The above paragraph sounds like I made it up, but every detail is true. And if you’re heading for the SHRM Annual Conference later this month in San Diego, I’ll be speaking on how to fix it on Sunday, June 29^th, at 1:30 PM.

First, Engagement Has Never, Ever Gotten Better

Gallup has reported on U.S. companies’ employee engagement every year since 2000. We at C-Suite Analytics track their reporting each year and update the below chart. Here are the results so far:

Gallup reports engagement in three categories: the green on the left indicates the percentage of U.S. workers who are engaged, the blue in the middle indicates the percentage who are not engaged, and the orange on the right indicates the percentage who are in Gallup’s terms “actively disengaged”. This latter group undermines the work of the others.

The obvious first conclusion is that U.S. employee engagement has been steady throughout, regardless of changes in our economy, war vs peace, or any other societal trend. So I would conclude secondly that engagement is based on what is happening inside our buildings versus outside in our society.

Second, Engagement Is Getting Worse, No Matter How Much $ We Through At It

The above chart says so, as does a recent Gallup report headline: U.S. Employee Engagement Sinks to 10-Year Low. So the logical question becomes now that we have done these surveys for so many years and we should be getting really good at this, plus we seem to have unlimited money to fix engagement, how can we be failing by such an incredibly high margin?

The easy out is to blame workers, and especially young ones. Baby-boomers are moving on, young workers don’t bring the grit, helicopter parents have been far too easy on their kids, blah blah blah.

Third, Here Are the Reported Reasons Why

There have been many published opinions for this failure of course. In the same report noted just above, Gallup pointed their finger toward clarifying job expectations and ensuring “someone” cares about them as a person and encourages their development. Gallup’s ultimate conclusions are for leaders to (1) define what they want in their workplace culture, (2) lead with their own strengths while clarifying the organization’s purpose, and (3) prioritize identifying and selecting managers with the innate ability to engage and inspire employees. In another Gallup report on employee detachment, Gallup says employees are disconnected from their employers due to rapid organizational change/hybrid & remote growing pains/new customer expectations/new employer expectations/broken performance management systems.[iv]

Here’s A Better, Winning Idea

The above paragraph is full of broad strategies without proven tactics, but in fairness it’s because Gallup’s business intent is for us to click on these reports to learn more. Nonetheless, every phrase in that paragraph stands in stark contrast to another, much more usable Gallup report that says this, from a book authored by their CEO:

Of all the codes Gallup has been asked to crack dating back to 80 years to our founder, George Gallup, the single most profound, distinct, and clarifying finding –ever—is probably this one: 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.[v]

Wow. This triggers the main point of my report here, that not just Gallup but every engagement survey vendor points to broad strategies that inevitably lead to one-size-fits-all programs, that completely overlook and result in zero engagement responsibilities for first-line managers.

Gallup speaks of high-level organizational development terms like culture, purpose, organizational change, and employee detachment…and they almost, almost name first-line leaders when they say that someone cares about employees and encourages their development. Yet the common company employee engagement survey response goes like this:

1. Conduct the survey.
2. Wait a month for the results.
3. HR reports major trends to the executive team.
4. Improvement plans are developed, usually by HR and by each manager.
5. The manager plans are never scrutinized for quality and more importantly managers are not held accountable for implementing their plans.
6. HR often times gathers an employee committee to develop items with the lowest scores.
7. And then the CEO sends an email to employees reporting all that will be done to improve the next round of scores.

And one-size-fits-all programs prevail. Want to improve recognition? Employee-of-the-month plus backpacks for ten years of service and clocks for twenty. Communication? CEO videos, town hall meetings, and more info uploaded on the company intranet. Benefits? Let’s add pet insurance.

What Employees Really Want

They want a manager they can trust. From their start, employee engagement solutions have been trains off the track. Arrows that miss the target. Baseball teams that have everything but pitching and hitting. When employees are having dinner and respond to “How was your day, dear?”, no one says their day was OK but they wish they had pet insurance. They talk about their boss, their colleagues, and their duties…and their direct supervisor has by far the most influence on all three.

So The Best, Fresh-Thinking Solution Is…

…hold managers accountable for their own engagement survey scores. And teach your managers to conduct Stay Interviews with each employee so they know precisely what that employee needs to become engaged, to stay, and to become happy with their work.

This is what I’ll talk about at the SHRM Annual Conference in San Diego on Sunday, June 29^th, at 1:30 PM PDT. Much more detail is available in my upcoming book, Targeting Turnover: Make Managers Accountable, Win the Workforce Crisis, which will be available in September. I welcome your questions and feedback at dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com

[i] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/393497/world-trillion-workplace-problem.aspx

[ii] https://blog.haiilo.com/blog/employee-engagement-8-statistics-you-need-to-know/

[iii] https://decisionwise.com/resources/articles/truth-employee-engagement-measurement-practices/#:~:text=Most%20Companies%20Measure%20Employee%20Engagement%20Every%20Year&text=45%20percent%20of%20companies%20reported,and%2014%20percent%20measure%20sporadically.

[iv] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/653711/great-detachment-why-employees-feel-stuck.aspx

[v] It’s The Manager by Jim Clifton and Jim Harter, Gallup Press, 2019, page 12.

The post SHRM25 Session Preview: Fixing Employee Engagement appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

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.

And Gallup keeps reminding us of one unshakable truth: Managers are the single biggest factor in employee engagement.

Gallup’s Data Speaks—And It’s Loud

A few data points worth revisiting (or maybe hearing with fresh ears):

• Managers account for 70% of the variance in team engagement.
• Two-thirds of employees whose managers focus on their strengths are engaged.
• One in two employees has left a job just to get away from their manager.

Let that settle. We keep spending millions on engagement strategies, yet half of our people are walking out the door because of their direct supervisor.

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Further Reading: Who Drives Retention Success? Gallup Says Your Team Leaders

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The Manager Math Still Doesn’t Add Up

Gallup’s deeper dive into management ability is even more sobering:

• Only 1 in 10 people naturally possesses the talent to manage others.
• That means, statistically, only 10% of employees report to someone well-suited to lead.

When you consider that many large organizations have one manager per 10 employees, the conclusion is hard to ignore: Just 1 out of every 10 employees works for a manager truly built for the job.

And Gallup doesn’t mince words:

“Bad managers cost businesses billions of dollars each year… and nothing fixes that—except making better decisions about who manages.”

Why Engagement Efforts Keep Failing

So, what are most companies doing instead? You know the list:

• Recognition: Employee of the Month, cake in the breakroom, company clock at 10 years.
• Communication: CEO video updates, annual town halls.
• Career Development: Career Day, a guest speaker from the local community college.

These initiatives aren’t inherently wrong—but they’re not moving the needle. Deloitte reports that U.S. companies now spend $1.5 billion per year on engagement strategies, yet average engagement levels haven’t budged in 20 years.

Roughly one-third of employees were engaged in 2000. It’s the same today. Why?
Because recognition, communication, and coaching only matter if they come from the boss.

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Further Reading: Gallup’s Post-Pandemic “Best Friend” Turnover Solution

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Engagement Is Local—and It’s Built on Trust

We’ve bought into a myth that corporate-led programs can replace what only a frontline manager can provide: genuine connection, consistent coaching, and real-time recognition.

But there’s no shortcut around this:

Employees engage when their manager engages.
Employees stay when their manager builds trust.

That’s why we developed Stay Interviews—to give managers the tools they need to do exactly that.

Stay Interviews: Training That Actually Sticks

Stay Interviews aren’t conceptual. They’re tactical and immediate.

We train supervisors to ask the right questions, listen deeply, and document what they hear. No lag between training and action. No guessing about what employees care about. Just conversations that build trust—one manager, one employee at a time.

Because at the end of the day, engagement doesn’t live in HR.

It lives in the hands of your leaders.

Want a Practical Way to Start?

If you’re frustrated with low engagement or unsure how to convince senior leaders to invest in manager training that works, let’s talk. Write me directly at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or send a note through LinkedIn. We’ll explore how you can cut turnover and finally move the needle on engagement.

The post The Real Cost of a Bad Boss; Gallup Doesn’t Mince Words appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

It Matters Where You Get Your Employee Engagement Data From

Many companies seek out this data, either as part of their engagement survey results or as a separate purchase. Those companies are already accustomed to securing benchmark data for operational areas like sales data, quality data, and more…so it seems right to make the same commitment to comparison data for employee retention and employee engagement.

Let’s focus first on employee engagement, where most survey companies will include comparative data in their contracts. So if our data source then becomes ABC engagement survey company because they are our vendor, then our only comparison data is from companies that also use the ABC engagement survey company. And of course we are also bound by that vendor’s engagement survey metric scale which might be different than for other vendors’ engagement survey scales.

To highlight this issue of measurement metrics, Gallup frequently points out that other survey vendors’ scales produce higher engagement scores because Gallup grades more conservatively. For example, Gallup places each survey outcome into one of just three metric categories which are engaged, not engaged, and actively disengaged…one positive, two negative…whereas other vendors might place survey outcomes for example into five categories for which two or even three might be classified as positive, as “engaged”. So again, your comparative benchmark data is restricted to just those companies that contract with your same vendor. And that could be a small number of companies, and if the comparative data pool is small then the comparative data might include companies across all industries instead of just your industry.

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Further Reading: To Cut Turnover, Survey Results & Benchmarks Don’t Matter

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The Major Employee Engagement Benchmark Problem

The bigger problem, though, is that somewhere along the way the average scores have become the goal. Regardless of whether your employee engagement benchmark group is large or small…depending on the vendor you choose…if the benchmark score is let’s say 62 and your company also scores 62, then the assumption can easily become, “If others scored 62 and we scored 62, then we must be doing pretty good because 62 must be the best that we all can do”. Or if you beat the benchmark by one point, then you might see yourself as the head of your class.

For engagement surveys, ask your vendor to compare you to their top ten percent, and strive to earn your way into that group.

How Turnover Benchmarks Go Awry

Imagine these contrasting conversations regarding turnover data:

Turnover-reporting scenario #1

HR: “Our annualized turnover is now just 18%, and according to benchmark data we are ahead of our peers.”

CEO: “Great work, Monica!”

Turnover-reporting scenario #2

HR: “Our annualized turnover is now just 18%, and according to benchmark data we are ahead of our peers.”

CEO: “Great work, Monica!”

HR: “This means our annualized turnovers’ overall costs are now down to just $6.2 million.”

CEO: “What did you say? Let me see those numbers. We have to do better!”

Reporting turnover in percentages only is speaking a foreign language to executives whose minds are trained to think in dollars…which results in their placing more value on comparative benchmark data than they should. Because there is no universal standard for turnover percentages, the external benchmark becomes the standard…so reporting turnover in dollars makes fixing turnover more obvious, more of an emergency.

Many executives see turnover like rush hour traffic, something that is inevitable so they must work around it…until they grasp turnover’s cost which drives them toward real solutions. Besides, uninformed CEOs believe turnover is driven by pay and benefits so they feel very OK about staying in the middle of the pack rather than increasing their company’s costs. Except that pay has little to do with why employees leave, and benefits mean even less.

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Further Reading: Should Referral Rewards Correlate to the Cost of Talent Turnover?

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Two Guidelines for Moving Forward Measuring Employee Engagement and Retention

Guideline #1 is always compare your company’s performance on engagement and retention to your own past measurements versus any other company’s performance.

The missing piece here is that very few organizations establish an actual turnover improvement goal…and far fewer establish an engagement improvement goal. So “doing better” by itself will never be enough. Your company’s very important operating metrics are all connected to goals at the company level and often-times at department levels…or even individual employee levels…and performance against these goals is reported frequently. The same must be done for employee retention and engagement.

Guideline #2 is that reporting turnover in dollars removes any reference to outside comparative data. And you can use our proprietary turnover cost algorithm today to place the cost of turnover on any of your company’s jobs: https://c-suiteanalytics.com/cost-calculator/

And btw, I am copied on and study each turnover cost entry, so I’ll be glad to reply to you with suggestions to improve your entry if I spot one or two. Enjoy!

Employee Retention for Organizational Success

If you know you have to address turnover or improve engagement, but aren’t sure where to start, email me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and I promise to offer specific ideas to jump start your employee retention strategy based on your current status and goals for 2025.

The post Escape the Benchmark Data Trap and Calculate Turnover’s Real Cost appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Unfortunately, today’s engagement still remains low. I vowed then to tell you how to improve employee engagement moving forward to overcome Gallup’s ongoing reporting that that just about one-third of our U.S. employees are engaged and that engagement has stayed essentially the same for years and years, long before the pandemic, and still to this day.

Why Hasn’t Employee Engagement Improved?

Let’s start with why most engagement strategies fail:

1) Reliance on employee surveys. A recent article in Fast Company declared employees are sick of surveys.[i] Why? Today’s employees are concerned about privacy and lack of trust in their organizations and managers that their answers will be heard. Surveys provide data but not solutions, and few organizations get the solutions right.

2) Using external benchmarks to judge internal data. Most surveys provide external benchmarks to compare results to. External benchmarks are momentum killers because most organizations are happy to be in the middle of the pack. And benchmarks which are so valuable in other areas of organizations are downers here because the easy cop-out is to say if other companies can’t fix this, we can’t fix it either. For most executives and many HR professionals, their reaction to their “average” engagement score compared to benchmarks is the same as their reaction to rush-hour traffic, something we cannot change and therefore we must work around. “The benchmark proves we can’t do better.”

Let’s pause here for a moment. Can you imagine your CEO thinking it is OK to be average in sales or service? Thinking that if competitors can’t do these things better then we can’t do them better either? This tells you the true state of engagement today, and why it hasn’t changed in twenty years.

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Further Reading: Why Hasn’t Engagement Improved in 24 Years?

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Can Engagement Scores Really Be Raised?

Absolutely! We have dozens of clients who not only improved their employee engagement and improved their employee retention by 20% or more, they did it during the worst of the pandemic’s trials. First, educate your top team that engagement is more than a score. A few years ago I published a paper on employee engagement’s correlations to productivity and profitability that is still relevant today and may be a helpful place to start.  

The time has come for CFOs to see employee retention and engagement as areas of both high cost and high opportunity for increased revenue. If your management meetings include CFOs reporting on essential operations performance against metrics while HR reports on engagement and retention, ask your CFO to report all of the data including engagement and retention. Otherwise, engagement and retention are seen as second-class metrics, less important than the operations metrics for which they might have the greatest influence. What influences operations performance more than the people who do the jobs there?

Second, share this Gallup study with your executive team regarding how much each individual leader impacts her team’s engagement.

Start by telling them the statement at the top is extreme, that Gallup researchers likely debated about whether to ask a question that included terms like “strongest personal relationships” when discussing employees’ bosses. But they did. And the outcome on a scale of 1 to 5 with 5 being high is 65% of the engaged employees…the ones we most need to keep…scored their manager relationships a 3 or above. And for the employees who are actively disengaged…the saboteurs…a full 92% scored their manager relationships a 1 or a 2.

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

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Nothing Improves Employee Engagement more than Stay Interviews

The you-can’t-miss-it conclusion is clear. Solving employee engagement must be done on a boss-employee level, one-on-one, and not with one-size-fits-all programs. The joke line here is no one stays longer or works harder for pet insurance.

One easy way to think about improving employee engagement…and for sure employee retention…is to ask what do your employees talk about over dinner. When someone asks, “How was your day, dear?”, employees focus on three topics…bosses, colleagues, and duties. There are zero one-size-fits-all programs that address these subjects because each person’s circumstances are unique.

In my book titled HR’s Greatest Challenge, I presented 25 studies proving the #1 reason employees stay/leave or engage/disengage is how much they trust their boss. This means every post-survey “solution” you implement matters less than bosses building trust. So yoga classes, company clocks, events with food…put your own list here…all matter not just less but far less than employees trusting their bosses.

Now it is easy to see why the U.S. spends $1.53 billion each year to improve engagement but engagement has not improved, right?

So if “boss trust” is the driving force for retention, how does each boss build trust? The obvious answer then becomes by making each employee’s day better…and not worse. Stay Interviews are a major part of the solution. The concept is simple but smart, that if employee turnover is based on how much employees trust their boss, then those bosses need an interactive way to build trust. And that interactive way must be based on topics each manager can control. So our five questions, the SI 5 as we call them, must address day-to-day issues that a first-line manager can change.

Our research tells us these are the right questions to ask…to learn what your employees think about during those first two hours after work and what they talk about over dinner. Nearly all day-to-day good things/bad things that are within their manager’s control.

The real proof is our client managers ask these questions, then listen, take notes, and probe to learn more by converting five questions to twenty or more. Then they build individualized stay plans for each employee. And their overall company turnover decreases by twenty percent or more.

Let’s have one more pause moment here. Does any metric across your entire company matter more than employee engagement? Or employee retention? Unless you are creating revenue entirely without employees, the answer is no.

You Can Cut Turnover by 20% or More, No Matter Your Industry

There is an established solution for employee turnover…start here to learn our comprehensive turnover solution, and watch the 2-minute video to open your eyes to fresh thinking for cutting turnover 20% and more. Then schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.

[i] https://www.fastcompany.com/91191527/employees-are-sick-of-surveys-heres-an-ultimate-guide-for-how-to-fix-them

The post Why Employee Surveys Fail to Truly Boost Engagement appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Jassy outlined the reasoning for this in the memo with this thought, “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.”

Work-From-Home vs Return-To-Office

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 and are mandating return-to-office (RTO).

From the employee side, WFH represents options…for when and how to work, for easier child and elder care, and even for which state to live in. For employers, the combination of WFH + RTO has led to higher turnover, more positions to fill and tougher recruiting, and lower productivity.

Reporting tells us this:

• 42% of companies that have mandated RTO saw a higher level of employee turnover than they had anticipated.
• Almost one-third of companies found recruiting got worse.
• And 76% of employees said they would leave if their company forced them to RTO.
• As a final kick, nearly half of candidates said they would reject roles if there is no flexibility.[ii]

From the start, forced WFH looked like trouble for employers who had zero choice but to permit it during those pandemic months. One of few expected upsides was that money would be saved via reduced office space, assuming workers would remain at home. And while true for some companies, those non-renewed leases are having a massive negative economic impact on our cities which has yet to fully hit home.

—–

Further Reading: What 60 MINUTES Got Wrong About WFH Commercial Real Estate Crisis

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WFH Hasn’t Improved Employee Engagement

Turnover is up and Gallup tells us employee engagement is down for the first time in a decade, saying this specifically about WFH:

The largest decline in employee engagement was among those in remote-ready jobs who are currently working fully on-site — this group saw a decline of five points in engagement and an increase of seven points in active disengagement. It’s worth noting that exclusively remote employees saw an increase of four points in “quiet quitting” (aka not engaged in their work and workplace).[iii]

Prediction is CEOs Will End WFH

Amazon may be on the forefront of this mandate, but media reports have been clear that we should expect more of this to come. Fortune published a recent report predicting CEOs are running out of patience with WFH, citing the following reasons[iv]:

#1: Remote work is bad for new hires and junior employees.

#2: Workers admit that remote work (sometimes) causes more problems than in-person work.

#3: Remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers.

#4: Productivity plummets on days when everyone is working remotely.

I remember two Wall Street Journal articles that nailed the problem. In one a CEO said he could not imagine a recent college grad developing adequately via zoom meetings versus walking the halls with her in-office, more-experienced colleagues. And the other article profiled four employees who had been hired and then quit within six months because zooming alone didn’t help them build relationships with their managers nor their peers.

Do Employees Have Power Regarding WFH or RTO Decisions?

The major obstacle is workers now have the upper hand. That the sheer number of workers across the U.S. cannot meet the demand for filling open jobs, permitting employees to make decisions that severely impact organizations rather than the traditional other-way-around. And the Census Bureau tells us this won’t change anytime soon because our baby boomers are retiring and there just aren’t enough younger workers to take their places.[v]

The Census Bureau also tells us in the same report that 51% of all new workforce entrants will be immigrants beginning in 2030, and that percentage will increase throughout the foreseeable future. This comes at a time when Americans’ favorable opinion of immigrants continues to go down[vi], likely influenced by the continuous streaming of Mexican border stories across TV news as though these are the only immigration examples.

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Further Reading: How Much Are Worker Shortages Impacting Customer Service Today?

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Regardless of WFH or RTO, Employee Retention Must be Addressed

CEOs are ultimately deciding their organization’s WFH/RTO strategies, choosing from (1) total WFO, (2) total RTO, or (3) various forms of hybrid scheduling. But among the hundreds of online reports about companies’ decisions, little is said about how those organizations should engage employees in order to retain them. Generic recommendations call for managers to build stronger, more personal relationships with their individual team members, yet those same generic recommendations come up short on how to do this.

Stay Interviews are Key to Employee Retention

As our company has proven for a decade-plus, Stay Interviews provide managers with a structured method to learn their employees’ greatest day-to-day needs and then meet those needs. This specific WFH retention solution is to combine the five Stay Interview questions with skill-building for asking those questions, listening to each employee’s responses, probing to learn more, taking a full page or two of notes, and then building individualized stay plans to retain that employee longer.

The Stay Interview goal is to identify and address work-driven issues versus virtual happy hours and other social activities which fail due to their simplicity, their superficial quality. While helping employees meet their peers virtually is a worthy objective, the absolute most important relationship is the one they develop with their manager…and that manager must have training and tools to lead that relationship.

Improving retention and engagement among WFH employees is a very, very tall task. Training managers to facilitate Stay Interviews on a regular schedule provides the absolute best opportunity to retain and engage them.

Need help establishing retention goals for WFH, RTO, or Hybrid?  
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://techcrunch.com/2024/09/16/amazon-mandates-full-five-day-return-to-office/

[ii] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/we-re-now-finding-out-the-damaging-results-of-the-mandated-return-to-the-office-and-it-s-worse-than-we-thought/ar-AA1eDefg?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=1c82f1dc40644b398135a3d0e5745381&ei=16

[iii] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/468233/employee-engagement-needs-rebound-2023.aspx?thank-you-subscription-form=1

[iv] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/bosses-are-fed-up-with-remote-work-for-4-main-reasons-some-of-them-are-undeniable/ar-AA1cyh0l?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=6ab063aa84fa4eb5abcae434f66ef879&ei=18

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

[vi] https://news.gallup.com/poll/508520/americans-value-immigration-concerns.aspx

The post Is Amazon’s Return-to-Office Bellwether for WFH’s Future? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Exit Interviews and Surveys for Employee Retention and Engagement?

Now onto meatier stuff for us regarding the uselessness of exit surveys. The often-applied medical metaphor is that exit surveys are autopsies, meaning they provide the real reasons employees quit so management can fix those reasons and turnover then falls. But to keep up the medical jargon, let’s call exit surveys toe tags instead.

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

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Too harsh? Many times I’ve polled HR audiences on their use of exit surveys by asking these two probes:

1. Please raise your hand if your company does employee exit surveys in any form…to which 90%-plus raise their hands.

2. Now please raise your hand again if you can think of one good outcome for your company as a result of your conducting exit surveys…and less than 5% raise their hands a second time.

On the surface, exit surveys should become strong tools to improve employee retention as long as…

• Surveys are designed to elicit the real reasons employees leave.
• Employees tell the truth.
• And organizations address these newly-discovered leave reasons by solving the problems at their roots.

But none of those things happen and here’s why.

“Better Opportunity” Doesn’t Explain Employee Turnover

Some time ago I went on a google quest to learn the supposed #1 reason employees quit their jobs…and better opportunity was the winner. And it’s the winner because nearly every exit interview questionnaire contains that response, whether the questionnaire is delivered by a person, by an online program, or by a third-person interviewer.

Since we associate opportunity with pay or career, the resulting assumption is that some other company swooped in and made our employee an offer…and that offer was financially enticing or included an exciting, higher-level job. So there’s absolutely nothing we could have done to stop that. Especially the assumed much-higher-pay part.

The truth is that “better opportunity” could have also meant a shorter commute, working with nicer people, or abandoning my jerk boss. Accepting that phrase as a leave reason is mush.

But the greater point beyond “better opportunity” being misleading is that it also implies that a new job just appeared.  And those who are leaving us know this is a safe answer because any short explanation that they provide for accepting their “better opportunity” ends the discussion.

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Further Reading:  Two Real Examples of Stay Interviews’ Connection to Retention Solutions

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The outcome is that “better opportunity” avoids the more deeply-rooted, drill-down discussions that come from asking questions like “Why did you look?”

Most job changes today require the job-changer to go online and click. That first click is the first step toward changing jobs. For a very select few this first step is instead a direct inquiry from another company pitching a job that your employee didn’t know was available and had never considered. But for the great majority of job-changers, the first step is that proactive click. So much better exit interview questions become…

• When did you initiate your job search?
• Why did you initially decide to leave us?
• Was there one trigger event that caused you to seek out other jobs?
• What’s the single-best thing we could have done to keep you?

The one overlap between exit interviews and Stay Interviews is that qualified interviewers must bring great probing skills. They must recognize which broad responses contain juicy behind-the-scenes details that lead to solutions, and then probe their ways down that cookie-crumb trail to learn deep-seated truths…regardless of whether that interview’s objective is to learn why an employee is leaving or how to better help an employee to stay.

So conducting exit interviews in a way that will actually help your company is not, let’s say, an entry-level job, but instead one that requires training, practice, and feedback on how effectively that exit interviewer can seek out the real reason each employee has chosen to look and then to leave.

Truth-Telling is Key for Employee Engagement and Retention Improvement

While the above section addresses a common exit survey design flaw, employees still have little reason to tell their real-life-story full truths…especially when inputting data into a computer or talking to a stranger.

Let’s make a safe assumption here that employees’ greatest frustration with employee engagement surveys…that I told you and you didn’t address my complaint…applies to employee exit surveys as well. Then why would an employee who has already checked out of her job believe that re-canting her story will make things better, for her or the person who replaces here? Besides, she’s already told her story to a few work peers and outside friends and she’s ready to move on with her life.

The survey design flaws combined with many employees’ reluctancy to be open make for an easy way out. If they can get by with “better opportunity” or by clicking just a few keys during an online survey, then telling abbreviated stories or misleading ones becomes easy and OK.

In most companies, exit survey results are tabulated into a report that is delivered upstream monthly or quarterly depending on turnover volume. That report rank-orders the reasons employees leave, often placing “better opportunity”, pay, or career at the top. Next steps are usually to build a few one-size-fits-all programs or to do nothing at all.

The contrast here is that the number one reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their managers…and rarely are exit survey results delivered to that employee’s supervisor. And if they are, the results are left to that supervisor to read, interpret, and decide what if any future changes he should make to his supervisor style, with little or no coaching coming from above.

So 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.

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Further Reading:  Is There An Exit Interview That Works For Turnover?

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The Best Exit Survey Story I Know

Years ago, I was speaking at the Chicago University Club to about a hundred senior managers who were attending a conference there. The topic of exit surveys came up and after extensive group discussion a man in the back right corner raised his arm, stood up and spoke…with great wisdom.

This man explained that he was CEO of a 400-employee consulting firm in Portland, Oregon, and that he needed and cherished every talented employee for his firm to successfully win over and retain top clients. So when an employee quit, he had established a protocol which was widely known throughout his management ranks. No re-hire could begin until he as CEO signed the new-hire requisition order, and his managers understood he wouldn’t sign that order until they had scheduled an in-person meeting with him to discuss why that employee had left and what that manager could have done to retain that employee.

This CEO’s method worked because (1) he was skilled such that he would ask tough questions regarding why each employee left, (2) he was immediately following-up at the likely root cause, and (3) his managers knew that any exit led to an uncomfortable interaction with the CEO, so they were motivated to build trusting relationships with each employee in order to keep them.

A Different Idea for Exit Surveys is Stay Interviews

Not every company’s CEO is going to do what the one in my example did above. For those, who have been told, “HR, go fix it,” there is still another way to tackle the real reasons employees leave your company, pushing turnover higher and engagement lower. Implementing Stay Interviews.

The SI 5 are deeply researched, and we know when combined with solid probing can gather an abundance of important information about each employee. And this information leads to far greater employee engagement and retention.

I recently wrote an article about just one of our SI5, that is the perfect antidote to the Exit Interview question of “Why are you leaving?”

Stay Interviews Question 3 (Q 3) is “Why do you stay here?”, and we train managers to ask it and then wait patiently for the employee’s answer. Most employees can immediately tell you why they might leave, but few have actually catalogued in their minds why they stay. Asking why and patiently waiting for their answer causes these employees to self-search, to go to a place where maybe they’ve never been before. And once they announce to you why they stay they also announce it to themselves…and they tend to never forget it.

There is a lot more that goes into implementing Stay Interviews successfully, including executive buy-in, training, and tracking. But if Exit Survey are giving you “better opportunity” problems to try to solve, Stay Interviews change that to give you the solutions to making changes before your employees leave.  

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Further Reading:  Want to Implement Stay Interviews Internally? Join Me at Disney

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Learn How to use Stay Interviews to Improve Employee Retention & Engagement In-Person Training

No matter what size or type of company – public, private, non-profit and no matter your budget, we will give you 100% of the support and training you need to leverage our solution to do it yourself.

The in-person event is in Orlando, Sept. 25-27 and registration includes all the training, tools, and resources, plus one year enrollment to our Finnegan Institute Stay Interviews Certification course to add to your credentials.

Based on my ground-breaking work with Stay Interviews, our expert facilitators will train you on our entire process so you can return ready to implement an effective and proven retention and engagement strategy.

Some of the most asked questions for the event are answered in our brochure and on our registration page.

I hope to see you in Orlando. If you have any questions or need further information, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com.

The post Requiem: The End of Exit Interviews appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

I know you accept this challenge/opportunity/burden. However, a recent study of HR professionals reveals that the top assignment from CEOs is one that gets the least amount of attention for training: improving retention. And retention is not only the solution to keeping good workers but also to reducing the number of open jobs.

Stay Interviews are a Piece of a Proven Retention Solution

Those who are familiar with our work can anticipate what I write next, that (1) engagement per Gallup has been completely stuck for 22 years, (2) that only 33% of our employees at best are giving their all, and (3) the culprit here is surveys, engagement and exit, 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 engagement/productivity/profitability, and obviously reducing employee turnover. Our most recent clients achieved these turnover reductions by not only implementing Stay Interviews but also applying additional business principals to your retention solution. You can learn how to do it too!

Stay Interviews without executive team buy in for goals and forecasts become flavors of the month, whereas when you have buy-in your executives must build in accountability of direct supervisors for retention, engagement, and building the right, individualized stay plans so employees feel valued, recognized, appreciated…and accommodated when possible.

HR Can Be in The Driver’s Seat and Lead the Retention Change

Stay Interviews as part of a comprehensive business-driven solution puts HR in the driver’s seat by addressing each employee’s needs as individuals, as people, and as people who need to trust their direct supervisors. Building trust with employees and having managers, not HR, accountable for their people directly affects productivity and the bottom line, something your CEOs and leaders will respond to.

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.

And be the HR hero I know you are.

Genesis of our Employee Retention Intensive

I was sitting at SHRM24 frustrated by the inability to help so many SHRM members who would love to implement Stay Interviews, but just can’t get the buy-in or time to do so. Often, I’ve had HR leaders tell me they bought my book and then created their own Stay Interviews program, only to find out that they needed more support – more help getting buy-in from their executives, more training methods for their managers, more tools and processes for consistency, and more tracking to prove sustainability. It’s a lot for someone in HR who is wearing many hats.

That was my AHA moment! I said, let’s figure out a way to get all the training, resources, and tools into a cost-effective package for HR professionals, so they don’t have to figure it out themselves. So, my team pulled all our pieces together and realized we needed 2 ½ days to cover everything an HR professional would need to be able to go back and start implementing immediately.

Okay…great…we’ve got the program and training together; now how do we deliver it? 

We decided in-person was the best way for attendees to get the most out of training. It gives HR leaders an opportunity to step away from their office and really focus on the materials and delivery. Plus, it allows our team to be actively engaged with them in the process and able to answer any questions right then and there.

We also built in practice sessions so the cohort can build skills together as well as share best practices and ideas. Also, by creating this 2 ½ day intensive, we were able to secure 20 SHRM credits for this training. So instead of a lot of one-offs, SHRM members can take care of 20 credits in one fell swoop, plus add a critical skill to their HR resume. 

Learn How to use Stay Interviews to Improve Employee Retention & Engagement In-Person Training

No matter what size or type of company – public, private, non-profit and no matter your budget, we will give you 100% of the support and training you need to leverage our solution to do it yourself.

Here are the details: The in-person event is in Orlando, Sept. 25-27 and registration includes all the training, tools, and resources, plus one year enrollment to our Finnegan Institute Stay Interviews Certification course to add to your credentials, and three nights stay at the Omni Orlando ChampionsGate just outside the gates of the Walt Disney World Resort area, with transportation access and more for friends and families to enjoy.

Based on my ground-breaking work with Stay Interviews, our expert facilitators will train you on our entire process so you can return ready to implement an effective and proven retention and engagement strategy.

Some of the most asked questions for the event are answered in our brochure and on our registration page including:

1. What is the main benefit of this training? To return with everything you need to implement an effective and proven retention strategy – a critical advantage for any organization, and a game-changer for your HR credentials.
2. What significant results has this previously achieved? Once implemented, turnover, costs for recruitment, training, and workers’ comp claims go down; and engagement and client satisfaction scores go up.
3. What is the fiscal value to my organization? Specifically designed as the most cost-effective way for an internal team to improve employee retention and engagement themselves without incurring any external consulting costs. The baseline ROI for this training is 4x the registration fee. Retaining just ONE employee more than covers the cost of this training.

I know these decisions are often hard to make quickly, and that budgets, more than ever, are tight. So I also wanted to share our 5 Key Reasons PDF that may help you make a case with your executives for why you should attend. Plus, we have group rates for multiple participants from an organization. Or forward this to anyone you know who would benefit from this training and put your own group together! It can be anyone – your SHRM or HR group you’re a member of, or other professionals you’d enjoy traveling and learning with. We will work with you to make it work FOR you!

I hope to see you in Orlando. If you have any questions or need further information, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com or visit our information page with links to individual and group registration.

The post Want to Implement Stay Interviews Internally? Join Me at Disney appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

• Engaged Employees – Engaged employees work passionately and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.
• Disengaged Employees – Not engaged employees are essentially ‘checked out.’ They’re sleepwalking through their workday, putting time — but not energy or passion — into their work.
• Actively Disengaged Employees – Actively disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged coworkers accomplish.

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

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Gallup’s reporting includes both U.S. and Canadian employees, and here are their results since 2000:

The chart tells us that over a full 24-year period there have been small gains and small losses, but that overall there has been little positive movement at all. And Gallup recently announced that early in 2024 employee engagement had reached an 11-year low.[i]

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. But here is the real reason:

Firstline managers are hardly if ever held accountable for increasing their employee engagement scores.

I reported this first in 2018 in my book titled How to Raise Your Team’s Employee Engagement Score.

A Gartner report tells us that a full 74% of U.S. companies conduct annual employee surveys[ii]. And what do they do with the data? Here’s a very common process using lack of employee recognition as an example:

1. HR pulls together an employee committee to solve employee recognition.
2. After three meetings the committee presents its report.
3. The top recommendations are to schedule employee of the month, employee of the year, and employee appreciation week…and also provide a backpack for five years of service and a clock for ten.
4. One year later, the employee recognition score is the same or worse.

When employees complain about lack of recognition, the last thing they want to do is watch someone else win an award. And the first thing they want is for their manager to tell them they did a good job.

Manager accountability for engagement is nowhere. I recently asked a crowd of 500 SHRM attendees to raise their hand if they’ve ever known of a manager to be fired for a continual low engagement score. No hands went up.

This process of conduct a survey/wait a month for results/ develop one-size-fits-all programs/re-survey a year later with no improvement is as outdated as suitcases without wheels, the ones we used to carry through airports.

Consider this Gallup quote:

Gallup’s most profound finding — ever — is probably this: 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.[iii]

So the obvious question becomes that if engagement is mostly driven by direct supervisors, why then do we think we can improve engagement with one-size-fits-all programs that do nothing to improve manager/employee relationships? These programs like town hall meetings, career ladders, and better benefits look as though they are designed to work around manager relationships rather than improve them.

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Further reading: Best Employee Engagement Gauge: 1-Day Survey or 1-on-1 Conversation?

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Why Don’t Companies Focus on First-Line Supervisors to Improve Engagement?

Because they don’t know how. Their best move is to ask managers to submit engagement improvement plans and then never follow up to see if the manager executed their plans. Nor do they have a critical eye to provide feedback to the manager on whether the plan would work, whether it would actually improve engagement. And worse, no one compares managers’ scores from year to year in order to coach or fire those managers who just don’t have the required skills, energy, or interest.

If employee engagement really mattered to executive teams, they would fire a few managers each year who failed to increase their scores over time. These are the same executives who throw around terms like culture, best place to work, and employer of choice, yet they saddle some of their best workers with an ill-equipped supervisor.

The Fix That Works for Engagement

Here’s an easy way to improve engagement that neither Gallup nor any other consultant will tell you:

1. Structure your survey reporting so you get reports with scores as far down the organization chart as possible.
2. After the first administration, provide each of your first-line supervisors with a specific and measurable goal for the next survey administration, and for most companies this is the following year.
3. Train your leaders to conduct Stay Interviews the right way, the way I invented Stay Interviews to be put into place, and ask them to build one-on-one engagement plans with each member of their teams.
4. Then hold them accountable to achieving their goal score.
5. If they miss, ask for details about their Stay Interviews and then coach them…or can them.

This is the cousin to how our client companies improve employee retention consistently by 20% and more.

In-Person Employee Retention Intensive for Leaders

Are you committed to improving employee retention and engagement? Then join us this September in Orlando for two-and-a-half days of intensive training specifically designed for HR leaders who need to cut turnover, improve employee engagement, and decrease recruiting spend in the most cost-effective way. Based on Dick Finnegan’s ground-breaking, our expert facilitators will equip you with all the tools you need to implement your retention strategies to build a thriving, engaged workplace culture. Secure your spot today!

[i] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/647564/employee-engagement-inches-slightly-year-low.aspx

[ii] https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/is-it-time-to-toss-out-your-old-employee-engagement-survey

[iii] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/395210/engage-frontline-managers.aspx#:~:text=business%20success%20soars.-,Gallup’s%20most%20profound%20finding%20%2D%2D%20ever%20%2D%2D%20is%20probably%20this,determined%20solely%20by%20the%20manager.&text=Managers%20are%20the%20difference%20between,retain%20and%20engage%20their%20teams.

The post Why Hasn’t Engagement Improved in 24 Years? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

“Surveys are a pain to complete and, as a result, most people don’t invest much thought in filling them in, which means the information they give is low-quality and unlikely to provide strategic insight. Talking to customers and asking open-ended questions yields better results and in most cases your managers will not need to conduct much more than a dozen such interviews to gain a complete picture of customer needs and preferences.”

So if talking to customers versus surveying them is now deemed as more effective by such a highly-credible source, shouldn’t this same principle be applied to employees as well? The chart below offers a clue.

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Further Reading: Who Drives Retention Success? Gallup Says Your Team Leaders

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Raise the Gallup and HBR Research and Findings on Employee Engagement Up a Notch

Gallup began surveying companies regarding their levels of employee engagement in 2000. So they now have 24 years of comparative data to measure how much employee engagement has improved, given that about three-quarters of companies do such a survey and then develop improvement plans after. Here are their results:

Gallup has said publicly that little has changed on the employee engagement front during the past 24 years. There are several reasons for this including…

1. As HBR says, surveys of any kind are taken more seriously by those who interpret them than by those who complete them.
2. Follow-up “action plans” result in little action, especially on the manager side.
3. And HR-driven actions are always one-size-fits-all programs for broad topics like recognition and communication.

But let’s take the HBR finding and raise our research up a notch. Unlike customers who change products for many reasons, we know that the number one reason employees quit jobs…or more importantly stay in jobs…is how much they trust their direct supervisors. And this applies to engagement as well. So when re-reading the three reasons why employee engagement surveys fail, is it any wonder that not only is employee engagement stuck in the mud but also that employee turnover remains the top worry among corporate CEOs?[ii]

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

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The HBR study also points out the importance of asking open-ended questions. When applying these principles to engaging and retaining employees, the stars are aligning that Stay Interviews are an awfully good idea. Here’s a refresher:

1. Managers invite each individual employee to meet, saying “I want to learn what I can do to make working here better for you”.
2. Managers are then trained to ask five specific and heavily-researched open-ended questions.
3. Managers are also trained to listen, probe to learn more, take pages of notes, and develop at least one action they can take to help employees stay longer and engage more.

The part that says “managers are trained” is more complex because managers must develop new skills…and practice those skills. The Stay Interview training that we provide consumes three full hours of skill practice, role-play, and feedback to ensure each manager is comfortable scheduling their initial Stay Interviews the very next day.

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Further reading: Best Employee Engagement Gauge: 1-Day Survey or 1-on-1 Conversation?

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Improving Employee Engagement and Retention with Stay Interviews

Stay Interviews versus engagement surveys? That’s an easy one because Stay Interviews…

• Put managers in the solution seat versus HR…or no one.
• Provide data that is always current because these initial conversations become the grist of future discussions resulting in more openness and even better solutions.
• And Stay Interviews provide one-on-one, individualized solutions to improve retention and engagement…versus one-size-fits-all “solutions” that are hardly ever actual solutions.

And here’s one last thought. Research tells us that top performers out-perform average performers by four-to-one. Chew on that for a moment because not only does it tell us that losing a top performer cost four times more to replace…but top performers’ survey data is mixed in with the rest because all inputs are anonymous. Managers, though, readily know who their top performers are and will go to extra steps to keep them…once they know what is required to do so which only Stay Interviews can disclose.

Master Training: Employee Retention Intensive for HR Leaders

Specifically designed for HR leaders who have been charged with reducing turnover and maintaining a stable, skilled workforce. 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://hbr.org/2019/01/customers-surveys-are-no-substitute-for-actually-talking-to-customers?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=hbr&utm_source=linkedin&tpcc=orgsocial_edit

[ii] Chief Executive Group, 2024

The post HBR Article on Customers also Applies to Employees appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.