#SHRM21 Preview: Managers’ Roles With Turnover

I’m looking forward to speaking at the SHRM21 Annual Conference in Las Vegas in less than two weeks like when I counted days to my birthday as a kid.

The reason is my topic. I speak at the conference each year and this year have been asked to prove that managers cause turnover and disengagement rather than HR. My goal for everyone who attends sounds like something out of a movie, that every HR pro goes back home to their management team and slams down the handout and says, “I’ve got something to say, and it’s time you heard it”.

OK, HR folk would be more tactful than that. But as a “recovering HR director”, I clearly recall the first time my CEO said, “Turnover’s high, go fix it”. It’s debilitating.

One of those “discussions” changed my career, and it’s the reason I’m writing this piece rather than doing something else. I worked for a large banking company and instinctively knew that any traditional HR turnover fix…think exit surveys, employee surveys, salary surveys, and whatever other surveys there are…would be a waste of money and time. My gut reaction was everyone who worked in our company sat in the same type of red-brick buildings and in the same chairs, with the same pay and benefits, and their only variable was their boss.

So we asked every branch manager to accept an employee retention goal, to reduce their current turnover to a designated targeted percent. Whoa! The managers told us we didn’t pay enough, our benefits were puny, and whatever other excuse they could muster. But in four months our turnover was down 19% and we had saved over $4MM. And all we did was publish a monthly turnover report with each manager’s performance against their goal. Nothing else.

Now equipped with new knowledge and a bold idea, I left banking, began writing books, and found many companies that needed my help cutting turnover. Knowing I needed more knowledge to build better solutions, I partnered with a professor who led me to scientific findings on turnover that led to our Comprehensive Turnover Solution designed to get results and consistently cuts turnover 30% and more.

So if you can attend the conference in person or virtually…or if you cannot…here are some research headlines I’ll present that you can “borrow” in advance to share with your top team:

• Employees’ opinions of their managers drive their opinions of their pay, development, and more.
• Managers drive a full 70% variance in engagement…meaning they impact engagement more than any other factor.
• Holding nurse managers accountable for retention cut turnover more than splashy new benefits like flexible scheduling and childcare.
• Managers have been proven to drive 22 of the top 25 stay/leave predictors.
• School administrators like principals drive teacher turnover more than pay, limited career paths, or behavior-challenged kids.

My session is titled 7 Proofs That Managers Drive Engagement & Retention, Not HR, and will be presented on Sunday, September 12^th, at 9:15 AM in Las Vegas. SHRM21 has labeled this as a “mega-session” meaning the room will hold thousands but will also fill up early. Please introduce yourself before or after if you will be there…or email me in advance and we’ll meet over a cup of something. Or if you can’t attend the session, email me now at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and I’ll be glad to send you the session handouts the day after.