Exit interviews are a sham. Whoever developed this idea did so in good faith because the theory makes sense. Ask employees why they leave, fix what they tell you, and fewer employees will leave. Simple enough. But here are their flaws, and there are so many, and some are so severe that there is no reason the resuscitate exit interviews to make them better. You can’t.

1. Many employees don’t tell the truth as they are either too nice or won’t burn bridges.
2. Studies tell us that once an employee says, “I quit”, their credibility tumbles so their words mean less so improvement actions don’t happen.
3. Managers who conduct exit interviews and select the leave reason are reluctant to check “Manager” on the form.
4. Executives are tired of reading “pay/recognition/communication/career development” on periodic reports when they believe programs are in place to fix these things…except maybe pay.
5. And most importantly, even if the leave reasons are right, we’ve all learned that knowing why people leave does not necessarily lead to solutions.

Our regular readers know we consistently help companies cut turnover by 30% and more, and when new clients offer us their exit interview data we politely say, “No thank you”.

Instead, start with this much-proven assumption, that the #1 reason employees quit jobs is because they don’t trust their boss. Now go back to those past reports that list lack of recognition, poor communication, no career coaching, and recognize that their solutions are selecting better bosses and building their skills. The common response to poor recognition is to implement employee-of-the-month/employee appreciation week/give service award clocks/have recognition luncheons. For communications we make CEO videos/schedule town hall meetings/pump up the company intranet. For career development we host career day.

How much do employees care about employee-of-the-month awards? There is a short-term good feeling if they win…and either no feeling or a bad feeling if they lose. Or more meetings? Or career day? Or for that matter, any event with food?

Gallup tells us employee engagement in the U.S. has hardly budged in 20 years, and just a third of our employees are engaged. Yet Deloitte reports we spend $1.53 billion in our country each year to improve engagement. Where does that money go? How can we possibly flush away so much for zero return? The opening hint is surveys…exit surveys, engagement surveys…that drive one-size-fits-all programs. How can those programs make a dent in retention or engagement when the #1 reason employees stay or leave…or engage or disengage…is how much they trust their boss?

Our work here deals in data, but this is just a hunch. If you want to know how to solve engagement and retention, fix what employees talk about over dinner. When the person across the table asks, “How was your day, dear?”, no one talks about having pet insurance or their company’s most recent event with food. They instead talk about their boss, their colleagues, and their job duties. This is the box we must address in order to help them stay longer and engage more.

How positively your employees talk about their days over dinner tells you everything you need to know about your supervisors’ leadership styles. Good leader, trust-building leader? Happy dinner talk. Jerk boss? Bad dinner talk.

If employee disengagement and turnover were considered as an illness, enabling supervisors to build trust with their teams would be the vaccine. You can learn how to administer that vaccine here, https://c-suiteanalytics.com/solutions/comprehensive-turnover-solution/

In a future blog, I’ll address another HR habit that you should toss which is engagement and turnover benchmarks.

Please email your comments to me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.  You are also welcome to forward this blog to anyone you believe would find it helpful.

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• Spiderman?
• Wonder Woman?
• Your CFO?

The correct answer is your CFO…your chief financial officer…even though Spiderman would make work more fun. Everyone on your top team including your CEO should look to your CFO to provide teeth for your engagement and retention efforts. But for many HR executives this is especially hard because HR tends to stay at arms-length from finance, operating in parallel worlds without much mutual understanding of purpose.

CFOs can make anything better because CFOs have power. CFOs manage their company’s wallets, and in the process are believed to know the very best ways to not only control costs but also make the best decisions about which costs are the right ones. While CEOs have final word on key decisions, your CEO probably listens most closely to your CFO. And the reason why CEOs listen so closely is because they both speak the same language…punctuated by dollar signs. In fact, most CEOs come from finance.

The HR/CFO disconnect starts with cluelessness…in that finance usually has no knowledge nor instinct regarding the dollar values of engagement nor retention. To finance these are usually second-class metrics, the ones CHROs report after CFOs delivers the ultra-important financial update. Profits first, people second…despite the logical connection that people make the profits.

I recently visited with the CFO of a client aerospace firm. When asked about the cost of turnover, the CFO said he didn’t know, had never considered it, and was never taught how to measure it. That metric was not part of his standard reporting so in his 30+ years of finance work he had never considered turnover as a cost. I wondered how many times he sat in meetings and heard about turnover metrics but never once associated this with dollars or productivity…when he was his companies’ protector of those dollars and productivity.

We then scheduled a meeting to determine turnover’s cost for a key job, and I suggested he would find total company turnover was his second or third highest cost after pay and benefits. A few days later we did a cost study on losing one engineer and the cost came to $121,450, which he thought was reasonable after considering all of the data we input to reach that amount. The next day he called to say he did some further analysis and found turnover to be his company’s second-highest cost. This was eye-opening to him, completely new information to a seasoned CFO in his fifties.

Think about the doors this opens. Imagine one day you sit in an executive meeting and your CFO says, “Our plant in Macon has higher product returns than our other plants. I did some checking and that plant also has the highest turnover and the lowest engagement so we can clearly see the problem”. No more groveling, then, for topside engagement and retention support…because the CFO gets it…and will get you all the support you need.

Let me suggest two tools on our website for you to share with your CFO. The first is our free turnover cost calculator located on our homepage, and the second is a white paper that provides proven correlations between engagement and productivity.

Once you move your executive team’s thinking toward the dollar implications of engagement and retention, the faster you will move them away from useless benchmarks. How useless? For turnover, your saying our turnover is better than the benchmark results in high-fives which provides no leverage to make it better. Saying instead that turnover costs $2.4 million each year though drives change. The same is true for engagement where top teams are usually content to be in the middle of the pack, plus most of them forget about engagement a month after the survey. I suggest you remove your addiction to benchmarks and move your attention toward costs…and make your CFO your superhero to help you succeed.

Please email your comments to me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.  You are also welcome to forward this blog to anyone you believe would find it helpful.

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And often times their great work hides behind a rock, unknown to even the vendors who make their living helping us solve our people management problems.

To get our minds spinning, think about the television and radio commercials for various online job posting services. One that comes to mind has a manager sitting in a restaurant before opening time, and after the narrator tells of the online posting service a smiling, attractive woman strolls through the door, shakes the manager’s hand, and sits down for an interview. The implication is that by using the online posting service the manager has scored a perfect candidate.

The point is that commercials such as these make hiring look way too easy…and the reason is because online services match candidates to keywords, telling you whether the candidate has done the same or similar jobs in the past. But what online job posting does not tell you is how well each candidate did the job, how engaged they were, how well they worked with others…or of course how long they will stay. So we usually rely on person-to-person interviews for that. I recall once reading that interviewers without proven interviewing skills are as effective at choosing employees as a coin flip.

So let us suppose we are seeking candidates for a professional job, say a nurse or salesperson or manager. Dr. Amy Wrzesniewski, a professor at Yale School of Management, has studied how individuals identify with their work and has  established three different work contexts which are job, career, and calling. Here are shortened definitions of Dr. Wrzesniewski’s work:

• JOB: A job provides you with pay, benefits and perhaps some social perks. It’s primarily about earning that paycheck. People in this category are typically more invested in their lives outside of the office.

• CAREER: A job is something you do for others, while a career is what you do for yourself. Career professionals are also working for the paycheck, but they are more driven to seek out opportunities for advancement in the workplace.
• CALLING: 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. They feel a personal and emotional connection to their work.^[i]

You probably know people whose relationship to their jobs fits each category. Doesn’t the thought of a new hire who sees work as a calling sound nearly the same as someone who is highly engaged in her work? And has her attention focused on improving her performance and learning more rather than looking for other jobs online?

In my book titled Raise You Team’s Employee Engagement Score[ii], I suggest there are three engagement competencies, that if you can measure three items you can forecast a candidate’s likelihood of engaging herself in your job. Those three competencies are:

1. Gives Top Effort because concepts like dedication and loyalty must be expressed through each employee’s behaviors, every day.
   
2. Gives Top Effort because concepts like dedication and loyalty must be expressed through each employee’s behaviors, every day.
   
3. Gives Top Effort because concepts like dedication and loyalty must be expressed through each employee’s behaviors, every day.

I go on in the book to detail suggested interview questions for each of the three competencies, along with suggested probes to push the candidate to provide deeper and more revealing answers.

But while hiring employees who self-engage is terrific, we also know any manager can puncture their employees’ engagement like bursting a balloon. In fact, my guess is engaged employees act faster than other employees on manager mistreatments because they bring so much passion, so high degrees of excellence expectations to their work that their frustrations skyrockets when stifled by a poor boss. I’ve indicated here before the myth-smashing evidence provided by Gallup, that engagement is driven by first-line supervisors’ relationships with each of their employees rather than by any employee program.

It is Stay Interviews, then, that provide the structured, post-hire intervention to ensure newly-hired and engaged employees are communicating upward what they both want and need to maintain their high work commitments. And those same Stay Interviews provide each manager with a structure to ask, probe, listen, take notes, and immediately or soon after construct another building block of trust by providing solutions to obstacles those highly-engaged new hires see in their paths.

If It seems like Stay Interviews are a required bridge for engaging and retaining employees, well…you see right through me because I believe they are. Initially the concept seemed too simple, that supervisors should invite individual employees to meet in order to discuss five questions about their satisfaction with work. “Isn’t that why we do surveys?” some asked. Or “How do we know employees will tell the truth?” But conducting Stay Interviews has proven to open very wide doors toward building TRUST which is the express lane toward engaging and retaining each of your employees.  

Please email your comments to me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.  You are also welcome to forward this blog to anyone you believe would find it helpful.

[i] https://www.forbes.com/sites/melodywilding/2018/04/23/do-you-have-a-job-career-or-calling-the-difference-matters/#157a8341632a

[ii] Published by AMACOM, 2018

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Many factors contribute to this, not the least of which is parental guilt. Every parent wants the very best for their children, and COVID-19 is throwing down many obstacles to our kids’ learning and socializing each day in school, which is where we would all agree they are supposed to be during safer times. Parents who travel to work must first find adult caregivers to care for their kids, which doesn’t begin to address ensuring these children are doing their online school lessons. And parents who are working from home must share space and possibly computers which cuts into productivity on both sides.

COVID has greatly inconvenienced everyone on earth, but who saw this issue coming?

One in five working-age adults is unemployed because Covid-19 upended their childcare arrangements, according to new research from the Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve. And of those not working, women are nearly three times more likely than men to remain home for the kids.[i]

This doubles-down on women whose job losses have already been disproportionally impacted by the pandemic. The International Monetary Fund recently reported that “The COVID-19 pandemic threatens to roll back gains in women’s economic opportunities, widening gender gaps that persist despite 30 years of progress.”[ii]

If you’ve not faced this scene yet, you likely will. A high-performing employee, likely female, hands a resignation letter to her boss and the hard decision has been made. The letter is just closure. That employee has consulted deeply with family members, made adjustments to expenses to compensate for lost income…or maybe solicited and found at at-home job…all before you have one bit of awareness, she is thinking of leaving. There are no early leave signs at work because their exiting is not about work. Performance doesn’t wane, work relationships remain solid…and then they vanish.

The answers to many workplace questions is communicate, and this issue requires a lot of it. The first decision point is about policies, as in what are you willing to do to accommodate working parents until schools are fully re-opened? Is your company willing to give temporary leaves with pay or without? Or adjust working parents’ schedules to accommodate their children’s needs? Would these policy changes apply only to parents or to all employees?

Note such policy changes would be temporary, until schools are open in the ways they used to be.

Or if your organization does not want to offer any across-the-board policy changes, who on your employee list is most vulnerable? Have their managers asked about their children’s schooling? Or heard about a particular employee’s concerns? 

As our clients conduct Stay Interviews, we’ve advised them to use some additional probes when asking the 5 key Stay Interview questions during the pandemic.   For example, ask Are their circumstances outside of work that could cause you to leave us?  Managers on all levels must become proactive to identify employees with children who are most at risk of quitting and catching you by surprise 

There is no playbook for solving our kids being unexpectedly marooned at home. Sometimes the best solution to help solve problems is to ask and listen. This turnover issue is coming down the pike, though, and we are wise to consider how to counter it now.

Please email your comments to me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.  You are also welcome to forward this blog to anyone you believe would find it helpful.

[i] https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/19/economy/women-quitting-work-child-care/index.html

[ii] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/covid-19-gender-gap-economic-change-gender-parity-equality-coronavirus/

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If you didn’t see that report or need a refresher, you can see it here: https://c-suiteanalytics.com/engagement-plunged-in-one-month/

I said then I would next tell you how to improve employee engagement, despite Gallup’s ongoing reporting that engagement prior to 2020 has stayed essentially the same, that just about one-third of our U.S. employees are engaged. Let’s start with why most engagement strategies fail:

1. Surveys provide data but not solutions, and few organizations get the solutions right.
2. By way of their required anonymity, surveys give broad trends vs individual employee responses meaning the inputs of your best performers and those you will terminate tomorrow gain equal weight.
3. Most surveys provide external benchmarks which are momentum killers because most organizations are happy to be in the middle of the pack.

To be clear, these three reasons happen in all corners of our globe. We have worked in China, Thailand, Malaysia, Africa, Europe, and South America….plus of course in the U.S. and Canada. Everywhere we go, these three circumstances are live in local organizations.

As you consider the three points above, consider also that top-performers generate as much productivity as four workers which we’ve proven here before, so it is essential that you know what each of them thinks about their work circumstance, individually. That previous report is here: https://c-suiteanalytics.com/how-to-keep-top-performers-from-quitting/

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.

How, then, should you actually raise your engagement scores?

First, educate your top team that engagement is more than a score. Six years ago, I published a paper on employee engagement’s correlations to productivity and profitability and you can see that paper here: https://c-suiteanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/C-Suite-Analytics-White-Paper-Employee-Engagement-Correlates-with-Profitability-SHRM-2014.pdf

As just one tease, Northwestern University professors found that salespeople who gave just 10% more effort increased their sales by nearly 23%. Wouldn’t that make your sales department’s engagement score more important?

Data like this makes chief financial officers drool…well, sort of…and 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 for 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 sabotagers…a full 92% scored their manager relationships a 1 or a 2.

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?

This is why we invented Finnegan’s Arrow®:

Think of Finnegan’s Arrow® as a solution for employee engagement and retention. I say this because until now we haven’t had a science-based invention that consistently improves engagement and retention. Instead, companies and their HR pros have been grabbing their own ideas off of the HR shelf based on their own instincts or on survey results. Think improving onboarding, building career ladders, supervisory training.

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 with robots, the answer is no.

Next week I’ll explain how Finnegan’s Arrow works…and lessons you can learn from it to improve your own employee engagement…and retention.

Please email your comments to me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.  You are also welcome to forward this blog to anyone you believe would find it helpful.

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