Last Sunday after the Super Bowl, NBC New York 4 News aired a segment on Quest Diagnostics’ use of Stay Interviews to cut turnover, so far by 42%. We are thrilled to be the conduit for Quest’s success and if you watch the 3-minute video, you will quickly identify my favorite part.
Manager disengagement is a major problem, a very significant obstacle to productivity. We sometimes use the term “exponential” to exaggerate some issue, some statistic, but in this case that term is a fit, knowing that the less engaged your managers are, the less engaged their teams and individual employees become.
If you keep low performers will you lose top performers, and ultimately be left with a workforce comprised of these workers and others who just don’t care?
Companies’ most frequent response to “The Great Resignation” is to raise pay. In fact, average increases rose from 2.6% to 3% during 2021 and are scheduled to raise to 4% during 2022. Let’s consult other data though, to better understand why all of this cash is having so little impact on the number of employees who are quitting their jobs.
MIT researchers shared a new study that presents a different perspective regarding why employees are quitting their jobs in droves, and the number one reason is “toxic corporate culture”. “Toxic corporate culture” is comprised of three distinct categories and the MIT research tells us “toxic corporate culture” is…wait for it…10 times more important than compensation in predicting turnover.
We are now firmly in the midst of “The Great Resignation”, and the number of monthly quits have consistently exceeded their all-time highs. This gloomy picture would be incomplete, though, without looking beyond today, wondering how long the workforce clouds will stay dark. There are at least 10 reasons that forecast "The Great Resignation" as the new normal.
The first week of January our C-Suite Analytics team reviews how much we helped our clients the previous year. We are tough on ourselves; did we miss an idea along the way? But we also identify our successes with specific obstacles and the solutions that did work to overcome them.
Each of you knows that nothing happens in organizations without accountability…nothing…yet my guess is fewer than 5% of global companies, large and small, actually hold someone accountable for turnover. This is why we always begin with converting turnover to dollars. It’s the turnover accountability wake-up call.
During a recent client discussion, I mentioned my belief that what matters most regarding employee retention and engagement is what employees talk about over dinner. That the feelings we tell ourselves on our way home from work plus any subsequent conversations we have soon after ultimately predicts how long we will stay and how committed we are to our day-to-day work.
I kept searching for clues as to how a poverty-stricken person views work, clinging to the naïve notion that work = money = getting out of poverty, so therefore one would give all to their job as the ticket out. Then I read more about poverty and the big lesson for me is that a poverty-stricken person’s reality is worse than I thought, with a lack of support systems and knowledge of hidden rules.