Securing HR’s “Seat at The Table”

October 15, 2024
CJ Higginbotham
Articles

Fortune published an interesting article recently about how HR’s role has stepped up due to people-centric issues like COVID-19, the subsequent labor upheaval, and remote work.[i] Their point is that HR now finally has that coveted “seat at the table” that top HR execs have longed for during the past decade or two.

One executive is quoted as saying, ““It’s not just that HR is kind of the fun crew, organizing picnics and engagement surveys. They’re doing real, proper business work.”

The Spotlight Has been on HR, and HR has Shined

The real point seems to be that external market conditions have put HR under the microscope, and most of HR has shined as a result. None of us wanted that bad bug from China, but the three named examples above are all about how companies responded to that bug which forced HR into the spotlight…which has been a very, very good thing for HR.

Pardon the sports analogy, but it’s often been said that winning the second super bowl is harder than winning the first. What can be that next step for securing one’s all-important seat?

And as important, what’s the next proactive thing HR can do…given that we earned our seat involuntarily based on a hopefully-once-in-a-lifetime event that none of us saw coming? We need a thing, an idea to transform our organizations that we can proactively initiate from scratch versus continuing to respond to outside business conditions, whatever they might be.

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Further Reading: Retention Tops CEOs’ Concerns that HR Needs to Solve

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Move Accountability for Retention from HR to Managers

So as they say, here’s the thing. Convince your executives that the true solution to cutting employee turnover is to hold your leaders accountable to employee turnover goals.

Move them away from believing employees stay because of pay, benefits, and all of those one-size-fits-all events that grow from your employee surveys. Convince them instead that employees stay or leave based mostly on their relationships with their first-line leaders, and that includes every leader from the CEO on down. Start by including your CFO in a turnover cost study so she tells the CEO and the others around the Monday morning table that turnover is one of your highest costs…and it takes more than a few HR programs to reduce it.

For many of us, turnover remains an HR-only issue, one that confounds us but also leaves us lonely because “it’s a people thing” so we on our own are charged with fixing it. And over time we finally figure out that employee appreciation week doesn’t fix recognition, town hall meetings don’t improve communications, and deep down nobody really cares about pet insurance.

Or said another way, everything we’ve been taught about how to improve employee retention is wrong.

Many of you know the story about how I collaborated with a professor at mid-career to discover the real turnover solution, one that sustains over time. And after digging into much academic research based on real-life corporate implementations, the pathway to real retention fixes comes down to this:

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.

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Further Reading: Correlation Between Culture, Turnover, and First-Line Supervisors

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HR’s Most Important Strategic Issue

Swing big. Consider your absolutely most important business issue and how improving retention addresses it. How often do your managers complain about recruiting? Or pay? Or might your executives be savvy enough to realize that we are running out of nurses, technicians, drivers, plumbers, and other essential skilled workers?

Here’s one off-the-wall example: School districts cannot find school bus drivers because those same drivers have gone to Amazon and other package-delivery companies because they work more hours and don’t have to deal with kids. Would any of us prefer to get up early to drive a bus, then wait around half a day to drive that same bus again?

HR Next Steps to Fix Turnover

Want to know how to prove to your top team that leaders drive turnover and also drive retention? Just how important is pay for retention compared to having a trustworthy boss? Why do one-size-fits-all programs fail compared to having a good one-on-one relationship with your boss?

And let’s add how does one put a cost on turnover. And which retention goals are the best goals.