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

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.