I wrote here a few weeks ago that exit interviews were the same as toe tags, that whereas autopsies tell reasons why an event happened that exit interviews don’t give us a reason why because of many reasons…including employees don’t tell the truth.
Consider “too many openings”, “too few candidates”, or perhaps “applicants too picky”…but the best description I heard came from a CEO of a manufacturing company who said this about today’s recruiting: Doom Loop…defined by Jim Collins in Good to Great as “a painful cycle of decline”.
If I asked SHRM why engagement and retention are not on their list, I suspect they would tell me the primary tools for engagement and retention are surveys and SHRM has stayed away from the survey business.
Exit interviews have the appearance of leading to a solution because logically if we know why employees leave and we can fix that, then we can cut turnover and employees will stay. That logic breaks down, though, in practice.
Let’s start with the common belief that workers are collecting unemployment, waiting until September, and are receiving more than they were earning in their prior jobs. “Not so fast, my friend” is one college football commentator’s catchphrase for disagreeing with his Saturday morning colleagues…
Rebuilding our infrastructure is just a matter of time, measured in months. I wonder, though, if anyone in Washington is wondering where the needed workers will come from because I can’t find an electrician now. But “The American Jobs Plan” is about more than electricians. It’s about 19 million Americans with various work histories getting new jobs.
How hard is it to understand that employees do want recognition, communication, and career coaching…but they want it from their boss? Yet we persist to believe one-size-fits-all programs are worthy substitutes for our managers performing their jobs. So there is no mystery why employee engagement has been stuck for 20 years.
In their weekly member newsletter yesterday, SHRM predicted a turnover “tsunami” once the pandemic ends, re-surfacing that employee retention is at major risk regardless of today’s unemployment rate.
The best and most comprehensive study on how U.S. companies are doing, specifically with retaining and advancing Black workers, was recently released. And the outcome says we have work to do.
Remember way back when, before the pandemic, when it was hard to find qualified candidates for most jobs? That was February 2020, exactly one year ago, when our unemployment rate hit its floor of 3.5%. Consider the off-setting turbulence that same market will face in 2021 if unemployment falls to 3.2% within a year.