I addressed the crowd at the SHRM24 Annual Conference in Chicago and HR professionals who associate us with Stay Interviews alone often miss out on what I described in the session’s title as “the best-ever employee retention solution”.
It’s become common to complain about poor customer service, mutterings by those with clear memories of right-in-front-of-me employees who were eager to help. And those who mutter are right because a full 75% of American businesses have already turned away customers or cut operating hours because they can’t hire enough staff, making us wonder how much worse customer service can become.
In the Harvard Business Review article, “Customer Surveys Are No Substitute for Actually Talking to Customers,” HBR now deems customer conversations as more effective for engagement than customer surveys. Shouldn’t this same principle be applied to employees as well?
Gallup’s CEO, Jim Clifton, very purposefully used the phrase, “team leaders” in a subtitle of one of his books. Why do I agree this specific role is crucial? Because team leaders are in their employees’ faces every day, providing instruction, feedback, and building relationships. Jim knows team leaders’ impact employee retention, and so do we. When it comes to cutting employee turnover - team leaders are the front line for building trust.
The greatest variable in worker safety is people, in that each of us is different and “personalities can be hard to manage”. It takes more than a paycheck to make people satisfied with their work…and this has a direct correlation to injuries and claims.
According to the National Education Association, a full 600,000 teachers have already left teaching since January 2020, and a recent NEA poll indicated 55% more will quit prematurely. So, teachers are fast becoming a very talented recruiting pool.
Those who have recently immigrated are working, as their workforce participation rate…the percent who hold jobs or are actively looking for jobs…is 67% compared to the overall US average of 62%. So as immigrants continue to strengthen our economy, we have far too much anti-immigration sentiment at our nation’s core, and those feelings must be addressed if we are to attract the best of the best to our country.
Data shows a four-day workweek is popular with employees. On the company side, data suggests work satisfaction and productivity are up, recruiting is easier…and employee turnover is down. And during these days workforce shortages, every company is seeking a recruiting edge. Could this be “it”?
At SHRM Talent Conference 2024 I asked the room this question: Who here has ever heard of one manager getting fired for a low employee engagement survey score? Please raise your hand if you can think of even just one. The only sound was the 400-plus attendees turning in their seats to see if anyone raised their hands. There were no hands up.
Those who experience their work as a calling are most likely to feel a deep alignment between their vocation and who they are as a person. However, they are also most likely to act faster to leave than other employees when they have mistrust of management because they bring high degrees of expectations that escalates frustration quicker when stifled by a poor boss. What to do?