Most employees can immediately tell you why they might leave, but few have actually catalogued in their minds why they stay. Stay Interviews Question 3 is important as it causes employees to self-search. And once they announce to you why they stay they also announce it to themselves…and they tend to never forget it.
Gallup recently announced that early in 2024 employee engagement had reached an 11-year low. Gallup attributes this absence of engagement improvement to areas like lack of job clarity, a short supply of manager skills, and survey burnout among other reasons.
Recent surveys say these are the at-work values young workers hold most dear: Mobility, entrepreneurial freedom, and flexibility. Lock these key employee retention words into your brain, make them pop up on your computer screen first thing each morning because 53% of your Gen Z and millennials will consider leaving this year.
Recently I’ve seen two examples of organizations essentially saying that increased turnover is unavoidable and then proposed work-around plans with no proven track records. In fact these voices are saying that entire industries, supply chain management and nursing, have no fix for turnover and they should waive a white flag of surrender.
Young workers are much more willing to abandon relationships that feel insecure or unsafe, both at home and in their places of work…and are much more willing to welcome relationships where they feel safe to be their authentic selves.
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.