How to Fix CEOs’ Top Worry: Employee Turnover

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