Hiring tools are everywhere. We’ve got resumes, skills tests, behavioral interviews, personality assessments… all in the name of answering two questions:

1. Can they do the job?
2. Will they do the job?

But here’s the real kicker: We’re missing a hiring tool for the most critical question of all.

Will they stay? Not “can,” not “will,” but stay. And not just hang around, they stay and remain engaged.

After decades of working with organizations on retention, I can tell you this question gets skipped way too often. And in healthcare, skipping it can be deadly, literally. If you’re hiring CNAs, nurses, or front-line staff who quit after six weeks, you’re not just wasting time and money, you’re jeopardizing lives.

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Roundtable Replay: Watch the 30-minute Roundtable replay of “Hiring People Who Stay and Self-Engage”.

Roundtable Slide Deck: Download the slide deck from the 30-minute Roundtable “Hiring People Who Stay and Self-Engage”.

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The CNA Turnover Crisis, and What We Did About It

Timothy Juergensen, one of our partners from Covenant Health, hit the nail on the head in a roundtable discussion. He said something I hear far too often:

“How did that person even get hired?”

It’s a fair question. At Covenant, CNAs were leaving in droves within their first two months. So, we worked together to fix it, starting with the hiring process.

What did we do?

We designed a Realistic Job Preview (RJP) for the CNA role. This wasn’t just another glossy recruiting video, it was a true, unfiltered look at what the job really entailed. Managers were trained not just to show it, but to use it to create better interview questions. We asked about tough past jobs, stress, and motivation. And we even invited candidates to tour the floor and see the job in action.

Some said, “No thanks.”
And that was a good thing.

Because when the cost of a bad CNA hire is thousands of dollars, or a patient safety issue, you don’t want to convince someone to take the job. You want to help them make the right choice, for them, and for you.

Three Ways to Hire People Who Stay

In my work, I’ve found that hiring for retention often boils down to three proven practices:

1. Realistic Job Previews – Show the real job. Warts and all.
2. Employee Referrals – People refer others like themselves. Good people know good people.
3. Commitment-Implied Offers – Language in your offer that signals expectations for growth, trust, and staying power.

Ask yourself: Which of these could move the needle the most in your organization?

Motivation Isn’t a Mystery, If You Ask the Right Questions

The Covenant team didn’t stop at previews. They rebuilt their interview training from the ground up, anchoring it to the idea of motivational fit. In short: Does this person want to do this kind of work, in this kind of environment, for this kind of team?

It’s not enough to ask if they’ve done a task before. We need to uncover why they did it, how they felt about it, and what kept them going when it got tough. That’s how you reveal the traits, not just competencies, that lead to long-term retention.

Because here’s the truth: You can train for skill. You can’t train for grit.

Let’s Be Honest: Retention Starts Before Day One

If you’re in healthcare, this isn’t optional. When a CNA walks off the job, your care teams are short-staffed, your costs skyrocket, and your remaining employees burn out faster. You’ve got to make hiring for stay power a core competency.

Let’s not pretend this is just an HR issue either. This is a leadership issue. And like most leadership issues, the solution starts with truth-telling, better questions, and accountability.

So I’ll leave you with this:

What are you doing to hire for stay power?

If the answer is “not much,” then don’t be surprised when your retention looks like roulette.

Want help building realistic job previews or motivational-fit interview questions?
Write me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com. Let’s talk about how to build a hiring process that cuts turnover from Day One.

The post The Hiring Question No One Asks: Will They Stay? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

“Pride in their work and loyalty to colleagues are the strongest correlates of readiness to stay with an organization. Competitive pay supports recruiting, but organizational culture, is what makes them stay. Improving organizational culture is a leadership challenge that is more complex than finding the money to increase compensation or correcting the problems that cause unhappiness. After all, in life in general, happiness is something beyond the absence of unhappiness.” (excerpted)

Employee Retention Lessons from Outside Healthcare

While the original article focused on healthcare, the insights resonate across industries. Consider these results from a manufacturing client with high turnover rates across nine U.S. facilities. Historically, 50% of new hires left within the first 60 days, leading to production delays and inflated recruitment costs. The goal? Achieve 80% retention at the 60-day mark.

The key to success was empowering front-line team leads to conduct Stay Interviews and actively participate in retention initiatives. Initially skeptical, the leads embraced their new responsibilities. By scheduling Stay Interviews on day five and again during the sixth week, these leaders created personalized action plans to address potential issues early.

Within six months, the plant not only met but exceeded the retention target. The transformation didn’t stem from higher pay or better benefits but from equipping team leads with the tools to foster stronger relationships with their teams.

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Further reading: HBR Article on Customers also Applies to Employees

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First-Line Supervisors: The Untapped Retention Engine

Gallup research underscores this point, showing that 70% of employee engagement is directly influenced by front-line supervisors. Yet many organizations continue to invest heavily in surface-level perks while neglecting this pivotal role. Leadership needs to shift focus and invest in the day-to-day managers who make or break the employee experience.

So, what doesn’t work?

• Higher pay alone? Nope.
• Flashy benefits packages? Nope.
• Employee appreciation events? Nope.

What does work? Equipping supervisors with skills, data, and accountability.

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Further Reading: What’s a Direct Route to Distinguishing Your Culture?

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The 5-Step Turnover Reduction Framework for 2025

The latest research and field-tested strategies point to our proven framework we call Finnegan’s Arrow for reducing turnover by 30% or more:

1. Dollars: Translate turnover rates into financial metrics. Use tools like the Turnover Cost Calculator to get your CFO on board with concrete financial implications.
2. Goals: Analyze past turnover data to set specific, measurable retention goals for the entire workforce and new hires.
3. Stay Interviews: Train supervisors to conduct structured interviews, using five targeted questions to uncover retention risks and craft individualized retention plans.
4. Forecast: Have supervisors predict the tenure of each team member, fostering proactive engagement rather than reactive responses.
5. Accountability: Track retention metrics with the same rigor applied to sales targets. Recognize high-performing supervisors and coach those who fall short.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

In the early ’90s, political strategist James Carville coined the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid.” For HR executives in 2025, the mantra should be: “It’s the supervisors.”

Front-line leaders shape the culture and retention outcomes more than any other factor. Equip them with the right tools, and watch your turnover rates plummet while engagement and productivity soar.

You Can Cut Turnover No Matter Your Industry

There is an established solution for employee turnover…start here to learn about our comprehensive turnover solution, and watch the 2-minute video to open your eyes to fresh thinking for cutting turnover 30% and more. Then schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.

[i] Harvard Business Review, What Makes Health Care Workers Stay in Their Jobs?, March 2^nd, 2023 by Patrick T. Ryan and Thomas H. Lee.

The post Employee Turnover in 2025: Why Culture Matters More Than Compensation appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

I’ve never been a smoker but have been close to people who’ve labored through the quitting process, over and over and over. So changing jobs is 50% more stressful than that?

So let’s say your company’s annual turnover is that same number, 50%, or half that at 25%. What does this new information tell us about how badly your employees want out? How much they disdain working for your company? What could be SO bad that they are willing to drag themselves through half of the same stress level as if they were getting divorced? Or the identical amount of stress from the death of a close friend?

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Further Reading: How Employee Turnover Is Like Losing a Marriage

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The Data Behind the Data on the Stress of Quitting

This study was published in The Atlantic which brings a pristine reputation for data quality. The study was conducted on the Holmes-Raye Life Stress Inventory[ii] which compares life’s common stress events, scoring the top life event which is death of a spouse at 100, and then compares the remaining events to this number. The remaining top five stress events after spouse death are divorce at 73, marital separation from mate at 65, and then detention in jail or another institution along with death of a close family member are tied at 63. 

But we also know that quit stress levels differ among individuals. One study focused on technology workers tells us that just 30% of those who indicated that they would quit within a year actually did quit[iii]…which is why I never quote “January studies” that say a certain percentage of workers intend to quit this year. The more relevant data is how many actually do quit later.

That same study indicated that while many who said they would quit did not quit, that about a third of them had risk-averse personalities that make it even harder for them to quit.

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Further Reading: The Blatant Unfairness of Retaining Poor Supervisors

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So How Do You Prevent Employees from Quitting?

This weekly piece has been packed with employee retention ideas…so given the space available, let me offer the top four:

Sounds easy I know…but there are many obstacles to make that above happen in any organization. Our clients cut turnover by an average of 34% across all industries, so we’ve conquered every challenge that’s included in these top four approaches.

Email me to learn more at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.

[i] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/job-hunt-quest-meaning/681299/

[ii] https://www.stress.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Holmes-Rahe-Stress-inventory.pdf

[iii]https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2843824.2843827?casa_token=YGHnXTTuCXkAAAAA:PrOxMtBqHJXllQrqWsZx5R4a997EWQ3-PQOgu-31C1oPQ3__s2NqS_vSKB4fRQpvwPd_qK-rgUWf

The post How Bad Does It Have to be for Someone to Quit Your Company? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

We’ve invented a turnover cost calculator, an actual algorithm, that you can use that will produce a reliable cost for any employee who leaves. But the ongoing accumulation of these costs on company productivity plus the spinning wheel of hire/onboard/train/wave good-by is like an ever-worsening chronic illness. And I’m certain that illness has killed off some companies. And it’s possible those companies thought early turnover was just “the cost of doing business”, flying blindly, right up till the end.

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Further Reading: Escape the Benchmark Data Trap and Calculate Turnover’s Real Cost

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Data Says Much, and an Impact Example is Manufacturing’s Monthly Turnover Churn

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that the median tenure for US workers has slipped to 3.9 years, down from 4.1 years in 2022 and the lowest since 2002.[ii] This slip seems tiny except when compared to the average tenure of baby boomers which has been greater than 8 years which is double the above amount.[iii]

We will miss them in oh so many ways. Even the “get off my lawn” ones who still brought day-to-day grit to their jobs.

Many manufacturing companies tell us a tale like this one:

Last year we lost 241 employees and hired 236. We’re trying to grow staff but it’s impossible because every month we’re hiring about as many as we’re losing.

This is probably why we buy faulty products. The machines that make the products work OK but not the people who run them. One must wonder how well these new hires are trained when rushed into production, and how much they care if they feel unwelcomed or unprepared. I’ve actually heard stories of managers who say I won’t memorize their names until I know if they’re going to stick around.

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

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The Cavalry Isn’t Coming to Fix Turnover

My recent work with the U.S. Census Bureau makes clear that fewer new workers will come our way, and the quality of those workers offers no greater promise. That sentence is as meaningful as any in this report, so it’s time that we get a lot smarter about who we hire and how we retain them. Here are four ideas that I promise will work.

New-Hire Retention Idea #1:

Invest at least 10 hours to develop a realistic job preview. Start with the top 3 reasons employees in this job quit and the top 3 reasons you fire them. Take candidates on a realistic job tour, turning on the “tell’ and turning off the “sell”, using these examples:

• How hot/cold/wet does it really get in here?
• How much overtime and is it forced?
• How many people have you fired this year because of attendance?
• When will my pay increase?
• How much time do I have to ramp up to meet the production standards?
• What must I learn in the first 30 days?
• What’s the real percentage of time I must travel?
• Is your return-to-office policy final or might it change?

Then ask each candidate (1) what’s the least attractive part of this job, and (2) how unattractive is that part on a scale of 1 to 10? Some you will pass on and others have already gone out the door. But the remaining group is better prepared to stick around.

New-Hire Retention Idea #2

Advise them to accept your offer only if they can see themselves working with you for at least one full year. The counter is they might have plans to take your job short-term till they get a better one, or return to school, or move away to another town. Stress how much actual job training and coaching you will provide such that two-way trust is required to move forward.

While a few might lie, some will refuse your job based on their personal integrity…and those who take your job will recall their commitment during a bad day in their fourth month. These are both good outcomes and will improve your productivity and reduce workforce errors.

New-Hire Retention Idea #3

Hold first-line supervisors accountable to new-hire retention goals. Calculate the percentage of new hires who reach 30/60/90/180 days to determine the targeted retention period, and then establish a goal to improve it. Tell supervisors they are accountable for that goal and how you will report it…and then tell them 1-1 if they are making their goal and what they need to do better.

New-Hire Retention Idea #4

Hold your in-house recruiters accountable to the same new-hire retention goal, knowing they represent the first gate to employment with your company. And if you have multiple recruiters, horse-race them against each other to see who advances the highest percentage of new hires who stay through the goal period.

And if you want to ensure early retention success, invite us to train those first-line supervisors to conduct Stay Interviews in the ways I invented that concept way back in 2012. Open their minds to the precise reasons why each newly-hired employee joins, stays, and might leave, along with what that supervisor can address in order to retain that treasured worker.

Getting an “A-ha!” to Tackle Turnover

You can use our free turnover calculator to see what even just one open job is costing your organization. Costing turnover is the beginning for gaining vigorous support from your c-suite to then establish retention goals for leaders, implement Stay Interviews, and all other solutions that are part of Finnegan’s Arrow®.

Email me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com to discuss holding a Cost of Turnover session with your executives to calculate your dollar cost of turnover together as a team. I guarantee, it will stun everyone and give you proof of value for addressing turnover.

[i] ASHHRA 2024 Healthcare Workforce Report, October 2024

[ii]https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm#:~:text=For%20women%2C%20median%20tenure%20was,See%20tables%201%20and%203

[iii] https://www.careerbuilder.com/advice/blog/how-long-should-you-stay-in-a-job

The post Four Proven Ways to Stop New-Hire Turnover appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

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.

Email me for answers at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com. I can help, promise.

[i] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/meet-new-c-suite-power-player-chro-fortune-ukp1f/

The post Securing HR’s “Seat at The Table” appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Two Bad Examples of Ducking Turnover

Recently I’ve seen two examples of organizations essentially avoiding fixing turnover by saying that increased turnover is unavoidable and then proposing work-around plans that are not proven. In fact these examples are from entire industries saying there is no fix for turnover.

The first “do not do” approach comes from a lead article in the Supply Chain Management Review, with the title Why Chief Supply Chain Officers Should Embrace Employee Turnover.[i] The author represents Gartner, a national-leading consulting firm, who cites their own data that turnover is likely to increase in the next five years. She goes on to say that “turnover is inevitable and it’s better to accept this fact, embrace it and turn it to your advantage.” Her advantage methods include conducting career counseling for opportunities both inside and outside of the organization, and then she cites that too often companies risk retaining disengaged employees with their overall efforts to retain their entire teams.

My gut reaction is you are coaching your productive employees to leave your organization and how will you replace them given our fast-increasing workforce challenges. As to her second idea, my suggestion is you should be coaching your disengaged employees and then take steps to fire them if necessary.

The second “do not do” approach comes from a keynote speaker at a national nursing conference I attended in April. Her pitch to the audience of nurse leaders was that nurse turnover is inevitable so find new ideas to work-around it. Coincidentally, this is a keynote speaker who has quoted my work extensively in her books, so this was completely counter-intuitive to those references. And, if she had attended the exceptional presentation at the same conference by Linda M. Valentino DNP, RN, NEA-BC, Stay Interviews & Human Centered Leadership: A Winning RN Retention Duo, she would have learned that Mt. Sinai West didn’t work-around nurse turnover, they solved for it and cut it by 43%.

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Further Viewing: Mount Sinai West’s Linda Valentino & Stay Interviews for Nurse Retention

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Is High Turnover Inevitable?

These things are true:

• Turnover is generally higher than we would want
• Our workforce shortage will get worse, not better
• Therefore the easy conclusion is turnover will get worse as well

If you were the above-cited author or the keynote speaker, you obviously believe that turnover cannot be fixed. But it’s not true that there is no solution to reduce employee turnover.

Do This! An Example of Cutting Turnover Versus Working Around It

When speaking at the SHRM annual conference in Chicago last month, a gentleman asked from the back of the room whether the retention tactics I described can work with non-profits. This is an insightful question because those who work in non-profits are more tied to their organization’s mission than their pay which is usually less than for a similar job in a for-profit company.

In that same room was Cliff Reyle, an executive with Youth Villages which has a total of 4,000 employees who provide emotional health services to young people who need them. Youth Villages is a client of ours and we are working to improve retention among their live-in residential counselors, the toughest group to retain. So in a room with about 600 folks I turned to Cliff to ask how much turnover had come down, to which Cliff replied “35 percent”…against an original goal to reduce turnover by 20 percent.

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Further Reading: Message at SHRM24: Stay Interviews Require Accountability

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In addition to reducing their turnover this much, Cliff told me how they are performing on their new-hire goal, as so often reducing new-hire turnover improves retention for all jobs over time. With a goal to retain 80 percent of new hires for their first 90 days, new-hire retention has improved to the following:

• 94% 90-day retention
• 88% 6-month retention
• 75% one-year retention

I would add that few who are reading this have a job that is as difficult to solve retention for as live-in residential counselors for challenged youth. But either way, Cliff and his team didn’t surrender to an inevitable fate to work-around, they took charge and did something about it.

You CAN Cut Employee Turnover

Those who read this column regularly know what comes next. That our research-based solution does indeed cut employee turnover…and it involves (1) converting turnover to dollars, (2) establishing retention goals, (3) training leaders to conduct Stay Interviews so they can build 1-1 stay plans with each member of their teams, (4) asking those leaders to also forecast how long each employee will stay, and (5) holding those leaders accountable to their goals and their forecasts.

Our method is based on research versus being whimsical or a combination of “best practices”. Yes, there is work and a dedicated effort to making these changes within your organization, but the results are significant and sustainable compared to a hands-in-the-air surrender with no proven solution or value.

Please email me if you’d like to learn more at dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com.

Master Training: Employee Retention Intensive for HR Leaders

Based on Dick Finnegan’s ground-breaking work with Stay Interviews and Finnegan’s Arrow, our expert facilitators will equip you with all the tools you need to refine and implement your retention strategies to build a thriving, engaged workplace culture. Secure your spot today!

[i] https://www.scmr.com/article/why-chief-supply-chain-officers-embrace-employee-turnover?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=TWISC&oly_enc_id=3458C7955823G5X

The post Don’t Do This! Bad Examples of Waiving the White Flag on Turnover appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

• ResumeBuilder.com polled 976 business leaders to learn that 20% already have a Four-day workweek and another 41% said they plan to implement one on at least a trial basis.[i]

• And non-profit firm 4 Day Week Global surveyed 41 companies across the U.S. and Canada that had implemented shorter hours last year, to find that weekly work hours had stayed reduced from 38 hours to 32 hours one year later.[ii] So the novelty didn’t wear off.

It’s easy to see why reducing the number of workdays would be popular with employees. In one study of those who’ve made the switch, almost half said they’d require significant raises to return to five days while 10% said no amount of money would make them switch back.

And on the company side, work satisfaction is up, productivity is up, recruiting is easier…and for our purpose here, employee retention is up. And during these days of extreme workforce shortages, every company is seeking a recruiting edge. This could be “it”.

What’s Not to Like About Four-Day Workweeks?

Lee Corso is the college football announcer famous for his line, “Not so fast, my friends”. Lee lives a couple of miles north of me here in Orlando so I’m naturally a fan. So if Lee was reporting on work schedules versus football, here would be his objections:

1. Will executives really take the plunge based on outsiders’ data versus what they see with their own eyes every day?
2. And do you pilot first, likely in the department where you best predict success…implying that if even it works here, it still might not work everywhere?
3. And how could you make it feel fair if some departments work four days while other departments work five?
4. And what are the employee relations consequences of raising company-wide expectations with a pilot that you then declare a failure, so no employees’ schedules change?

One of the reports contains this seemingly-simple sentence which is instead a daunting challenge:

Proponents of the four-day week contend that companies can trim a full day from the week without a loss of productivity.

One for-certain risk is that white-collar workers would still work as many hours as now, and bristle at the sound of other employees discussing the activities of their now-longer weekends. Especially since so many of our white-collar workers now work from home and would be stretching themselves invisibly. Productivity goals can’t change so their work must get done.

And this points to the most-widely reported “solution” for reducing work hours which is…wait for it…reducing the time we all spend in meetings, raising these questions:

1. Do we really have to have this meeting?
2. Do regularly-scheduled meetings need to happen as often?
3. Must any of our current meetings be scheduled for so long?
4. Should meeting invitation lists be trimmed so only those who will really contribute or benefit must attend?

Two of the common anti-meeting fixes have been (1) schedule all meetings to end in 30 minutes and (2) remove the chairs so everyone must stand.

But those who work on factory floors and in call centers don’t spend as much time in meetings as white-collar workers do. Nor do nurses or CNAs in healthcare, although their schedules have been atypical for years, in part to retain them longer.

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Further Reading: Calculating Turnover’s Highest Cost: Lost Productivity

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Can We Reduce Weekly Schedules “Without A Loss of Productivity”?

Let’s then imagine we manage a manufacturing facility that tracks its production numbers daily and weekly. And our objective is to reduce the currently-scheduled number of weekly work hours while keeping pay the same. For some this means reducing work from five days to four days, for others from six days to five days…or maybe even five days to four and a half. Here is one way to proceed:

1. Choose the one metric that best represents weekly productivity and establish a floor that must be met for the next 12 months.
2. Challenge your top team to develop tactics to reach that weekly metric in less time, for example reducing from 5 days to 4 requires achieving that same goal in 80% of the time.
3. Challenge every policy, every work process, and each piece of equipment to ensure they maximize getting production out the door.
4. Do the same with schedules, ensuring the right number of trained employees are onsite when they need to be.
5. Establish two employee retention goals, (1) to reduce current annual turnover by 20% and (2) retain 90% of new hires for 90 days.
6. Train managers to conduct Stay Interviews at least once per year with each employee and twice with new hires during the new-hire goal period.
7. Address every employee performance issue to either resolve it or terminate that employee.
8. Do the same with supervisors and managers, top to bottom, but especially for the first-line supervisors.

Then if you believe you can achieve your goal, tell your employees your plan, the goal that must be achieved, and a possible implementation timeline if the total team can both achieve the goal for one month but also project to continue achieving it for an additional 90 days. But the full team will return to its original schedule if the productivity goal cannot be met.

Every employee on every level must be all-in to achieve the newly-stated productivity goal…but if they cannot achieve it, they must work as many days hours as required to do so…with the goal of ultimately committing to a reduced schedule.

But if your top team believes you cannot achieve the stated weekly production goal regardless of the changes suggested here, play safe by stopping all discussion of reducing weekly work hours, at least for now.

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Further Reading: Clarify Employee Engagement’s Fuzzy Metrics to Improve Productivity

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Be Prepared To Consider Offering 4-Day Workweeks for Employee Retention

Who among us would have predicted that today nearly 100 million U.S. workers would be working from home?[iii] The reason is not because we all believe working from home increases productivity, but instead because workers have the upper hand. And data from the U.S. Census Bureau tells us this won’t get much better for at least the next decade.[iv] So we had better be ready to offer reduced workweeks if that becomes the next hot employee benefit trend.

Let’s close with a reminder that the #1 reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their boss. The truth is implementing four-day workweeks may give us a little slack in that an employee might stay for a jerk boss a little longer, but only until they can find an otherwise similar work situation elsewhere. Giving them a boss they can trust goes much further.

Need help establishing your employee retention goals?  
Schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and we’ll discuss the numbers and needs you should have to evaluate your retention goals. We work with companies in every type of industry to cut turnover by 20% and more by building trust and accountabilities.

[i] https://thehill.com/business/4052078-more-than-half-of-us-employers-ready-to-try-four-day-workweek/#:~:text=Most%20workers%20love%20the%20idea,of%20work%20in%20fewer%20hours

[ii] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-27/four-day-workweeks-are-good-for-employee-health-study-suggests?in_source=embedded-checkout-banner

[iii] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/real-estate/our-insights/americans-are-embracing-flexible-work-and-they-want-more-of-it

[iv] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p25-1144.html

The post Could 4-Day Workweeks Improve Employee Retention?    appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

More on nursing homes in a minute…but let’s first consider if this same command rippled through all healthcare. What if all hospitals, clinics, urgent care, dialysis centers, and more had to report their cost of turnover in their financials by applying an agreed-up dollar figure to their data. Then board members, and even the public, could see the dollar cost of turnover on an organization’s financial reports and use it to assess and set concrete goals for improvement.

The Dollar Cost of Turnover is Rarely Reported

How important is this? Many finance professionals in publicly traded companies start their days by opening their computers to the standard run of finance reports, looking for ways to save money or generate more revenue…all while millions of dollars are going out the door due to turnover. Why? Because dollars associated with turnover are not reported, not budgeted, not visible in any financial reports anywhere. Not to the boards of directors, not to Wall Street, not to current shareholders nor to potential buyers of your stock.

The same is true for small businesses, privately-held businesses, and non-profits. Seriously, pause for just a moment. How can any chief financial officer say her standard financial reporting presents a total picture of her organization’s financial performance if it doesn’t account for the dollar cost of turnover?

The True Dollar Cost of Turnover is Often Shocking

Finance and accounting pros are in a constant search for quarters in the couch compared to the millions in dollars in cost of turnover often overlooked or simply not accounted for.

Several years ago, I worked with an aerospace company that made rockets…and invited the CFO to participate in a turnover cost study. We ultimately agreed the cost of losing an engineer was $121,450. We talked after the meeting and I suggested his company’s total cost of turnover was likely a top-5 cost, competing with the costs of facilities, materials, and people. He called the next day and said he couldn’t sleep, had gone to work early to extrapolate some numbers…and determined turnover was his second-highest cost. How is that for a reality check!

Do you know your dollar cost of turnover?
Use our free Turnover Calculator to determine the
specific financial impact of turnover for your organization.

Turnover Data Incorporated Into Nursing Home Reporting

But let’s return to this great service our government is providing us by reporting nursing home staffing and turnover statistics. Go to https://www.medicare.gov/care-compare/?providerType=NursingHome and then follow the prompts to enter the name of any local nursing home to reach this incredible information as you imagine that you are trying to find the best nursing home for a loved one. The first data presents overall staffing rating on a five-point scale, and then each of the following data points compared to the national average:

• Total number of nurse staff hours per resident per day
• Resident nurse hours per resident per day
• LPN/LVN hours per resident per day
• Nurse aid hours per resident per day
• Total number of nurse staff hours per resident per day on the weekend
• Physical therapist staff hours per resident per day
• Registered nurse hours per resident per day on the weekend

And then you will find specific data relative to turnover:

• Total nursing staff turnover
• Registered nurse turnover
• Number of administrators who have left the nursing home

This same report contains the following makes-sense quote that contains a clue as to these data’s importance:

CMS has explored the relationship between staff turnover and quality of care and a preliminary analysis indicates that as the average staff turnover decreases, the overall star ratings for facilities increases, suggesting that lower turnover is associated with higher overall quality. 

Turnover Data Impacts Ratings AND Revenue

The star ratings mentioned here refer to each nursing home’s being assigned one to five stars based on metrics related to health inspections, staffing, and quality measures. Each star rating computes to dollars as these ratings are used by regulators, consumer, practitioners, insurers, lenders, and investors, as well as some designated Medicare payments.[ii]

So who is taking the lead to initiate reporting and financial accountability for each organization’s employee turnover? Our U.S. government is. Let’s see if other healthcare organizations will be next up to repair the gaping hole of not reporting turnover’s costs.

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Want to improve your retention but not sure where to start or how to convince your executives of the importance? Write to me DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or connect with me to schedule a FREE one-on-one consultation.

[i] https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/advance-information-quality-care-cms-makes-nursing-home-staffing-data-available

[ii] https://thegreenfields.org/growing-importance-nursing-home-5-star-ratings-impacted-survey-findings/

The post Nursing Home Employee Turnover Data Transparently Reported appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Our approach at its core is that leaders on every level are employee turnover’s greatest influencers. And Gallup would tell you the same regarding employee engagement. The result is that most employees’ stay/leave decisions are based on everyday work…and the dominant influence over how employees see their daily work is their boss.

Most would profoundly agree…or passively nod their heads…to what is above. Yet they continue to do what other companies do, all without considering that others “best practices” hardly ever including improving each supervisor’s relationships with their employees.

As just two examples, increasing pay or adding a benefit does nothing to improve an employee’s relationship with her manager. Neither does improving new-hire onboarding. This mini-analysis starts a very long list of things companies do with full belief that those things will cut their turnover…but they will hardly make their turnover budge. So let’s dig deeper into what doesn’t cut turnover.

Exit Surveys Don’t Cut Turnover

Each year at the SHRM annual conference, I poll the audience as to how many believe their company’s conducting exit surveys had resulted in reducing their turnover. The standard response is less than five percent saying “yes” and about 95 percent saying “no”. But I would bet you twenty bucks that all of those who had just pronounced their exit surveys as worthless have since returned to their jobs and continued to conduct exit interviews.

Exit interviews fail to provide an entry point for cutting turnover for bunches of reasons but here are the top three:

• Employees don’t tell the truth.
• HR accepts responses like “better opportunity” which provides no help for finding solutions…and many translate “better opportunity” to mean more pay.
• No one acts on exit survey results anyhow.

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Further reading: Exit Interviews – More Like Autopsies or Toe Tags?

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Neither Do Engagement Surveys

Whether conducted annually or more often, engagement surveys are targeted toward generating one-size-fits-all programs by way of HR or an employee committee that develops a resulting action plan for improvement. Survey says employees want more recognition? Committee meets three times and reports their plan for more employee recognition events and better service awards. Or for better communication we will have CEO videos and town hall meetings. Need career development? HR makes “career ladders” and emphasizes all of the training classes available. And tuition reimbursement is our associated employee benefit.

What’s missing? Nothing about first-line leaders.

Contrasting the above paragraph against first-line leaders having the greatest clout to improve turnover, one must consider these engagement survey questions:

• Does your employee survey provide data for first-line leaders who are the key drivers of employee retention? Or just for those leaders above them?
• How many items on the survey inquire about first-line leaders building trust vs pay, benefits, and other things?
• Does anyone in your company remember a first-line leader’s engagement score year-to-year?
• Has a first-line leader ever been fired because he couldn’t improve his lousy employee engagement score?

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Further reading: Yes or No: Do Engagement Surveys Cut Turnover?

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Nor Do Turnover Benchmarks

CEOs often ask for external-company benchmarks so they know if their turnover percentage is something to worry about. So large-company HR departments search online or pay for benchmark data while small-company HR leaders call their local competitors for talent. The outcome is usually expressed like this:

Whereas our turnover is __%, the benchmark for other companies is __%

so we are doing (better or worse)

If the data says we are doing better, we now have an excuse to not try harder…and therefore not hold first-line leaders accountable for keeping their teams. If the data says we are worse, we can either invent a reason why like “it gets colder where we are” or whatever, or we can tell HR to fix it.

The worst thing about external turnover benchmarks is that they freeze our progress. The implication is if other companies can’t figure this out then we can’t either…so being about the same means this is the best we can do.

Some Inside Scoop

C-Suite Analytics has built its reputation by helping companies cut turnover by 20% and more, consistently over the thirteen years we’ve been in business. Our consultants know explicitly how to follow our implementation model which is here:

We can describe the inspiration-driving benefits of converting turnover to dollars and helping executives develop employee retention goals. We’ve seen firsthand the career-improving results of first-line managers conducting Stay Interviews to both improve their retention and help those leaders build better careers. And we know asking those same first-line leaders to forecast how long each employee wills stay leads them to listen more carefully and watch for retention-indicating signs.

We know most, though, that holding first-line leaders accountable to achieving retention goals is the most powerful retention fix. And no part of exit surveys, engagement surveys, or turnover benchmark data plays any role in helping those first-line leaders cut their turnover.

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Want to improve your retention but not sure where to start or how to convince your executives of the importance? Write to me DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or connect with me to schedule a FREE one-on-one consultation.

The post To Cut Turnover, Survey Results & Benchmarks Don’t Matter appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Job Survey Data Says…

These are his data points that jumped out the most:

• In 2017, 24% of respondents to a Pew survey said their job or occupation was very important to their identity. In 2021, just 17% did. Later surveys corroborate this finding. 
• More workers are taking their full slate on vacation days, sick days, and other opportunities to skip work.
• Men worked 30 hours less last year than in 2019, and the drop was concentrated among upper-income college graduates.

The author points out that these upper-income college grads are likely now working from home, so gone is the never-said-out-loud competition to see who arrives first to the office and is last to leave. These former workaholics can instead easily respond to any extended-office-hour requests on their phones from restaurants, the gym, or wherever.

Work From Home and Layoffs Signal White Flag for Employee Retention

While the overwhelming number of CEOs don’t approve of their employees working from home, our long-continuing worker shortage gives employees the upper hand. As one frustrated CEO said in the article…

“If you have a person working in finance who’s not coming to the office, why wouldn’t you hire that same person in India or in the Philippines?”

How’s that for waving the white flag on employee retention and engagement?

Then consider the must-be-at-work jobs like those for blue-collar workers, restaurant workers, teachers, or those in healthcare who are consistently winning concessions on pay increases, scheduling, or even by striking and winning.

Some might say that layoffs forecast a future-soon economic downfall. Recent reports though say Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Netflix employ roughly 50% more workers than before the pandemic…and Amazon’s workforce remains twice as big as it was in 2019[ii]…despite each of these company’s recent layoffs being in the news.

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Further Reading: Do Layoff Announcements Mean Hiring Gets Easier?

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Employees Have the Upper Hand…

…and they know it. And the strongest upper hands hang off the arms of your top-performers. And because good workers all over are in short supply, let’s include your middle-performers, too. Workers can call their own shots such that a full 68% of those who changed jobs in February moved to a new industry.[iii] Let’s chew on this for a moment, that a large majority of job-changers moved to new industries with likely no same-industry experience and maybe no proven skills for their new jobs, yet employers opened their arms to take them.

How desperate is that?

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Further Reading: Pay or Disrespect – What Drives High Performer Turnover?

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The Real Employee Retention Issue

Any head-above-water CEO would agree that retaining good performers is a better fix than posting and re-posting their jobs on Indeed…even that guy above who saw no difference between hiring an employee from home vs outsourcing his job to a foreign country and culture. Making the retention case is easy. The hard part is knowing how to retain. What should CEOs and their teams actually do?

My post-grad work with an industrial/organizational professor re-directed my career because the gap between real research and on-the-ground organizational practice was as wide as the Pacific Ocean. One way to consider this is that all jobs bring with them pre-established work processes, for example an accountant walks into work and knows how to be an accountant. Same with a plumber. But until now no one has known how to actually solve employee turnover because there have been no successful, research-based processes to do so.

There are wrong processes though…like improving onboarding, raising pay, delivering new benefits. These are all good things, but they have no proven impact on consistently improving employee retention.

And The Employee Retention Solution Winner Is…

All meaningful employee retention solutions must be driven through first-line leaders because the number one reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their boss. No one ever leaves for better benefits and very few leave a job they like for more money. And onboarding has little impact a week later if you assign that employee to a jerk boss. This does not mean everyone who quits didn’t trust their boss because employees bail for many reasons…but instead that solving turnover requires making first-line leaders your bulls-eye for solutions.

This was true twenty years ago, is true today, and will be true twenty years into the future.

Those who are familiar with our work can anticipate what I write next:

1. Engagement per Gallup has been completely stuck for 17 years.
2. That only 33% of our employees at best are giving their all
3. The culprit here is engagement and exit surveys, because we believe data identifies easy solutions…but data only provides data, not solutions.

Imagine cutting your turnover by 43%, 45%, or 67%…and the impact this would have on reducing open positions, improving employee engagement, productivity, profitability, and obviously reducing employee turnover. Our most recent three clients achieved these turnover reductions by applying the principles of Finnegan’s Arrow in their organizations which include: Dollars, Goals, Stay Interviews, Forecast and Accountability.

So what’s the best response to “Americans don’t care as much about work”? Take these research-proven actions to retain the ones who do.

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Want to improve your retention but not sure where to start or how to convince your executives of the importance? Write to me DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or connect with me to schedule a FREE one-on-one consultation.

[i] https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/americans-attitude-work-data-0c2e487c

[ii] As quoted in The Week, 3.15.24

[iii] Revelio Labs The Digest, 3.13.24

The post WSJ Says “Americans Don’t Care as Much About Work” appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.