Millions of people lost jobs in the pandemic. The largest group were laid off in March and April 2020, but layoffs continued above pre-pandemic averages even in recent weeks. Several factors, though, prevent these people from filling the positions that are open.
The much-less told story of 2020 is how many women dropped out of the workforce and most of them still remain on the sidelines. The reasons for this particular contribution to your turnover rates cover a lot of ground.
Several years ago, AngloGold Ashanti invited me to help them lower their turnover rates in African gold mines…for jobs a full four kilometers underground. AngloGold Ashanti’s turnover situation was just like many of ours. Too few workers available, the jobs had their shortcomings, and their workers didn’t stay.
Remember way back when, before the pandemic, when it was hard to find qualified candidates for most jobs? That was February 2020, exactly one year ago, when our unemployment rate hit its floor of 3.5%. Consider the off-setting turbulence that same market will face in 2021 if unemployment falls to 3.2% within a year.
There needs to be a new-found mathematical equation that says (1) if you have high turnover that impacts productivity and (2) you have high spans of control and (3) you have a clue about how much turnover costs, then (4) maybe you should rethink your high spans of control.
Employee engagement is a fuzzy concept that usually generates a fuzzy metric. Most of us conduct employee engagement and we assume the results never vary, that somehow a one-time snapshot on the third Thursday in March reflects how our employees feel about their jobs every day.
The bottom line is PEPCO’s Baltic states’ turnover has decreased by 67%...and PEPCO has yet to leverage the full power of Stay Interviews as they have taken them to the Area Manager and Store Manager levels only. Kristina tells me the likely next step is to implement Stay Interviews to include all PEPCO employees.
The fight wasn’t fair because science was on my side when I played my “test the booth” game, one could even say I cheated. On one side was me, holding onto the correct answer as to why employees leave like a gambler with four aces, while on the other side was a salesperson trying to make a buck.
We have a client with very high entry-level turnover where we are implementing customized solutions to fix it. And we WILL fix it. But this story is about the top of the organization rather than the bottom.
My first Tony encounter began with a SHRM conference in Las Vegas, circa 2009. Somehow, I learned that Zappos was sponsoring tours at their nearby headquarters, so I signed up, boarded their bus, and toured their facility.
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