The Crucial Time of Day for Stay/Leave Decisions

Two hours in the day matter more for turnover than any other hours of that day. Those two hours are the ones immediately after work ends, regardless of each employee’s schedule or shift. These are the hours when we review our day…but we do so involuntarily. We might be in our car or truck, or on the train going home…or in the gym hitting a punching bag. It’s those hours when we can’t get work out of our minds.

Turnover Time is the Emotional Moments When the Mind is Tired

Think about this as it applies do your usual week. You work hard all day whether with your body, your mind, or both. But when your body walks away from the job your mind sticks around, at least for a while. And your mind is tired, making it difficult to discipline what enters your mind versus what doesn’t. So your mind takes you through an emotional trail of your day. Too exhausted to be rational and say, “My day started at 8 AM during a meeting with my team”, your mind instead flashes from good events to not-so-good events. Emotionally.

For many of us, that two-hour window includes dinner with our families. The joke line here is when someone says, “How was your day, dear?”, no one answers, “My day was OK. I just wish we had pet insurance”. Or said another way, some of the things we’ve been conditioned to believe will cut turnover really don’t matter at all.

Work-Life Balance has No Bearing on Turnover Time

Recently I said this idea in a meeting with the top 25 executives of a pharmaceutical firm in California. Imagine the highest-ranked and highest-paid top team, meeting in an impressive hotel ballroom seated at round tables with white table cloths. Brian, the CEO, was in the room. One executive challenged this top-two-hour idea with vigor, rising to a standing position to challenge me by saying, “Not my team. I tell them work-life balance, you don’t talk about work at home. You be there for your families”.

Dilemma here. My first instinct was to say, “Sir, you are one in a million. Now please sit down.”

But instead I took a chance and said this: “Let’s find out. We have your top 25 executives in the room including your CEO back in the corner. Let me ask you all to be honest. Raise your arm if you’ve talked about your boss in the past week over dinner.” Twenty-five arms reached for the ceiling.

This story is now legendary in C-Suite Analytics because as a result we tell leaders the following during Stay Interview training:

You are on the menu every night. Your employees will be talking about you over dinner. You decide what you want them to say.

But this story has an even greater lesson: that employees stay or leave, or engage or disengage, based on daily activities in their jobs. Put aside talk about employees leaving for pay, for career opportunities, and other reasons that flawed exit interviews tell us. While every possible exit reason is true some of the times, I’m convinced the greatest leave reason of all is that first-line supervisors fail to make their employees’ days as good as they can.

Turnover Time Decreases when Employees Trust Their Boss

C-Suite Analytics is rightly known for cutting our clients’ turnover by 20% and more…and often times as high as cutting turnover in half. Our mantra, our foundational belief is this, built on scores of academic studies that tell us the following is true:

• The #1 reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their boss.

• This does NOT mean each time an employee quits it is because she doesn’t trust her boss…though that might be true.

• It DOES mean each individual leader becomes your very best employee retention solution.

So if “boss trust” is the driving force for retention, how does each boss build trust? The obvious answer then becomes by making each employee’s day better…and not worse.

Here’s proof. Stay Interviews are a major part of the solution we offer clients which I invented with a book in 2012. The concept is simple but smart, that if employee turnover is based on how much employees trust their boss, then those bosses need an interactive way to build trust. And that interactive way must be based on topics each manager can control. So our five questions, the SI 5 as we call them in-house, must address day-to-day issues that a first-line manager can change. Here are the SI5:

1. When you travel to work each day, what things do you look forward to?
2. What are you learning here?
3. Why do you stay here?
4. When was the last time you thought about leaving our team? What prompted it?
5. What can I do to make your experience at work better for you?

Our research tells us these are the right questions to ask…to learn what your employees think about during those first two hours after work and what they talk about over dinner. Nearly all day-to-day good things/bad things that are within their manager’s control.

The real proof is our client managers ask these questions, then listen, take notes, and probe to learn more by converting five questions to twenty or more. Then they build individualized stay plans for each employee. And their overall company turnover decreases by twenty percent or more.

Can it be that easy? Yes. Call me if you want to learn more, 407.694.3390.

You Can Cut Turnover by 20% or More, No Matter Your Industry

There is an established solution for employee turnover…start here to learn our comprehensive turnover solution, and watch the 2-minute video to open your eyes to fresh thinking for cutting turnover 20% and more. Then schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.