CVS Waives the White Flag on Turnover

Pharmacist Waives the White Flag on Turnover

We’ve talked here before about how “The Great Resignation” would ultimately cut into customer service. Now according to the Wall Street Journal, CVS and other pharmacies are making that official.

Pharmacy Turnover Sparks Change to Business

CVS and Walmart announced last week they would cut pharmacy hours “in the midst of a pharmacist shortage that has plagued the nation’s biggest drugstore chains throughout the Covid-19 pandemic”.[i] Specifically…

  • CVS will begin cutting or shifting hours in March at two-thirds of its 9,000 locations.
  • Walmart will reduce pharmacy hours by closing at 7 PM vs 9 PM at most if its 4,600 stores, also in March.
  • And Walgreens previously announced they would reduce pharmacy hours with no specifics given.

Nowhere in various reporting have any of these companies indicated these pharmacy scheduling changes are temporary. Rather it appears that an expected standard tied to our nation’s healthcare will now be permanently changed. And that permanent change has resulted from (1) a drop in pharmacy school applicants…not enough workers…and (2) these companies’ combined inability to retain the pharmacists they have.

White Flag on Turnover Happened After Typical Recruiting Incentives Failed

On one hand, it’s admirable that these Fortune-100 corporations are willing to take the associated revenue hits by reducing hours and therefore reducing sales of perhaps their highest-margin products. Their alternative was to keep the same hours but let long customer lines form due to their continuing staff shortages which would make no one happy.

But the failed list of solutions these mega-employers used prior to waving the white flag on service hours reads like the same approaches taken in manufacturing, hospitality, and other industries, meaning they are trying to out-recruit each other:

  • Walgreens offered sign-on bonuses of up to $75,000 to new hires.
  • CVS guaranteed lunch breaks and added more virtual work to their pharmacists’ roles.
  • Walmart is telling candidates their reduced hours offer better work-life balance.

Don’t Wave the White Flag – Stop Your Recruiting Doom Loop,
Keep the Employees You Have, and Cut Your Turnover by 20% and More

Schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com to discuss your employee retention roadblocks and I’ll share ideas for how you can move forward and what is working for other companies to cut turnover by 20% and more, even during The Great Resignation that may benefit you.

Turning Turnover Around Takes a Deeper Understanding of What Drives It in the First Place

I made a mid-life commitment to make developing legitimate employee retention solutions my calling. Doing so drove me to ask the help of a distinguished professor who had a similar interest. That professor, Murphy by name, gifted me by emailing me links to professional articles about turnover. Who across the entire spectrum of HR professionals would even imagine there was and continues to be professional studies published that disclose secrets for cutting employee turnover?

I kept my findings in a notepad and one finding dominated all others. Here is the way I explain that finding today:

  • The #1 reason employees stay or leave…or for that matter engage or disengage…is how much they trust their immediate supervisors.
  • 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.

In my book, HR’s Greatest Challenge, I summarize 25 separate studies that all lead to this same conclusion.

It’s No Secret What the Cause of Turnover Is

Let’s take this summary finding one giant step further. I believe strongly that the two most important hours of the day for whether employees stay or leave…or engage or disengage…are the two hours immediately after work. This is the time when we “decompress” from our day, reviewing the highs and lows not chronologically by when they occurred but instead emotionally, what we liked and didn’t like. And that review is scattered, disorganized, because our brains are that way at the end of the day. So whether in our cars, on a train, or having dinner with our families, we are focused on the resulting emotions of our day.

And what are we focused on? Bosses, colleagues, and duties. And as we review what these companies have offered…more pay, lunch breaks, and reduced hours…my guess their soon-to-leave pharmacists’ end-of-day tired brains were focused instead on the events of their days. The joke line here is when that special someone asks over dinner, “How was your day, dear?”, no one answers, “My day was OK, I just wish we had pet insurance”.

Employees stay or leave based on the positive or negative build-up of day-to-day issues. Does my job make a difference or do I generate reports no one reads? Does my manager hold that jerk John accountable or do I have to tolerate his slack work? Does my boss appreciate my work…or should I report on the next employee survey I’m not appreciated so my company organizes “employee appreciation day” which solves nothing?

Pharmacist Turnover is a Canary in the Coal Mine

Retail pharmacists work in small teams and in tight spaces. Their jobs can be redundant, counting out pills to insert into bottles and explaining health consequences to patients. I would ask the executives of CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart these questions before I reduced customer hours:

  1. Do your lead pharmacists want to manage their teams or would they rather just focus on pharmaceutical work?
  2. If they want to be leaders, have you trained them on leadership skills?
  3. Do you track turnover by pharmacy, and especially by length of service?
  4. And most importantly, do you hold your lead pharmacists to employee retention goals?
  5. And if they fail to achieve those goals, do you coach them or move them out of their leadership roles and replace them with someone who wants to lead a team?

There’s a “canary in the coal mine” situation happening here. The entire world doesn’t yet understand that employees stay or leave for their bosses…hence we can consider the shut-down of pharmaceutical hours to be the beginning of the following, said meekly:

We did all the usual things to cut turnover but they didn’t work, so we will provide poorer customer service instead.

[i] https://www.wsj.com/articles/cvs-walmart-to-cut-pharmacy-hours-as-staffing-squeeze-continues-11674796388

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