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1. Stand up
2. Take 3 steps to your right
3. Tell yourself the top 5 things your company is doing to improve retention and engagement
4. Move back to your original place
5. Now take 3 steps to your left
6. Acknowledge that the top reason employees stay or leave, and engage or disengage, is how much they trust their immediate supervisors
7. Now return to your original position.
8. And in a moment of candid reflection, ask yourself if your company’s initiatives to improve retention and engagement are totally, directly targeted at improving your supervisor’s trust-building abilities…or targeted somewhere else.

It is no coincidence that the number of employees who voluntarily quit their jobs is at its all-time high, nor that employee engagement hasn’t changed this century. And chances are you just proved why.

The primary villain in this scenario is employee surveys, followed by its usual subplot of “HR, go fix it”. Whether you are reading now as a CEO, COO, or an HR professional, we have collectively…across all six inhabited continents…taken the bad-tasting bait to survey our employees, read off their top disappointments, and then build one-size-fits-all employee programs to “fix” them. HR is often first on the receiving end of this assignment, so HR proceeds with best intentions while handicapped with no authority. Most in HR know which managers cannot build trust because they are constantly listening to their employees complain, and then refilling their jobs when they leave. Yet when asked to fix engagement or retention, HR defaults to what they are empowered to do…arrange recognition events, more company meetings…and as we sometimes say wryly, more events with food.

Benchmarks make this situation worse. CEOs speak in dollars but see reports with turnover percentages or engagement survey scores, causing them to seek better data. That next-best data is how their company compares to others, and any sliver of good news in the form of “We’re as bad as the rest” stifles any real solution-making.

Stay Interviews delivered as part of Finnegan’s Arrow are THE answer. True confession here. One of my books is the top-selling SHRM-published book in history. When I first typed the words of The Power of Stay Interviews, I had no clue it would sell even one hundred books let alone reach such lofty status. That was before our company and I had worked with hundreds of client companies to make Stay Interviews real for them. And before we helped their supervisors implement a solution that pulled these supervisors and their teams through disclosure, empathy, and problem-solving to make their work truly better. Finding ways to remove unnecessary reports, get parents home in time for dinner, and other this-is-what-really-matters-to-me issues have been the missing glue-builders that keep our best employees near us. And these are the issues that no employee engagement survey nor exit survey will ever uncover, let alone fix.

The post Take 3 Steps…Literally…To Fix Turnover and Engagement appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

CFO’s are great partners to find engagement and retention magic because they can tie those topics to dollars. And in many organizations calling attention to dollars makes the most impact. For many of us, our immediate and private response to “HR, go fix it” is concerns about the managers we work with each day who drive employees out or down, causing turnover to go up and engagement to slide. We grouse to ourselves about why executives can’t see that the problem is there, not here. Why don’t they act on those poor-performing leaders?

Engaging Finance into the fight can help you tie mangers’ engagement and retention results to dollars and bottom lines, the language of CEOs. Using turnover as our example, while percentages matter and benchmarks, too, in the eyes of some, once the CFO says, “Turnover is costing us $2.4 million dollars this year and going up. Let’s see which managers are costing us the most.” It changes the perception from data to dollars and from low performance managers to costing us money managers.

Take a low-ball estimate for each turnover loss, let’s say $4,000, and multiply it times the total number of employees who leave in a year. In a company of 500 employees with 25% turnover, that total reaches $500,000. CFOs will know where that fits on your overall list of expenses. I’m guessing no lower than third, maybe after salaries/benefits and cost of goods. But imagine the impact of saying, “If we cut just 5% off our 25% turnover rate it would add $100,000 back to our bottom line.”

Candidly, most CFOs bring power that HR can only dream of. Think megaphones versus microphones. If you really want to cut turnover, share this piece with your CFO. Ask your CFO to go to c-suiteanalytics.com/cost-calculator and try our originally-invented and always-free Turnover Cost Calculator. I am copied on every entry and I commit to sending feedback as needed until your turnover cost outcome is right.

The post The Missing $ Piece: How HR Can Ask Finance To Help With Cutting Turnover appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

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 if in any way your executives have said, ‘Turnover is high. HR, go fix it’”, no arms went up half way, no one hesitated. This was clearly a sore spot.

During that session I described four clients companies that had cut turnover by 40% and more, and how each of their forward-thinking HR teams had bought into crossing the boundary from HR to executives to implement Finnegan’s Arrow…to re-position employee retention from HR back to the operations sides of their companies.

Steps one and two are to invite finance to help place a cost on turnover, and then inspire the top team to address it in a way only they can, with retention goals for leaders across all levels. One must ask if turnover is so important, why haven’t they set goals for it?

Stay Interviews follow which are the absolute, most powerful retention solution for leaders on all levels, but will fall to flavor-of-the month status without the preceding costs and goals.

Forecasts then follow whereby leaders actually do just that, forecast how long each employee will stay, so those on top can provide help to keep top performers. Finnegan’s Arrow closes with Accountability, as leaders are now accountable for achieving their goals and developing accurate forecasts…just as salespeople have been doing for decades.

So thus far I’ve said (1) HR is unfairly held accountable for retention, (2) executives must lead with dollars, goals, stay interviews, forecasts, and accountability, and (3) here’s a plan to do just that. Yet most HR professionals remain stuck in wrong-accountability-land, and struggle emotionally each day on the job.

One reason they remain stuck is implementing Finnegan’s Arrow requires courage. HR must approach finance to help with the cost study, executives to establish retention goals, and then gain support for all additional tools. This is a major leap for many in HR who prefer instead to “solve” turnover with better onboarding and the plethora of one-size-fits-all employee programs that have proven over decades to be ineffective. In other words, we will implement HR-driven solutions that only require us to work with HR.

Our executives have never needed us more as employee retention and engagement top their lists of greatest obstacles to success. Our job, then, is to teach them that they hold the authority to fix these things. And then give them a plan to do so.

I’m offering you a resource as I’ll be glad to help. Please email me if you’d like to chat to learn more….dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com…and take care.

The post Yes, HR, You Were Always Right: You Cannot Solve Turnover By Yourself appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Calculating Employee Turnover

Most companies calculate employee turnover with the following formula:

            # employees lost ÷ by average number of employees on board X 100

So for example, if an organization loses 25 employees in one year and the average number of employees on the payroll for that year is 100, then 25 divided by 100 equals .25, and .25 times 100 equals 20…so that organization’s annual turnover rate is 25 percent. Some organizations reverse this number to say their retention rate is 75 percent

This calculation results in an effective, first look at turnover rates, and can be applied to specific jobs, departments, or even for calculating the turnover for those employees who report to a specific manager. Some organizations then apply this formula to learn the rate of turnover for designated high-performing employees who could be those above a certain performance-level rating. Others might have identified a specific, small group of high-potential employees and would then measure turnover for that group.

An equally-strong metric results from measuring turnover by length of service. This metric is usually applied for specific jobs, for example call center agents often times leave during or soon after training which costs their organizations thousands of dollars per exit based on the training invested with no resulting return on those dollars. High early employee turnover is usually a sign of inadequate recruiting, selecting, or training.

Employee Turnover Statistics

Organizations seek out many ways and sources to learn how their employee turnover compares to others. Some participate in industry surveys while small companies might assign someone from human resources to call surrounding organizations to share employee turnover percentage information.

One reliable way to learn this data is through the online reports of our federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, commonly referred to as the BLS. The BLS provides periodic updates on both total employee separations and also voluntary quits, published by industry groups and regions of the country. For example, in the industry category of “Healthcare and Social Assistance” 33.2% of employees separated last year and monthly quits are averaging 1.9%.

The best value for comparing one’s turnover percentages to others doing so provides a benchmark for how our retention performance compares. The shortcoming of these benchmarks is they tend to make executives complacent, perhaps by signaling that being average or near-average is acceptable because they are reluctant to spend more dollars on pay and competitive benefits to improve retention, believing compensation is the primary reason employees leave.

Types of Employee Turnover

Many organizations classify their turnover by reasons for leaving, both to find solutions and also to identify which turnover matters most. Chief among these sub-categories are voluntary/involuntary and controllable/uncontrollable. The primary thought is “if we fire them or couldn’t have kept them, that turnover doesn’t count”.

The counter to this thinking and perhaps smarter approach is (1) more often than not we really don’t know why an employee leaves and (2) all turnover causes disruption and cost. For example, the number one reason employees leave according to aggregated exit surveys is “better opportunity”. Some organizations dedicate “turnover committees” to solve this by identifying all possible components of “better” such as pay, benefits, careers, and commute, and then recommend related improvements. Yet all of this digging can be more easily solved by asking the key follow-up questions, “Why did you look? And what could we have done to keep you?”

Likewise, all would agree that terminating a non-productive employee is the right thing to do. But while productivity is then likely improved in the long run, the dollars spent on hiring, training, and coaching that poor-producing employee have been lost. And companies never know if that employee could have been successful with better coaching and overall help.

The Cost of Employee Turnover

Perhaps the most important turnover data is turnover’s actual dollar cost. While executives see value in benchmark data, their everyday business language is dollars so turnover’s actual dollar cost motivates them to act.

Our own research has resulted in the invention of the most comprehensive turnover cost calculator, that measures both the direct costs to find and train a replacement as well as the lost productivity while that job is open and the new hire ramps up. And this lost productivity is usually the greater cost.

By implementing our turnover cost calculator with client teams from human resources, finance, and managers, these are just a few of the examples we’ve calculated for client companies:

• Physician…$225,808
• Software engineer…$131,000
• Call center representative…$29,447
• Truck loader/unloader…$4,955

When learning that losing a software engineer cost his company $131,000, the technology company CEO declared, “Now I know that making our annual profit plan requires me to retain our software engineers”.

Causes of Employee Turnover

Low pay, non-competitive benefits packages, bad company culture, poor work/life balance, lack of recognition, no cross training, poor communication, no employee development, zero career opportunities, poor work environment, and bad schedules top the list of why employees quit their jobs. At least that’s how employees feel according to employee surveys. The common, hamster-on-wheel approach to reducing employee turnover is this:

• Conduct exit surveys to see why employees leave
• Conduct engagement surveys to learn what we must do to keep our employees and engage them more
• Ask human resources to develop solutions based on survey results
• Ask managers to do the same to engage and retain their teams
• Then offer employees the resulting one-size-fits-all solutions
• Continue re-surveying to measure improvement

This solution sequence is as likely to happen in China or Europe as it is in the United States. Yet using United States’ data, it is clear that this approach brings failure. Turnover in the U.S. has reached its all-time high and employee engagement hasn’t changed this century…despite our investing $1.53 billion each year to “fix” it.

“Finnegan moves the lever for engagement and retention to first-line managers where it belongs and gives them a solid tool for continuous improvement.”

– SARAH KING, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT & CHIEF HUMAN RESOURCES OFFICER, DARDEN RESTAURANTS

How to Reduce Employee Turnover

The #1 reason employees quit their jobs is because they don’t trust their immediate managers. Employees leave for many reasons, both voluntary and involuntary, but lack of trust tops this list. Trust shortcomings manifest themselves in many ways such as no recognition, poor communication, or unfairly favoring one employee over another. The result is that two employees in the same organization could have very different views of that organization as an employer because the employee with a trustworthy boss thinks the organization is top-notch, while the colleague down the hall with a different, untrustworthy manager see that same company as terrible place to work.

So true and effective employee retention solutions must start with immediate, first-line managers building trust with their teams. This approach conflicts with the commonly-applied “solutions” referenced above that result in one-size-fits-all programs like recognition or communication, because those attempts work around first-line supervisors rather than through them.

While momentarily enjoyable, most one-size-fits-all programs are soon forgotten because after leaving them employees must return to their jobs…and it is there that the employee retention and engagement challenge is won or lost. First-line managers then have the daily, most powerful impact on how much those employees trust their managers, respect their colleagues, and like what they do.

“Retaining top employees is a constant challenge. Stay Interviews is the answer!”

– WILLIS TISDALE, SHRM-CP, CHR, PHR, DIRECTOR OF HUMAN RESOURCES, SHRINERS HOSPITALS FOR CHILDREN, GREENVILLE

Our research has proven the single best way to improve supervisor trust is for those supervisors to be trained to conduct Stay Interviews. Building trust is both professional and personal because employees bring their entire selves to work each day. The impact, then, of being invited to a meeting that is focused on their needs versus the company’s needs is invigorating because until that point every meeting has been about either checking their work or assigning them more work.

“I want to have a meeting with you to learn what I can do to make working here better for you.”

Stay Interviews provide each supervisor the opportunity to ask 5 specific, highly-researched questions, probe to gather detailed answers, listen to capture both information and emotion, and write down key points so their employees keep sharing. The result is employees disclose their absolute most important needs and supervisors now have the clear opportunity to address them. And while executives might think compensation tops the employee needs list as referenced above, the top subject employees reference during Stay Interviews is better work processes…things like whether obsolete reports must be continued, equipment can be repaired, or other employees or departments can be rightly held accountable for their work.  Employees’ greatest concerns are usually about being even more productive.   Stay Interviews enable leaders to build trust and reduce turnover.

The post What Is Employee Turnover? A Complete Overview appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

I think not. Our studies match those of other respected organizations, that the number one reason employees stay or leave…or engage or disengage…is how much they trust their boss. “Boss” in this case means immediate supervisor, the next level up, and the impact of these first-line leaders is so strong that leaders on each level above them can do little to overcome their shortcomings. Or for that matter, improve on their strengths. These leaders’ day-to-day behaviors result in either good management styles or bad management styles.

Savvy managers move their retention and engagement compass away from most companies’ knee-jerk solutions, mainly one-size-fits-all programs, and instead aim this responsibility squarely upon themselves. These managers empirically know that their ability to build trustworthy relationships with each member of their teams brings out the best in each of their employees. And their employees feel such a resulting emotional connection that they work their hardest and smartest, while searching out ways to contribute more. And they also want to stay. Contrast this with bad management behavior where leader-employee connections hardly happen at all.

This connect-the-dots combination of “You have built trust with me so I will give my best and stay here for a long time” is the backbone of the holy grail all organizations seek, better employee engagement and retention.

3 Real-Life Ways Managers Break Trust

How do bad managers break trust? The obvious ways are by commission, things they actively do such as tell lies, break confidences, and unjustly favor one employee over another. But many bad managers also break trust by omission, by failing to do things good managers do. And too often these managers fail to do these behaviors unintentionally, with no knowledge they are losing their team’s trust in the process. Here are the top 3 ways we see bad managers unintentionally break trust:

1. Provide the daily silent treatment.

These managers provide little informal, voluntary interaction, and instead focus their energies on their own work instead the work of their teams. Their core belief of “I do mine, you do yours” sets a bad leadership example. They become present for required meetings and expected interactions but for little else. And seeing employees as replaceable parts becomes natural to them because they never see their teams as humans. Trading their teams for robots would be terrific for them.

For employees, the silent manager is just a mystery. So his employees consult their imaginations to fill in the blanks on what their communication-absent manager thinks of them. And they see no evidence to believe it’s good. So the result of this bad management style is suspicion at best, turnover at worst.

2. Micromanage to get the precise outcomes they want.

Ultimately, managers who coach others too closely are simply saying “I don’t trust you to get it right yourself” which is a bad manager behavior. Regardless if their employees have 10 years of experience or 10 months, the micromanager wants full control of strategies, tactics, outcomes, and usually credit, too. Employees become their tools for their own success, and those employees never become quite good enough because the micromanager cannot release the employee from his over-reaching grasp. Instead, the micromanager’s ego whispers to himself, “Good thing I’m so effective because other people never are”.

The micromanager’s ways produce the opposite environment for employee engagement and retention. Which qualified employees would want to work under strict tactical management every hour, with little chance of growth and no chance of achievement?

3. Giving “feedback” to help you grow.

“Feedback” has grown to encompass many forms of communication in our society, but for the non-trustworthy manager feedback has only one meaning: Telling others what they did wrong. Missing is telling them what they did right.

At best, the “feedback” manager’s employees develop a “No-news-is-good-news”  approach, again resulting from their leader’s  bad management style.  But at worst they wear down over time from the broad-sided or subtle hits to their self-esteem, when going to work becomes a completely eclipsed, dark spot in their lives. Work harder? Give more? Stay longer? Instead these employees have been tossed into an emotional survival mode, and they seek the freshness of new opportunities as soon as they can, causing even more employee turnover.

Next Up, Real-Life Ways Managers Build Trust

What makes a good manager? The full list of trust-building behaviors is long, but these 3 ways leap out as core, as getting these methods right builds the foundation for deep-seated, engagement- and retention-building relationships. This list represents good management skills.

1. Listen intently and patiently.

Let’s first acknowledge that managers cannot always drop what they are doing to lend a fully-focused ear, but they can always say “Can we continue this conversation at 2 PM?” And, yes, some employees will talk that ear off, as they say, with non-work chit-chat. But savvy leaders know how to re-direct those conversations into meaningful ones.

Listening builds trust because it shows that the listener cares. Make time, delivering attention via eye contact, taking notes, and asking probing questions all convey the same message, that your thinking is important to me. Good listeners separate their own needs from the moment by resisting pulling the conversation to themselves, for example saying, “That happened to me once so let me tell you about it”. They instead hear the speaker’s words but listen for the speaker’s emotions, as those emotions are always the most important message for the speaker. Responding by addressing those emotions such as, “You seem really happy/sad/angry about that” sends the clear, unfiltered message back that I am with you…and I care. Any listing of how to be a great manager must start with good listening skills.

2. Show professional and personal interest, from the heart.

Employees bring one hundred percent of their lives to work, not just the work part. Even though some employees express the non-work part more than others, all of those parts are with them each day. Smart managers understand this so they draw careful but loving lines between work and non-work topics. Because they care, they listen to all parts of their employees’ lives but rarely cross the line of giving advice.

Likewise, caring managers give feedback in ways that honor the full person instead of just the work one. They include phrases like, “I am telling you this because I care about you, and I want you to succeed”, rather than delivering cold, uncomfortable declarations of improvement instructions. Best management styles must include caring for the whole person instead of just the “work” one.

3. Credit good work, no exceptions.

Trustworthy managers look for good performance so they can co-celebrate it with their teams, both with individuals and groups. They intuitively know the difference between a common, expected achievement and a substantial one, realizing that making a small achievement large will hurt their credibility rather than grow it.

They have usually caught on early that the greatest of all motivators is achievement, so giving feedback that is specific, timely, and with smiles/handshakes and other proper non-verbal behaviors go far to make their teams want to stay and work harder.

Shifting to Meet Employees’ Individual Needs

So what makes a great manager? And how do managers develop good management skills? Stay Interviews provide these savvy managers with the pathway to learn precisely what their individual employees need…and how effectively those managers are fulfilling those needs…and help each leader develop the very best management style. For example, one employee might crave public recognition in front of peers, whereas another believes she gets no recognition whatsoever. Or another employee defines caring as his manager delivering solid career guidance while his peer who works beside him just wants to work each day and go home. Employees come in all shapes and sizes, physically and emotionally, and the very best managers must stretch their own levels of understanding to learn, adapt, and accommodate to those various employee needs.

The Stay Interview Manager described here provides these precise skills for learning and providing for each employee’s unique needs. The result is the highest level of achievement for managers which is retaining and further engaging their teams to meet and achieve all of their operational goals.

The post How Bad Managers Drive Turnover appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

After flunking the first test and subsequently freaking out, I resorted to deep note-taking and memorization, moving way past trying to connect the dots to actually learn biology. Essay tests were my path to victory as I eventually matched his questions with a carefully-selected, memorized section of my notes. Final grade was “B”, amount of learning and lifetime application was zero.

Until yesterday. I was speaking with a hospital administrator from upstate New York about employee retention, and specifically how to retain nurses…and heard myself drift off into a metaphor about cellular biology. Our minds are just amazing things. How could this possibly happen?

The metaphor is simple…and trust me, it would have to be. That those who study employee retention research versus those who do the same common, worthless “solutions” understand that employee retention happens inside the supervisor-employee relationship. This is different than thinking employee retention happens outside of that relationship…which is the completely misguided assumption that causes organizations to flush so much money to hopefully stop employee turnover for zero return.

For example, William’s department has high employee turnover, and that turnover is consistently higher than in other departments managed by William’s peers. William complains that pay is too low and exit surveys indicate employees are leaving for “better opportunities”…so executives cough up a few bucks to raise some pay. Then annual employee engagement survey results say recognition is bad so William institutes a quarterly recognition luncheon for his top performers. Meanwhile, HR searches for ways to recognize employees with long service and announces 5-year employees will get a company-logoed backpack…and those who reach 10 years get a clock.

If this sounds exaggerated, it’s not. No one in our story so far has asked “What about William?” The hard fact about employee turnover…as well as employee engagement…is the top reason employees leave or slack off is they don’t trust their boss. The number of possible reasons for employee turnover or disengagement might be unlimited, but broken trust is the top one. And if William’s peer supervisors consistently retain more employees than he does, those exits are not due to pay or recognition.

This is where “cellular walls” popped from my mind and into my voice. I immediately pictured the manager-employee relationship wrapped in a part-liquid bubble, with connecting tissue to that employee’s everyday experiences with that supervisor, her peers, and her duties. Those duty images might include customers, reports, meetings, deadlines, equipment. In other words, I applied this biology-inspired metaphor to describe the constant, daily experiences employees face each day at work. 

Who drives, who most influences life inside that bubble? The immediate manager. Yet organizations “solve” employee turnover and engagement by investing time, energy, and money into activities outside of that bubble. For proof, look up every new initiative your company did based on your last engagement survey results and you fill find a list of non-bubble, non-cellular stuff.

Employee engagement and employee retention happen inside the cellular wall of the manager-employee relationship and Stay Interviews are the key to building stronger walls.

The post The Link Between Biology and Employee Turnover appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

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 been our approach to “fix” these massive business problems…(1) survey, (2) develop actions plans, (3) implement across-the-board employee programs, (4) re-survey, (5) re-do this same process over again in a year or so. With absolutely no improvement.

Those who think this is the only way are stuck in darkness. It’s time for very fresh thinking, with a track record that proves this fresh thinking works. Enter Finnegan’s Arrow…and business-driven solutions.

Data is everywhere that says the #1 reason employees stay or leave…or engage or disengage…is how much they trust their boss. Yet many executives as well as leaders on every level say “That’s true for me but not for everyone”. Or worse, “Young people today only care about money…or not working hard”. Here’s the fact: Trusting your boss IS important for everybody.

The hard part is how do you fix this. Trust-building courses don’t work because they don’t provide leaders with an immediate application experience, a proactive way to build trust with their teams. But Stay Interviews do.

See in the infographic from C-Suite Analytics that the retention and engagement magic Stay Interviews bring must be surrounded by business-driven processes. We’ve known for decades that salespeople are driven by dollars, goals, tools, forecasts, and accountability. Flip that same model for leaders to engage and retain their teams and you get Finnegan’s Arrow, our fresh-thinking, business-driven solution for employee retention and engagement.

CEOs say in every survey today their greatest worry is people.

Contact the C-Suite Analytics today at (844) RETAIN-U (738-2468) to learn how we can help you implement our proven business-driven retention processes that cut turnover and improve engagement.

The post The New Phrase for Stopping Turnover: Business-Driven appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

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The picture is clear but bleak. Historic low unemployment plus a continuing growing economy means current employee turnover solutions are obsolete. Sprinkle in a new tax law that flushes companies with new money to spend on added factories, distribution centers, and research, then add in the potential for billions of dollars appropriated to improve infrastructure….and we are entering into a heightened period of employee retention impossibility.

And we can’t imagine it could get worse. But we will face even higher employee turnover if we don’t get smarter.

Do your company’s employee turnover solutions work? Or do you have long lists of open jobs you can’t fill, and top performers quitting on short notice…especially millennials?

What ARE employee turnover solutions, anyhow? Might your company do the typical run of surveys such as for engagement, salaries, benefits, or exit surveys? And then roll out the shiniest new employee programs like more meetings, recognition events, annual service awards, and more events with food? Has that helped?

National data says no. In fact, employee quits have increased steadily since 2009, while employee engagement has been flat…stonewalled…for the past 17 years. Those various surveys and resulting employee programs are a broken model. They are busted.

The missing piece is leaders don’t own accountability for retaining their people. And the number one reason why employees stay or leave is how much they trust their boss. Some companies might say accountability is there because each plant has a retention goal…or worse that HR has one…but until your first line leaders believe in their hearts that they own their talent and are held accountable in meaningful ways to retain it, no retention solution will work. None. You have likely already proven this in your company.

Here’s the right solution to fix employee turnover, which can also be applied to fix employee engagement:

Finnegan’s Arrow races way past employee programs and provides a business-driven model to solve employee turnover instead. We’ve worked with scores of companies to apply it across all industries, with results like these:

• Indiana manufacturing company, turnover down 67% in 5 months
• Florida hospital, nurse turnover down 70% in one year
• U.S. auto repair shop chain, turnover down 44% in 4 months

Here’s how Finnegan’s Arrow works:

Dollars means convert turnover to dollars so executives put complacency aside and bring their full authority to fix it, which brings buy-in for the next steps.

Goals indicates that leaders on all levels must be accountable for their teams, with reports each month that tell them and others how they performed against two goals…all turnover and new hire turnover; and that new hire goal might be for 60 days for some companies.

Stay Interviews then become these leaders’ best friends, as they are trained to ask each employee five questions on why they stay and why they might leave…then build a stay plan for each individual employee.

Forecasts then become the lockdown tool, as leaders forecast how long each employee will stay, and seek help if needed for top performers who are designated as short-timers.

Accountability then circles back to goals and forecasts, as leaders must achieve their retention goals and make consistently accurate forecasts.

Why do I say Finnegan’s Arrow is business-driven? Because from a strategic perspective, Finnegan’s Arrow resembles a common sales model. Salespeople know the precise dollar value for each sale…for their companies and themselves…and they have sales goals, tools, do sales forecasts, and are accountable for achieving their goals and developing accurate forecasts. Finnegan’s Arrow works the same way to reduce employee turnover.

Stay Interviews are the keystone in the Arrow because they are proven to cut turnover, and work best if preceded by and followed by business tactics. Stay Interviews succeed because they require leaders on each level to say, “I want to have a meeting with you to learn what I can do to make working here better for you”. And that meeting is one-on-one, personal, and is totally about the employee’s needs. Until then that employee has attended hundreds of meetings and their agendas can be cooked down to these two: Have you done your work? And here’s more work.

Stay Interviews instead drive conversations about what we like about our jobs, what development we seek or need to be successful, why we might leave, how our managers can do better. And importantly, why we stay.  These conversations work with reducing millennial employee turnover and keeping employees from all generations.  They are about finding out about what is important to each individual employee.

Ask yourself that question: Why do YOU stay? We all know reasons to leave on bad days, but few of us have tackled identifying the harder side of our own, personal stay/leave drivers. As employees we need to dig deeply to find that answer, say it out loud, and hear ourselves say it so we remember it. Especially when work gets tough.

What are the obstacles to making Stay Interviews work?

1. “No time” …which sometimes is true because we are busy interviewing replacement candidates and filling in for employees who have left.
2. “My employees won’t tell me the truth” …except they will if they trust you, and if they don’t Stay Interviews provide that platform to build trust by asking, listening, probing, taking notes, and developing a good stay plan
3. “I might drop the ball on my part of the stay plan” …then yes, your Stay Interview will fail.

What do employees want the most? Better work processes like stop doing worthless reports, get colleagues to do their share, fix broken equipment. Few even think of more money, more duties, as most live in the present tense and are thrilled someone wants to help them, especially their boss.

So, what’s the key takeaway? Everything you’ve been taught about employee retention might be wrong…and there is bright news that Finnegan’s Arrow is the proven approach to solve employee turnover. Please contact us for help with strategies to reduce employee turnover, and I always look forward to your feedback….dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com

The post How to Fix CEOs’ Top Worry: Employee Turnover appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.