Is it just a coincidence that the worst managers usually blame their employee turnover on pay? Not enough staff? HR recruits ineffective workers? That leaders with bad management styles see employees’ reasons for leaving as every possible one but themselves?…
I’m flying home from delivering a keynote address on employee retention to executives of Reser’s Fine Foods in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. After the address one of the group gave me a Reser’s hat, the baseball kind. I’ve never…
I was a strong high school student but faked my way through the sciences. While decades ago, my memory of walking into sophomore biology class is frighteningly clear, seeing a foreign-looking five-syllable, science-like word on the board, followed by its…
Everything we’ve been taught about employee retention is wrong. Turnover keeps ramping up, now at its all-time high. Engagement keeps keeping on, a nice way to say our workers haven’t increased their efforts during this decade. Just as steady has…
About 20% of the executives we talk with say something like this: “We understand why you want our leaders to have retention goals, but that’s difficult here because our employees report to more than one supervisor.” The background is this…
I can’t think of a time when decisions made in Washington have so much impact on whether your employees stay or leave. Three areas of legislation come to mind that will likely make employee turnover even worse than it is…
The picture is clear but bleak. Historic low unemployment plus a continuing growing economy means current employee turnover solutions are obsolete. Sprinkle in a new tax law that flushes companies with new money to spend on added factories, distribution centers,…
Almost every type of manager/employee meeting is a one-way street. We have many names for these meetings…project updates, status checks, performance reviews of course, and in call centers they are called monitoring meetings. That’s when employees sit with their managers…
Everyone knows the drill: employee quits, HR or the manager asks questions about why they quit, a report with the reasons is drafted and distributed, then nothing happens. When speaking at conferences and in-house management meetings, I like to poke…
We met recently with the top HR team for a major call center corporation. During the meeting we heard there is no reason to conduct a turnover cost study because both the CEO and CFO get it, that turnover is…