It seems too intangible or simple to say that supervisors who build trust will improve retention, even more than traditional solutions like pay, benefits, onboarding, training, and everything else. But it’s true that the the lens through which your people see their relationship with their manager is how they see your company.
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.
C-Suite Analytics’ work with United Facilities cut turnover for full-time workers by up to 58%, cut costs and improved production metrics. Then they elected to take on turnover for their temporary workforce. Could Stay Interviews be as effective for retaining them?
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.
Why is Q2 “What are you learning here? And what do you want to learn?” Because Q2 is the low-hanging-fruit way for supervisors to identify how they can add one additional brick to the foundation of building trust with each member of their teams.
Sitting in a top management meeting, “turnover” comes up, and all eyes become focused on the HR Director. The forever-assumption has been that HR is about people and turnover is about people too, so HR should therefore solve turnover. So what should HR say when all eyes turn to them?
The common belief is that the employees quitting during “The Great Resignation” are young and don’t make much money, so replacing their meager incomes is easily done. Two reports throw a heavy wrench into the assumption that the majority of quits are entry-level workers.
We believe a good retention strategy moves you past lamenting about Quiet Quitters and keeps the focus on the opportunity to retain your best workers.
Two years ago, at SHRM21, I gave a presentation called Seven Proofs That Managers Drive Engagement & Retention, Not HR. It was clear then that there was a disconnect between what research tells us and what we do to improve retention. I’m revisiting my notes from that event to see how far retention efforts have come in two years.
The highly-respected Gallagher 2023 Workforce Trends Report survey of 4,000+ organizations says that employee retention remains priority #1. Not only did 66% of HR executives say so, but more than half of operations executives did as well. So businesses who must get product out the door now see turnover as their main obstacle, just as nurse turnover drives patient-care shortcomings and ever-increasing agency costs.