Relying too heavily on survey vendor data can lead to misleading conclusions on your employee engagement numbers and benchmark comparisons. Instead, focus on tracking performance against your own historical metrics. It’s also essential to highlight the financial impact of turnover in clear terms—dollars, not just percentages—driving leadership toward real, actionable solutions.
Employee engagement strategies often fail due to over-reliance on surveys which many employees distrust. The key to success is recognizing that engagement goes beyond a simple survey score and ensuring executives and managers view engagement and retention as critical metrics that influence overall operational performance, especially through strong leader-employee relationships.
Monday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent a memo to employees outlining several cultural and operational changes including mandating a full return to the office at the start of 2025. For many future years we will read reports and say, “The pandemic caused that” and at top of the list is the work-from-home (WFH) phenomena that today has led to an increased level of tension between employees who have embraced it and employers, like Amazon, who are over it.
While exit surveys bring a concept that at first glance should be helpful to our overall retention quest, the combination of poor survey design, minimal truth-telling, and the absence of constructive follow-up all dilute their value. You should be asking “Why do you stay?” versus “Why are you leaving?” to get better employee retention data for your company.
Each week I present here the absolute best information and solutions to implement Stay Interviews and cut employee turnover. But today, I want to invite you to spend a few days in Florida learning it all such that you could return home to MAKE IT HAPPEN…to not only reduce turnover but also slash open jobs, make real employee engagement happen, and improve productivity across your company.
Gallup recently announced that early in 2024 employee engagement had reached an 11-year low. Gallup attributes this absence of engagement improvement to areas like lack of job clarity, a short supply of manager skills, and survey burnout among other reasons.
In the Harvard Business Review article, “Customer Surveys Are No Substitute for Actually Talking to Customers,” HBR now deems customer conversations as more effective for engagement than customer surveys. Shouldn’t this same principle be applied to employees as well?
The greatest variable in worker safety is people, in that each of us is different and “personalities can be hard to manage”. It takes more than a paycheck to make people satisfied with their work…and this has a direct correlation to injuries and claims.
According to the National Education Association, a full 600,000 teachers have already left teaching since January 2020, and a recent NEA poll indicated 55% more will quit prematurely. So, teachers are fast becoming a very talented recruiting pool.
At SHRM Talent Conference 2024 I asked the room this question: Who here has ever heard of one manager getting fired for a low employee engagement survey score? Please raise your hand if you can think of even just one. The only sound was the 400-plus attendees turning in their seats to see if anyone raised their hands. There were no hands up.