Articles on Employee Retention | C-Suite Analytics

How Bad Does It Have to be for Someone to Quit Your Company?

Richard Finnegan — Tue, 21 Jan 2025 13:59:13 +0000

A new study tells us that altering your employment creates on average about a third as much stress as the death of a spouse, half as much as divorce, about the same amount as the death of a close friend, and 50% more than quitting smoking.[i]

I’ve never been a smoker but have been close to people who’ve labored through the quitting process, over and over and over. So changing jobs is 50% more stressful than that?

So let’s say your company’s annual turnover is that same number, 50%, or half that at 25%. What does this new information tell us about how badly your employees want out? How much they disdain working for your company? What could be SO bad that they are willing to drag themselves through half of the same stress level as if they were getting divorced? Or the identical amount of stress from the death of a close friend?

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Further Reading: How Employee Turnover Is Like Losing a Marriage

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The Data Behind the Data on the Stress of Quitting

This study was published in The Atlantic which brings a pristine reputation for data quality. The study was conducted on the Holmes-Raye Life Stress Inventory[ii] which compares life’s common stress events, scoring the top life event which is death of a spouse at 100, and then compares the remaining events to this number. The remaining top five stress events after spouse death are divorce at 73, marital separation from mate at 65, and then detention in jail or another institution along with death of a close family member are tied at 63.

But we also know that quit stress levels differ among individuals. One study focused on technology workers tells us that just 30% of those who indicated that they would quit within a year actually did quit[iii]…which is why I never quote “January studies” that say a certain percentage of workers intend to quit this year. The more relevant data is how many actually do quit later.

That same study indicated that while many who said they would quit did not quit, that about a third of them had risk-averse personalities that make it even harder for them to quit.

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Further Reading: The Blatant Unfairness of Retaining Poor Supervisors

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So How Do You Prevent Employees from Quitting?

This weekly piece has been packed with employee retention ideas…so given the space available, let me offer the top four:

Hire employees who want to do the main parts of your job…and implementing realistic job previews which are also called RJPs is your best pathway for doing so.
Retain leaders on all levels who build trust with their employees, and fire the leaders who don’t.
Train those leaders to conduct Stay Interviews so they can learn face-to-face why each employee stays, might leave, and what that leader can to do retain them.
Then hold those leaders accountable to retention goals…with real accountability.

Sounds easy I know…but there are many obstacles to make that above happen in any organization. Our clients cut turnover by an average of 34% across all industries, so we’ve conquered every challenge that’s included in these top four approaches.

Email me to learn more at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.

[i] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/job-hunt-quest-meaning/681299/

[ii] https://www.stress.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Holmes-Rahe-Stress-inventory.pdf

[iii]https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2843824.2843827?casa_token=YGHnXTTuCXkAAAAA:PrOxMtBqHJXllQrqWsZx5R4a997EWQ3-PQOgu-31C1oPQ3__s2NqS_vSKB4fRQpvwPd_qK-rgUWf

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If You Need Another Reason to Do Stay Interviews, #MeToo Is It

Richard Finnegan — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 14:47:16 +0000

I can tell you scores of reasons why Stay Interviews are right for you and your company, long before crossing the waters toward the #MeToo movement which is loaded with controversy. But let’s muscle directly toward that controversy.

All employees, not just women, need their forum to announce abuse. Abuse comes in many forms with sexual abuse being just one example. Bullying fits in this category as does any action which pits someone with power against another.

I’ve worked in organizations and know first-hand that such abuse sometimes happens at the supervisor level…but sometimes at higher levels, too. The result is employees like their jobs, want to keep their jobs, but learn through very bad circumstances they must accede to weird, uncomfortable demands to keep their jobs. Those demands at the extreme are about sexual activities, but sometimes are just about taking undeserved abuse from someone whose power exceeds theirs.

Of course, peers and non-manager employees sometimes try to take advantage of their working colleagues, too, by leveraging various forms of authority or just employing a strong personality to coerce or intimidate.

The stories we see in the media are not only about sexual abuse but also about the abuse of power. One example is a woman is sexually approached…and wanting to keep her job, looks for the best way to minimally accommodate and duck. A non-informed outsider would say, “Why didn’t she just say no?” The answer is she had bills to pay, likes her day-to-day job otherwise, and is seeking ways to survive.

Stay Interviews, then, open the door to communication. Some supervisors are in the dark regarding managers above them who are making sexual-favor-innuendoes to members of their teams…or about others doing the same from any corner of their companies. Or those supervisors might be the actual perpetrators and need to be directly confronted.

Further, some supervisors are in the dark about their own behaviors, mistakenly thinking that a comment that seems natural to them is offensive to others. Imagine this scenario where a supervisor asks an employee, “When was the last time you thought about leaving? What prompted it?”, and the employee says, “You are the reason. It’s OK if you tell me I look nice, but it’s not OK if you tell me I look nice in a tight sweater”.

These are the conversations that need to happen. Employees must be invited to confront sexual abuse…and for that matter any type of abuse. And even more so if that abuse is happening at a higher place.

So there are two key lessons here: the first is that all abuse of any type must be reported and addressed…and the second is less obvious and just as important, that sometimes leaders on any level don’t understand how their actions could be misconstrued and hurtful and that a compliment is more than a compliment…and someone needs to tell them.

There is no perfect fix for increasing communications to overcome abuse. Stay Interviews, though, open another door of communication, and one that is not tied to performance or a review. Requiring your managers to introduce them provides each organization with a better, more informed way to open up conversations with their employees and brings abuse of any kind into the open. Once that occurs it opens the doors to get HR involved to stop it.

Schedule a free one-on-one strategy session with our team and we will listen to your concerns, probe deeply to learn more about your workplace needs and work together to find solutions to cut turnover and improve employee engagement. https://go.oncehub.com/TeamFinnegan

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Hats, Client Focus, and Employee Retention

Richard Finnegan — Wed, 16 May 2018 16:58:30 +0000

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 cared much for hats, even though some men with my hair situation welcome them to shield their bald spots. So at first I gladly accepted the hat but wondered inside what to do with it. But now I have a new idea.

I’m going to move a hat rack into my office, collect hats from all of our client companies, and put their hat on my desk when I’m working on cutting their turnover. Whether on a call with their management team, or with my C-Suite Analytics colleagues, or drafting plans for them, I will leverage their hat and their logo to focus my energy on the single best thing we do to cut employee turnover.

So here are three turnover-cutting ideas for Reser’s inspired by my new hat:
1. Their managers know that employees must work in cold, wet conditions, made worse by the cold of winter and the heat of summer; since these job conditions won’t change, I’ll suggest they include them in a realistic job preview to ensure applicants fully grasp and accept these conditions as part of the job rather than be surprised by them and subsequently quit in their first few weeks

2. Stopping early turnover stops all turnover, so I was confident before checking data that a high percent of quits happen in the first 60 days; establishing a goal to improve the percent of new hires who reach 60 days is therefore essential, but just as important all those who impact new hires must own that goal…and this group usually includes HR recruiters, new-hire trainers, and most or all supervisors

3. Now train those managers to conduct two Stay Interviews with new hires in that initial 60-day period, usually at 3 weeks and 6 weeks; learn precisely why these newly-hired employees stay and also could leave, probe to learn every detailed thought, and take actions in the form of a retention plan to retain them so each supervisor meets their 60-day new-hire retention goals.
Sometimes retention ideas are more client-specific. One manufacturing company placed new hires in their internal labor pool as floaters to fill in for absences and other areas of need. Doing so made their initial turnover worse because new hires not only were restricted from learning skills for one particular job, but more importantly they began their careers without one steady, easily-identifiable supervisor with whom they could build a relationship based on trust. Now this client sees this process flaw and will soon name 15 veteran employees as floaters and celebrate their promotion, in order to give new hires a permanent work home.

I like this hat idea. Someone might think it’s hokey but I think it brings creative, intelligent focus…to do our jobs which is helping our client companies retain more employees and engage them in their work. Now I’m suddenly a hat guy.

We work with companies of all sizes, even those too small to have their own hats. Learn how we can help you stabilize your workforce, cut employee turnover, and greatly increase the number of employees who bring their best to work for you every day and I’ll hang your hat on my rack.

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Employee Retention, Engagement, & Pinning Tails on Donkeys

Richard Finnegan — Fri, 30 Mar 2018 16:09:06 +0000

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. We have proven in all industries…and on all continents…that implementing Finnegan’s Arrow solves employee retention and engagement. Our process is business-driven in that executives (1) establish the dollar cost of both turnover and engagement, (2) establish goals for each leader, (3) train leaders to conduct Stay Interviews, (4) ask leaders to forecast how long each employee will stay or perform on their next engagement survey, and lastly (5) those leaders become accountable for achieving their goals and the developing accurate forecasts.

The business-driven part is that these same processes have been used for decades by companies to manage sales. Salespeople know the dollar value of each sale, have sales goals, have sales tools, they forecast future sales, and they are accountable for their goals and forecasts. We’ve re-purposed sales processes into retention and engagement processes…and it works by cutting employee turnover and improving employee engagement.

But it only works if each employee reports to a specific leader and knows who that leader is. For those 20% or so executives who haven’t aligned each employee with one leader, we’ve asked them to do so and they have. The bigger question, though, is this: How strong can supervisor/employee relationships be if employees can’t identify their supervisor?

Study after study tells us the single best way to improve engagement and retention is to give each employee a supervisor she can trust. The joke here is to say if we give each employee several supervisors, surely they’ll trust at least one of them. But the truth is, providing employees with multiple supervisors just confuses their directions, communications, feedback, and ultimately their trust.

And that means you reduce their productivity…as well as likely their engagement. And our studies tell us those companies that assign employees to more than one supervisor have higher turnover. The reason is clear, that they cannot form the types of employee/supervisor relationships that cause employees to stay.

So back to donkeys. During a recent conversation with a CEO who owned this dilemma, she acknowledged this error and said, quote, “I guess regarding supervisors we need to pin the tail on the donkey.” And her meaning was immediately clear to me.

So what’s the lesson? Matrix management in any form brings value to shared ownership…but detracts from engagement and retention which are the greatest contributors to productivity. To make engagement and retention happen by implementing Finnegan’s Arrow, choose one boss for each employee and tell them who their boss is. And then hold that boss accountable for engagement and retaining his team.

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What Piece Is Missing For HR Professionals?

Richard Finnegan — Fri, 05 May 2017 12:31:29 +0000

Let’s look at a shockingly stark contrast that applies to all of us in Human Resources and Recruiting. Here is a summary of what CEO’s say they need most from a few recent studies and publications:

• SHRM: Top challenge last two years, “Retention”

• Harvard Business Review: Top thing CEOs worry about is “talent management”

• KPMG: 99% of global CEOs named top challenge as “developing talent”

• Inc Magazine: The biggest challenges these CEOs face every day…”attracting and retaining talent”

• The Economist: “Talent has always been important but now it needs to become an inseparable part of business strategy on par with technology and finance

• Fortune: Biggest challenge facing businesses will be “lack of qualified labor”

• Chief Executive Magazine: “75% of CEOs say recruiting and retaining key talent is their top business challenge

Notice that every single one is about the work we do.

The fact is OUR human resources work is now the most important work, more than the work done by sales, service, or technology. We are in the bullseye and have to produce. And while we accept this challenge/opportunity/burden, a recent study of HR professionals reveals that the top assignment from the CEO list is one we don’t know how to fulfill: improving engagement and retention. And retention is not only the solution to keeping good workers but also to reducing the number of open jobs.

In other words, it’s OUR time…but the thing our CEOs want us to do most, we don’t know how to.

Those who are familiar with our work can anticipate what I write next, that (1) voluntary quits are approaching our all-time high, (2) engagement per Gallup has been completely stuck for 17 years, (3) that only 33% of our employees at best are giving their all, and (4) the culprit here is surveys, engagement and exit, because we believe data identifies easy solutions…but data only provides data, not solutions.

Imagine cutting your turnover by 43%, 45%, or 67%…and the impact this would have on reducing open positions, improving engagement/productivity/profitability, and obviously reducing employee turnover. Our most recent three clients achieved these turnover reductions by implementing sound solutions…and “sound” in this case means business-driven…by applying the principals of Finnegan’s Arrow in their organizations which include: Dollars, Goals, Stay Interviews, Forecast and Accountability. Notice there are no town hall meetings, employee appreciation days or other initiatives typically asked of HR.

Stay Interviews put HR in the driver’s seat by addressing each employee’s needs as individuals, as people, and as people who need to trust their direct supervisors. Building trust with employees and having managers, not HR, accountable for their people directly affects productivity and the bottom line, something your CEOs and leaders will respond to.

Stay Interviews are a piece of the bigger business-driven solution.

Stay Interviews without goals and forecasts become flavors of the month, whereas your executives must build in accountability for retention, engagement, and building the right, individualized stay plans so employees feel valued, recognized, appreciated…and accommodated when possible. One employee vowed to stay longer because he asked for and received permission to start work an hour early and end an hour early, but only on days when his son has a little league game. What employee survey will tell you that?

HR does have the solution – Stay Interviews

When your CEO asks you to solve his/her biggest concerns, with Stay Interviews and Finnegan’s Arrow, you can say you already have by implementing this business-driven solution.

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Our New Year’s Gift: The Employee Retention Secret Sauce

Richard Finnegan — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 22:08:45 +0000

What is the largest improvement in cutting turnover in 12 months that is realistic? Is it 88%, 46%, or 41%? Any of those are the correct answer for three of our recent clients.

First, some perspective. Cutting turnover by more than 40% saves small companies hundreds of thousands of $s and large companies millions. Most companies don’t set turnover improvement goals but those that do set them at 20% improvement, tops. Forty percent improvement is unheard of.

Here’s what our clients did not do: Raise pay, start new benefits, have more company meetings, implement a career coaching system, use data to forecast turnover, conducts engagement surveys, conduct exit surveys, or implement any new employee program.

Here’s what those clients did: Developed the dollar cost of turnover, implemented retention goals, hired applicants who would stay, and trained all managers to conduct stay interviews.

What are the key differences between the two approaches?

Targeted vs broad, as treating all employees the same is the ticket to retention failure
Tops-down driven since getting executives to take action requires them to see turnover as dollars versus percentages
Implementing hiring tools we’ve developed that screen out retention risks

And most importantly, leader accountability steers all retention efforts as the number one reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their boss.

We learned long ago that common sense does not imply common practice. Said another way, we sometimes follow others rather than think about better solutions. We look forward to connecting in this new, ambitious year to continue sending productive thoughts.

May this year be the very best in your life, ever. Peace.

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