Those who experience their work as a calling are most likely to feel a deep alignment between their vocation and who they are as a person. However, they are also most likely to act faster to leave than other employees when they have mistrust of management because they bring high degrees of expectations that escalates frustration quicker when stifled by a poor boss. What to do?
As important as engagement is, what do you think provides the best data? A one-day snapshot survey or a regularly scheduled one-on-one manager to employee conversation. To truly know how our employees feel about their jobs every day, we know conducting Stay Interviews are the best way to ask, listen, probe, and respond to individual problems and needs. That’s how to truly gauge employee engagement and improve employee retention.
Instead of wondering how to make employee retention goals and tools fit into your current corporate culture, consider making a fundamental change to your culture with the consistent belief, executive buy-in, and full organizational engagement in employee retention as one, if not the, most important focus of your organization.
Today is prime time for learning how to measure our applicants’ levels of grit…defined as passion and perseverance…because we are hiring so many of them. Assuming grit and engagement are workplace cousins, key words “finish”, “setbacks”, “diligent”, and “overcome” provide a good start to help structure the best interview questions to measure levels of grit in your applicants.
The G12 is the core of Gallup’s approach to measuring employee engagement by rating 12 highly researched items on a five-point scale. One of those 12 is “I have a best friend at work”. I confess to initially scoffing years ago regarding this one and I whiffed on seeing the correlation between this Gallup data and an organization’s level of employee engagement.
Here’s what’s true: Higher engagement leads to lower turnover. But does conducting more surveys lead to higher employee engagement? Today I’m diving deeper into my research from one of my books to address the question.
Employee engagement directly impacts productivity far more than pay, benefits, and other compensations. However, most employee engagement conversations are centered on survey scores because scores are tangible. But engagement is more than just a number, and one day of data isn’t enough metric to measure it effectively.
If improving employee engagement and retention is top of your priority list, consider changing just one Employee/Manager meeting to a Stay Interview where employees talk about their needs, not their performance.
Gallup’s ongoing reporting shows that engagement has stayed the same for years, long before the pandemic, through “The Great Resignation”, and shows no signs of improving in the future. But there is a way you can move engagement from stagnation to success starting right now and I have proof it works.
This story is the genesis of my completely re-directing my career by taking one idea…how to cut turnover…and launching my second-half entrepreneurial work life.