the paradigm shift: each principal-assistant principal team would be held accountable for achieving specific teacher retention goals.

My job, then, was to teach this group how to conduct Stay Interviews, a concept I invented with a top-selling book in 2012, explaining the five heavily-researched questions and facilitating exercises such that the participants learned to ask, listen, probe, take notes, and take responsibility for what they heard…rather than duck away and point elsewhere. And most importantly, they learned to develop customized, one-on-one retention plans for each of their teachers.

——

Further reading – Stay Interviews Really Work: Two Proven Retention Wins

——

Our Inspiring, Productive Beginning…

Within the first few months of implementation, teacher retention exceeded district goals. Principals reported that the Stay Interview process fundamentally changed their relationships with teachers. Instead of superficial interactions focused on compliance and administrative tasks, those principals and their individual teachers engaged in meaningful conversations about classroom support, career growth, and other topics that caused teachers to build upstream trust.

As one principal noted, “I learned that our retention challenges weren’t primarily about pay or resources – they were about teachers feeling unsupported and undervalued. When I started having regular, structured conversations about their needs, everything changed.”

The success stemmed from two critical factors: First, principals developed authentic professional relationships with each teacher through the structured Stay Interview process. Second, those principals took ownership of individualized retention plans because they were being held accountable for measurable retention outcomes.

…Was Then Interrupted by a Hurricane

The term “butterfly effect” is broadly defined as how circumstances in one area can lead to surprising changes in another area. Unfortunately, Hurricane Maria’s devastation of Puerto Rico and the resulting months-long power outages created several unexpected challenges in Osceola County schools. Thousands of families immediately relocated to live with relatives throughout central Florida, driving massive enrollment increases that required emergency classroom additions, teacher reassignments, and other reactions to this crisis, causing our retention initiative to slip down on the priority list.

Yet even during this chaotic period, the relationships built through Stay Interviews provided unexpected benefits. Principals reported that teachers who might have left due to increased stress and changing assignments stayed because of the authentic connections and support systems established through the retention process. The investment in relationships proved its value even under extraordinary circumstances.

Beyond Nice-to-Do: Making Retention a Leadership Priority

Educational leaders demonstrate extraordinary dedication daily. They enter the profession knowing compensation is modest and resources are limited, often purchasing classroom supplies with their own personal funds.

What educators cannot create, however, is additional time. The Finnegan’s Arrow model transforms teacher retention from a nice-to-do initiative into a structured leadership priority with clear expectations and measurable outcomes.

Consider the difference between a general statement like “provide positive feedback” versus scheduling periodic Stay Interviews where principals ask five specific questions, document concerns, and develop action plans for retention. The first approach depends on good intentions and available time whereas the second creates systematic relationship-building with accountability for results.

Returning to Sir John, you may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. Let’s move forward together to not just improve teacher retention but to make America and the world a far better place to learn, live, and find true happiness.

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.

¹ https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/blog/addressing-teacher-shortages-insights-four-states

² https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/blog/addressing-teacher-shortages-insights-four-states
³ https://www.panoramaed.com/blog/teacher-retention-strategies

⁴ https://tntp.org/blog/ask-them-to-stay-data-backed-teacher-retention-strategies/ ⁵ https://soeonline.american.edu/blog/teacher-retention/

The post The Missing Piece to Reduce Teacher Turnover appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

The above paragraph sounds like I made it up, but every detail is true. And if you’re heading for the SHRM Annual Conference later this month in San Diego, I’ll be speaking on how to fix it on Sunday, June 29^th, at 1:30 PM.

First, Engagement Has Never, Ever Gotten Better

Gallup has reported on U.S. companies’ employee engagement every year since 2000. We at C-Suite Analytics track their reporting each year and update the below chart. Here are the results so far:

Gallup reports engagement in three categories: the green on the left indicates the percentage of U.S. workers who are engaged, the blue in the middle indicates the percentage who are not engaged, and the orange on the right indicates the percentage who are in Gallup’s terms “actively disengaged”. This latter group undermines the work of the others.

The obvious first conclusion is that U.S. employee engagement has been steady throughout, regardless of changes in our economy, war vs peace, or any other societal trend. So I would conclude secondly that engagement is based on what is happening inside our buildings versus outside in our society.

Second, Engagement Is Getting Worse, No Matter How Much $ We Through At It

The above chart says so, as does a recent Gallup report headline: U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low. So the logical question becomes now that we have done these surveys for so many years and we should be getting really good at this, plus we seem to have unlimited money to fix engagement, how can we be failing by such an incredibly high margin?

The easy out is to blame workers, and especially young ones. Baby-boomers are moving on, young workers don’t bring the grit, helicopter parents have been far too easy on their kids, blah blah blah.

Third, Here Are the Reported Reasons Why

There have been many published opinions for this failure of course. In the same report noted just above, Gallup pointed their finger toward clarifying job expectations and ensuring “someone” cares about them as a person and encourages their development. Gallup’s ultimate conclusions are for leaders to (1) define what they want in their workplace culture, (2) lead with their own strengths while clarifying the organization’s purpose, and (3) prioritize identifying and selecting managers with the innate ability to engage and inspire employees. In another Gallup report on employee detachment, Gallup says employees are disconnected from their employers due to rapid organizational change/hybrid & remote growing pains/new customer expectations/new employer expectations/broken performance management systems.[iv]

Here’s A Better, Winning Idea

The above paragraph is full of broad strategies without proven tactics, but in fairness it’s because Gallup’s business intent is for us to click on these reports to learn more. Nonetheless, every phrase in that paragraph stands in stark contrast to another, much more usable Gallup report that says this, from a book authored by their CEO:

Of all the codes Gallup has been asked to crack dating back to 80 years to our founder, George Gallup, the single most profound, distinct, and clarifying finding –ever—is probably this one: 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.[v]

Wow. This triggers the main point of my report here, that not just Gallup but every engagement survey vendor points to broad strategies that inevitably lead to one-size-fits-all programs, that completely overlook and result in zero engagement responsibilities for first-line managers.

Gallup speaks of high-level organizational development terms like culture, purpose, organizational change, and employee detachment…and they almost, almost name first-line leaders when they say that someone cares about employees and encourages their development. Yet the common company employee engagement survey response goes like this:

1. Conduct the survey.
2. Wait a month for the results.
3. HR reports major trends to the executive team.
4. Improvement plans are developed, usually by HR and by each manager.
5. The manager plans are never scrutinized for quality and more importantly managers are not held accountable for implementing their plans.
6. HR often times gathers an employee committee to develop items with the lowest scores.
7. And then the CEO sends an email to employees reporting all that will be done to improve the next round of scores.

And one-size-fits-all programs prevail. Want to improve recognition? Employee-of-the-month plus backpacks for ten years of service and clocks for twenty. Communication? CEO videos, town hall meetings, and more info uploaded on the company intranet. Benefits? Let’s add pet insurance.

What Employees Really Want

They want a manager they can trust. From their start, employee engagement solutions have been trains off the track. Arrows that miss the target. Baseball teams that have everything but pitching and hitting. When employees are having dinner and respond to “How was your day, dear?”, no one says their day was OK but they wish they had pet insurance. They talk about their boss, their colleagues, and their duties…and their direct supervisor has by far the most influence on all three.

So The Best, Fresh-Thinking Solution Is…

…hold managers accountable for their own engagement survey scores. And teach your managers to conduct Stay Interviews with each employee so they know precisely what that employee needs to become engaged, to stay, and to become happy with their work.

This is what I’ll talk about at the SHRM Annual Conference in San Diego on Sunday, June 29^th, at 1:30 PM PDT. Much more detail is available in my upcoming book, Targeting Turnover: Make Managers Accountable, Win the Workforce Crisis, which will be available in September. I welcome your questions and feedback at dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com

[i] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/393497/world-trillion-workplace-problem.aspx

[ii] https://blog.haiilo.com/blog/employee-engagement-8-statistics-you-need-to-know/

[iii] https://decisionwise.com/resources/articles/truth-employee-engagement-measurement-practices/#:~:text=Most%20Companies%20Measure%20Employee%20Engagement%20Every%20Year&text=45%20percent%20of%20companies%20reported,and%2014%20percent%20measure%20sporadically.

[iv] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/653711/great-detachment-why-employees-feel-stuck.aspx

[v] It’s The Manager by Jim Clifton and Jim Harter, Gallup Press, 2019, page 12.

The post SHRM25 Session Preview: Fixing Employee Engagement appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.