What is the Worst Way to Increase Young Worker Retention? Promote Them!

What is Worst Way to Increase Young Worker Retention? Promote Them!

January 22, 2024
Richard Finnegan
Articles

Two weeks ago we talked here about whether young workers have grit. This is a simple one-syllable, four-letter word that needs to be more prominent in our vocabularies, meaning does one have perseverance, stick-to-it-ness, the eye-of-the-tiger in terms of getting things done. We also discussed the cultural issues that are impacting young workers today and focused on two of them, one being the always-constant influence of their parents and the other referring to the life-changing impacts of COVID-19.

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Further Reading: Young Workers, “Grit”, and New-Hire Turnover

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Are We Giving Young Workers Something They Don’t Want? Yes.

What’s new here is that 29% of U.S. workers are quitting their jobs within one month of their first promotion[i]. Yes, please read that sentence again. Given that we are talking about first promotions only and that more than half of our total workforce is comprised of millennials and Gen Z, I’m going to assume this astounding fact applies mainly to young workers.

The answer to this riddle is obvious. We are giving them something they don’t want. Consider these contributing factors in today’s workforce:

Turnover has never been higher which creates more openings at the top, middle, and bottom of each company’s organization chart.
Workers are in such short supply that we might look harder internally for talent than risk going outside.
While HR is experiencing higher-than-ever days to hire, managers must get work out the door so they succumb to promoting borderline internal candidates versus seeing who’s available on the outside market.
Then because work has backed up, new promotees walk into more work on all levels including their own new work plus left-over employee work.
And because everyone is focused on their own work mountains, new-manager coaching and training decrease.

Many of these jobs require managing people, and who wants to tackle that as a first-timer when companies can’t decide who works from home and who does not? Besides, managing people is messy, it requires grit, and it gives that feeling that work is never completely done. Googling “what do young workers want” generates dozens of studies that mostly contain these words…in addition to high pay which everyone clicks on every survey:

Autonomy
Higher purpose
Work/life balance
Job stability & security
Paid time off

And for many, the above combination adds up to wanting time and energy to work a side gig.

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Further Reading: Who Jeopardizes Engagement the Most? Gallup Math Says It’s Managers

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Who Should Be Accountable for This Costly Post-Promotion Turnover?

This post-pandemic period has taught us is that the above generalizations are mostly meaningless. A company rep can attend a conference and upon returning tell others the big takeaway was young workers want a higher purpose…so that company will then develop posters about all of the good ways they serve society.

What matters today is knowing what each individual employees wants…looking behind the vague curtain of misleading generalities to actually know each employee and what will engage them and keep them. And the only person who can and should achieve this is each person’s direct supervisor.

Someone must be accountable for knowing what each employee wants, and that someone is the direct supervisor. And that same someone must be accountable for the right career choices for each employee…and also must be accountable for that employee’s engagement and retention.

Why do 29% of young workers quit within a month of their first promotion? Because their “management” misread what they wanted…and their “management” is their boss.

This Is Why Stay Interviews Work

I invented Stay Interviews with a book titled The Power of Stay Interviews in 2012[ii]. I wrote that book because I had learned via an industrial/organizational psychology professor’s research that the number one reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their boss. So I was driven to develop a way for those managers to learn what their employees wanted in order to stay, and that method had to be interactive.

Those of you who know our company sometimes wonder how to we consistently cut turnover by 20% and more. The comprehensive answer is at this address…https://c-suiteanalytics.com/solutions/comprehensive-turnover-solution/…but here’s the shortcut: Establish retention goals, train managers to conduct Stay Interviews with each employee, encourage those managers to develop specific 1-1 stay plans, have those managers forecast how long each employee will stay…and then hold those managers accountable for achieving retention goals and developing accurate retention forecasts.

This method is in radical contrast to what most companies do such as employee surveys, exit surveys, and their resulting one-size-fits-all programs…because employees are never one size fits all. Employee recognition means my boss tells me what I do well in a way that fits into our specific manager-employee relationship…and it does not mean establishing employee-of-the- month or employee-of-the-year programs, or giving employees a backpack at five years and a clock at ten.

Besides, maybe younger workers don’t see moving up the organization chart as worth the hassle, despite a small jump in pay.

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Further Reading: Why Stay Interviews Q2 is “What Are You Learning Here?”

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