Today is prime time for learning how to measure our applicants’ levels of grit…defined as passion and perseverance…because we are hiring so many of them. Assuming grit and engagement are workplace cousins, key words “finish”, “setbacks”, “diligent”, and “overcome” provide a good start to help structure the best interview questions to measure levels of grit in your applicants.
It seems too intangible or simple to say that supervisors who build trust will improve retention, even more than traditional solutions like pay, benefits, onboarding, training, and everything else. But it’s true that the the lens through which your people see their relationship with their manager is how they see your company.
The G12 is the core of Gallup’s approach to measuring employee engagement by rating 12 highly researched items on a five-point scale. One of those 12 is “I have a best friend at work”. I confess to initially scoffing years ago regarding this one and I whiffed on seeing the correlation between this Gallup data and an organization’s level of employee engagement.
Gallup research tells us that the managers in our companies drive employee engagement and also says that just 10% of people put in manager roles have a strong natural ability to do so. So if companies average one manager for every 10 employees, Gallup math tells us that just 10 in every 100 employees are working for an adequate manager. That’s alarming data for our engagement and retention efforts.
One of the almost never-considered metrics for turnover is spans of control, or the number of employees assigned to each manager on an organization chart. Spans of control was named the strongest predictor of staff turnover in a prominent study.
C-Suite Analytics’ work with United Facilities cut turnover for full-time workers by up to 58%, cut costs and improved production metrics. Then they elected to take on turnover for their temporary workforce. Could Stay Interviews be as effective for retaining them?
Here’s what’s true: Higher engagement leads to lower turnover. But does conducting more surveys lead to higher employee engagement? Today I’m diving deeper into my research from one of my books to address the question.
Why is Q2 “What are you learning here? And what do you want to learn?” Because Q2 is the low-hanging-fruit way for supervisors to identify how they can add one additional brick to the foundation of building trust with each member of their teams.
Sitting in a top management meeting, “turnover” comes up, and all eyes become focused on the HR Director. The forever-assumption has been that HR is about people and turnover is about people too, so HR should therefore solve turnover. So what should HR say when all eyes turn to them?
My professional passion for cutting turnover began decades ago with my CEO saying words that HR professionals, dread: “Turnover is high so HR, go fix it.” Looking back, I knew then that I had learned a lesson mostly unknown across HR circles.