When employees seek support regarding any of their daily employee needs, their supervisor is their go-to source. First-line supervisors drive no less than 50% of turnover and 70% of engagement. Research and data support that if the boss is seen as trustworthy, the number of reasons to leave diminish significantly, including leaving for pay.
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.
It’s likely that in the next few months our national workforce data (open jobs and unemployment) will get closer to “normal”, but the data is painfully clear, that we will not have enough workers to fill our open jobs for a long time. So says the Census Bureau which has released a chilling chart.
Learning that the tenure for young workers’ didn’t get even shorter during “The Great Resignation” raised an internal alarm. How could it be that with so many open jobs that those young workers who stray so frequently didn’t stray even more?
When it comes to the US Marines, US Air Force, and national pharmacy chains, retention is faltering due to lowering standards instead of building trust.
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.
The key to cutting turnover is leader accountability and the key to holding individual leaders accountable is to have robust retention data. When individual managers are responsible to input retention data and the reports are used for accountability, it communicates that retention accountability is real and they should forecast carefully, build stay plans to increase retention, and most importantly achieve their retention goals.
Is it just a coincidence that the worst managers usually blame their employee turnover on pay? Not enough staff? HR recruits ineffective workers? That leaders see employees’ reasons for leaving as every possible one but themselves? I think not.
A Paychex study tells us 80% of those who changed jobs during “The Great Resignation” have regrets and wish they hadn’t walked out on their original jobs. Let’s extrapolate that over the more than 97 million quitters from 2021-2022. That’s 77.6 million people who regret quitting their job. Let that sink in.
The Harvard Business Review has a reputation as the leading deep-thinking research publication for organizations to reach their highest performance levels. A recent report certainly meets that standard and provides one key retention instruction for executives of all industries.