Employee engagement strategies often fail due to over-reliance on surveys which many employees distrust. The key to success is recognizing that engagement goes beyond a simple survey score and ensuring executives and managers view engagement and retention as critical metrics that influence overall operational performance, especially through strong leader-employee relationships.
Engagement surveys are targeted toward generating company-wide programs, exit interviews aren’t valid data because employees don’t tell the truth, and CEOs want turnover percentage benchmarks instead of cost. Even together, the data from these three common tools give you absolutely no viable pathway to cut turnover.
This is a startling statement from the normally conservative Wall Street Journal. The pandemic has been the universal game-changer such that American’s work habits and work values changed in ways comparable to having experienced a war.
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.
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.
Never waste your time again asking an employee why she’s leaving. Never analyze a vendor’s data regarding why your employees leave. Never compile data into a report to tell your top team why your employees are quitting. Never report the top 5 reasons why employees quit ever again.
What does science tell us about cutting turnover and improving engagement? Do scientific studies mention exit interviews? Employee surveys? Focus groups? Salary surveys? Benefits benchmarks?
It is hard to build the personal level of trust that is required for true engagement and retention without in-person interactions.
Stay Interviews cut turnover and improve engagement because they drive supervisors to talk with their employees about work issues that matter to each individual employee. And sometimes about non-work issues that matter, too.
I was a strong high school student but faked my way through the sciences. While decades ago, my memory of walking into sophomore biology class is frighteningly clear, seeing a foreign-looking five-syllable, science-like word on the board, followed by its…