800 hands immediately shot up in the air. This was the scene at the SHRM Annual Conference in Chicago last month, when I addressed a large crowd on “Cutting Turnover by 40% and More”. When I said “Raise your hand…
Perhaps the most vexing of all people management challenges, high employee turnover quietly drives every company’s costs up and their productivity down. The “quiet” part is because turnover is generally referred to as just a statistic, a percentage of employees…
Employee engagement is a hot buzz-phrase that rolls easily off the management tongue…in weekly meetings, when conducting surveys, and in various sessions where HR provides updates on new trends. How Important though, really, is employee engagement? The short answer on…
Some managers give a knee-jerk twinge when asked to conduct Stay Interviews, to meet with their individual employees to learn how to make their jobs better. They instinctively fear a rebound response of something they can’t control like pay, promotions,…
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…