The top finding is Recruiting a Persistent but Common Challenge. The report further describes this #1 HR challenge:

In 2024, recruiting was the top priority for HR, fueled by the ongoing challenge of attracting top talent in a market where job openings outnumber individuals actively seeking work. Given these conditions, it is unsurprising that only a portion of HR professionals and U.S. workers viewed their organization’s recruiting efforts as effective. These staffing challenges resulted in heavier workloads for some employees, ultimately driving higher burnout rates.

Recruiting tops all other topics which include talent analytics, future of work, employee experience, technology, C-suite/board relations, and more. And not only is recruiting the top challenge, but the description provided above makes clear that most HR professionals who were surveyed do not think their recruiting function is working well.

As a “recovering HR director”, I have clear memories of how my HR team and I would respond to such a report. Armed with a white board and marker, we would identify new ways to recruit, read a best-practices article or two, develop a report, and present that report to the executive team. And then go on the recruit maybe a little bit better but probably not very much.

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Further reading: Message at SHRM24: Stay Interviews Require Accountability

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A Quiz Question That Leads to A Riddle

So to get to our riddle, let’s propose a quiz question with an obvious right answer. Which would be better for your company, in the short-term and especially in the long-term?

1. Continue to improve recruiting as best you can.
2. Improve employee retention so you don’t have to recruit as much.

Every single HR professional I know would choose B. But then they would ask how to improve retention given their limited budgets for pay, benefits, and the rest.

So our riddle is, Where did improving retention rank on SHRM’s list? And the answer is that there is no mention of improving retention or improving turnover on SHRM’s list of 16 practice areas, and those were the topics that were offered for this survey.

So if we take this discussion one step further, the clearly best solution for HR’s loudly-declared greatest problem appears to be less important than, let’s say, C-suite/board relations. Or than future of work. Or any of the other SHRM practice list. This is indeed a head-scratcher, even for my balding head.

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Further reading: The Room-Silencing Question at SHRM Las Vegas

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Seeing Light Through the Dark

In fairness, though, there is a clear reason for this massive oversight. And that reason is that until now employee retention has been seen as a combination of doing the rest of the list. Using some other list examples, employee turnover will improve if you do for example performance management/total rewards/talent management/learning and development, and more.

Reality, though, tells us that assumption is false. Because if it were true, then recruiting wouldn’t be so hard because employee retention would be making recruiting easier. But employee turnover continues to be high, while employee engagement is at an 11-year low.

It’s time, then, for employee retention to earn its well-deserved promotion to every important HR list, including SHRM’s practice list. To earn this promotion, employee retention needs a true fix, a research-based solution that as a solid track record of success, and here it is:

Convert turnover to dollars, develop retention goals, and then hold first-line leaders accountable to achieve those goals. Train those leaders to conduct Stay Interviews with each member of their teams to develop individual stay plans, and teach them also to forecast how long each employee will stay. Then hold those leaders accountable for achieving their retention goals and developing accurate forecasts.

For HR to do this, they must find the courage to influence their executive teams to say “yes”. HR must walk across the bridge from the HR-only side versus develop more of the same regarding onboarding, new benefits, and even fresher pay studies…because research tells us the #1 employees stay or leave is how much they trust their boss. HR can’t do this unless they build the case for executives to hold those bosses accountable for retention, as well as for engagement.

This is the way to improve recruiting…and it’s the permanent way.

Employee Retention for Organizational Success

Now is the time to plan how you will retain your best workers now to mitigate the numbers you will need to hire in the future. If you know you need to address turnover or improve engagement but aren’t sure where to start, email me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and I promise to help you start your employee retention strategy now, so you can see results this year.

[i] https://www.shrm.org/content/dam/en/shrm/topics-tools/research/2025-shrm-state-of-the-workplace-research-report.pdf

The post Riddle: Find the Hole in SHRM’s Annual State of the Workplace Report appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Unfortunately, today’s engagement still remains low. I vowed then to tell you how to improve employee engagement moving forward to overcome Gallup’s ongoing reporting that that just about one-third of our U.S. employees are engaged and that engagement has stayed essentially the same for years and years, long before the pandemic, and still to this day.

Why Hasn’t Employee Engagement Improved?

Let’s start with why most engagement strategies fail:

1) Reliance on employee surveys. A recent article in Fast Company declared employees are sick of surveys.[i] Why? Today’s employees are concerned about privacy and lack of trust in their organizations and managers that their answers will be heard. Surveys provide data but not solutions, and few organizations get the solutions right.

2) Using external benchmarks to judge internal data. Most surveys provide external benchmarks to compare results to. External benchmarks are momentum killers because most organizations are happy to be in the middle of the pack. 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.

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Further Reading: Why Hasn’t Engagement Improved in 24 Years?

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Can Engagement Scores Really Be Raised?

Absolutely! We have dozens of clients who not only improved their employee engagement and improved their employee retention by 20% or more, they did it during the worst of the pandemic’s trials. First, educate your top team that engagement is more than a score. A few years ago I published a paper on employee engagement’s correlations to productivity and profitability that is still relevant today and may be a helpful place to start.  

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 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 saboteurs…a full 92% scored their manager relationships a 1 or a 2.

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Further Reading: Yes or No: Do Engagement Surveys Cut Turnover?

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Nothing Improves Employee Engagement more than Stay Interviews

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?

So if “boss trust” is the driving force for retention, how does each boss build trust? The obvious answer then becomes by making each employee’s day better…and not worse. Stay Interviews are a major part of the solution. The concept is simple but smart, that if employee turnover is based on how much employees trust their boss, then those bosses need an interactive way to build trust. And that interactive way must be based on topics each manager can control. So our five questions, the SI 5 as we call them, must address day-to-day issues that a first-line manager can change.

Our research tells us these are the right questions to ask…to learn what your employees think about during those first two hours after work and what they talk about over dinner. Nearly all day-to-day good things/bad things that are within their manager’s control.

The real proof is our client managers ask these questions, then listen, take notes, and probe to learn more by converting five questions to twenty or more. Then they build individualized stay plans for each employee. And their overall company turnover decreases by twenty percent or more.

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 without employees, the answer is no.

You Can Cut Turnover by 20% or More, No Matter Your Industry

There is an established solution for employee turnover…start here to learn our comprehensive turnover solution, and watch the 2-minute video to open your eyes to fresh thinking for cutting turnover 20% and more. Then schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.

[i] https://www.fastcompany.com/91191527/employees-are-sick-of-surveys-heres-an-ultimate-guide-for-how-to-fix-them

The post Why Employee Surveys Fail to Truly Boost Engagement appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Our approach at its core is that leaders on every level are employee turnover’s greatest influencers. And Gallup would tell you the same regarding employee engagement. The result is that most employees’ stay/leave decisions are based on everyday work…and the dominant influence over how employees see their daily work is their boss.

Most would profoundly agree…or passively nod their heads…to what is above. Yet they continue to do what other companies do, all without considering that others “best practices” hardly ever including improving each supervisor’s relationships with their employees.

As just two examples, increasing pay or adding a benefit does nothing to improve an employee’s relationship with her manager. Neither does improving new-hire onboarding. This mini-analysis starts a very long list of things companies do with full belief that those things will cut their turnover…but they will hardly make their turnover budge. So let’s dig deeper into what doesn’t cut turnover.

Exit Surveys Don’t Cut Turnover

Each year at the SHRM annual conference, I poll the audience as to how many believe their company’s conducting exit surveys had resulted in reducing their turnover. The standard response is less than five percent saying “yes” and about 95 percent saying “no”. But I would bet you twenty bucks that all of those who had just pronounced their exit surveys as worthless have since returned to their jobs and continued to conduct exit interviews.

Exit interviews fail to provide an entry point for cutting turnover for bunches of reasons but here are the top three:

• Employees don’t tell the truth.
• HR accepts responses like “better opportunity” which provides no help for finding solutions…and many translate “better opportunity” to mean more pay.
• No one acts on exit survey results anyhow.

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Further reading: Exit Interviews – More Like Autopsies or Toe Tags?

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Neither Do Engagement Surveys

Whether conducted annually or more often, engagement surveys are targeted toward generating one-size-fits-all programs by way of HR or an employee committee that develops a resulting action plan for improvement. Survey says employees want more recognition? Committee meets three times and reports their plan for more employee recognition events and better service awards. Or for better communication we will have CEO videos and town hall meetings. Need career development? HR makes “career ladders” and emphasizes all of the training classes available. And tuition reimbursement is our associated employee benefit.

What’s missing? Nothing about first-line leaders.

Contrasting the above paragraph against first-line leaders having the greatest clout to improve turnover, one must consider these engagement survey questions:

• Does your employee survey provide data for first-line leaders who are the key drivers of employee retention? Or just for those leaders above them?
• How many items on the survey inquire about first-line leaders building trust vs pay, benefits, and other things?
• Does anyone in your company remember a first-line leader’s engagement score year-to-year?
• Has a first-line leader ever been fired because he couldn’t improve his lousy employee engagement score?

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Further reading: Yes or No: Do Engagement Surveys Cut Turnover?

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Nor Do Turnover Benchmarks

CEOs often ask for external-company benchmarks so they know if their turnover percentage is something to worry about. So large-company HR departments search online or pay for benchmark data while small-company HR leaders call their local competitors for talent. The outcome is usually expressed like this:

Whereas our turnover is __%, the benchmark for other companies is __%

so we are doing (better or worse)

If the data says we are doing better, we now have an excuse to not try harder…and therefore not hold first-line leaders accountable for keeping their teams. If the data says we are worse, we can either invent a reason why like “it gets colder where we are” or whatever, or we can tell HR to fix it.

The worst thing about external turnover benchmarks is that they freeze our progress. The implication is if other companies can’t figure this out then we can’t either…so being about the same means this is the best we can do.

Some Inside Scoop

C-Suite Analytics has built its reputation by helping companies cut turnover by 20% and more, consistently over the thirteen years we’ve been in business. Our consultants know explicitly how to follow our implementation model which is here:

We can describe the inspiration-driving benefits of converting turnover to dollars and helping executives develop employee retention goals. We’ve seen firsthand the career-improving results of first-line managers conducting Stay Interviews to both improve their retention and help those leaders build better careers. And we know asking those same first-line leaders to forecast how long each employee wills stay leads them to listen more carefully and watch for retention-indicating signs.

We know most, though, that holding first-line leaders accountable to achieving retention goals is the most powerful retention fix. And no part of exit surveys, engagement surveys, or turnover benchmark data plays any role in helping those first-line leaders cut their turnover.

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Want to improve your retention but not sure where to start or how to convince your executives of the importance? Write to me DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or connect with me to schedule a FREE one-on-one consultation.

The post To Cut Turnover, Survey Results & Benchmarks Don’t Matter appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Job Survey Data Says…

These are his data points that jumped out the most:

• In 2017, 24% of respondents to a Pew survey said their job or occupation was very important to their identity. In 2021, just 17% did. Later surveys corroborate this finding. 
• More workers are taking their full slate on vacation days, sick days, and other opportunities to skip work.
• Men worked 30 hours less last year than in 2019, and the drop was concentrated among upper-income college graduates.

The author points out that these upper-income college grads are likely now working from home, so gone is the never-said-out-loud competition to see who arrives first to the office and is last to leave. These former workaholics can instead easily respond to any extended-office-hour requests on their phones from restaurants, the gym, or wherever.

Work From Home and Layoffs Signal White Flag for Employee Retention

While the overwhelming number of CEOs don’t approve of their employees working from home, our long-continuing worker shortage gives employees the upper hand. As one frustrated CEO said in the article…

“If you have a person working in finance who’s not coming to the office, why wouldn’t you hire that same person in India or in the Philippines?”

How’s that for waving the white flag on employee retention and engagement?

Then consider the must-be-at-work jobs like those for blue-collar workers, restaurant workers, teachers, or those in healthcare who are consistently winning concessions on pay increases, scheduling, or even by striking and winning.

Some might say that layoffs forecast a future-soon economic downfall. Recent reports though say Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Netflix employ roughly 50% more workers than before the pandemic…and Amazon’s workforce remains twice as big as it was in 2019[ii]…despite each of these company’s recent layoffs being in the news.

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Further Reading: Do Layoff Announcements Mean Hiring Gets Easier?

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Employees Have the Upper Hand…

…and they know it. And the strongest upper hands hang off the arms of your top-performers. And because good workers all over are in short supply, let’s include your middle-performers, too. Workers can call their own shots such that a full 68% of those who changed jobs in February moved to a new industry.[iii] Let’s chew on this for a moment, that a large majority of job-changers moved to new industries with likely no same-industry experience and maybe no proven skills for their new jobs, yet employers opened their arms to take them.

How desperate is that?

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Further Reading: Pay or Disrespect – What Drives High Performer Turnover?

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The Real Employee Retention Issue

Any head-above-water CEO would agree that retaining good performers is a better fix than posting and re-posting their jobs on Indeed…even that guy above who saw no difference between hiring an employee from home vs outsourcing his job to a foreign country and culture. Making the retention case is easy. The hard part is knowing how to retain. What should CEOs and their teams actually do?

My post-grad work with an industrial/organizational professor re-directed my career because the gap between real research and on-the-ground organizational practice was as wide as the Pacific Ocean. One way to consider this is that all jobs bring with them pre-established work processes, for example an accountant walks into work and knows how to be an accountant. Same with a plumber. But until now no one has known how to actually solve employee turnover because there have been no successful, research-based processes to do so.

There are wrong processes though…like improving onboarding, raising pay, delivering new benefits. These are all good things, but they have no proven impact on consistently improving employee retention.

And The Employee Retention Solution Winner Is…

All meaningful employee retention solutions must be driven through first-line leaders because the number one reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their boss. No one ever leaves for better benefits and very few leave a job they like for more money. And onboarding has little impact a week later if you assign that employee to a jerk boss. This does not mean everyone who quits didn’t trust their boss because employees bail for many reasons…but instead that solving turnover requires making first-line leaders your bulls-eye for solutions.

This was true twenty years ago, is true today, and will be true twenty years into the future.

Those who are familiar with our work can anticipate what I write next:

1. Engagement per Gallup has been completely stuck for 17 years.
2. That only 33% of our employees at best are giving their all
3. The culprit here is engagement and exit surveys, because we believe data identifies easy solutions…but data only provides data, not solutions.

Imagine cutting your turnover by 43%, 45%, or 67%…and the impact this would have on reducing open positions, improving employee engagement, productivity, profitability, and obviously reducing employee turnover. Our most recent three clients achieved these turnover reductions by applying the principles of Finnegan’s Arrow in their organizations which include: Dollars, Goals, Stay Interviews, Forecast and Accountability.

So what’s the best response to “Americans don’t care as much about work”? Take these research-proven actions to retain the ones who do.

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Want to improve your retention but not sure where to start or how to convince your executives of the importance? Write to me DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or connect with me to schedule a FREE one-on-one consultation.

[i] https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/americans-attitude-work-data-0c2e487c

[ii] As quoted in The Week, 3.15.24

[iii] Revelio Labs The Digest, 3.13.24

The post WSJ Says “Americans Don’t Care as Much About Work” appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

The Seven Proofs for Retention Have Not Changed in Two Years

As I’ve shared here over the years, data supports that as important as recruiting is, especially at a time when the number of open positions AND the number of employees quitting across our country continues to be a challenge, helping managers solve turnover to keep the employees you have is also as critical.

In my book HR’s Greatest Challenge, I outline more than 25 distinct studies that all point to one thing: managers as the main reason employees leave and dis-engage. From those 25 studies I selected the top seven that stood out the most:

1. Manager opinions impact pay and more.
2. Managers drive 70% variance in engagement.
3. Holding nurse managers accountable for retention out-performed childcare and scheduling.
4. Managers drive 22 of the top 25 stay/leave predictors.
5. School managers…principals…drive teacher turnover.
6. Poor leadership causes over 60% of all employee turnover.
7. Per Gallup’s decades of research on this topic, employees join for things and stay/leave for managers.

As a group we agreed that these seven were real no-brainers, but that the trick is what to do with the information to improve engagement and retention upon returning to work.

It Appears Two Years Later, Retention Efforts Have Not Changed

At SHRM21 in Las Vegas, SHRM placed a “The Turnover Tsunami is Coming” wall on the expo floor at the conference, asking attendees to jot and post their very best ideas for stopping turnover. The responses included recruit better, improve onboarding, and of course do more engagement surveys and exit surveys.

Two years later, SHRM21’s Wall makes it clear there was a total disconnect between what research and science tells us and what we actually have on our daily to-do lists to improve retention. If you accept that the science behind the seven studies as true… then it means you must also accept that any investment of your time in the following activities is less important than helping your managers solve turnover:

• HR onboarding new hires
• Purchasing better benefits
• Conducting engagement surveys
• Conducting exit surveys
• Benchmarking pay and benefits against competitors

Today, helping managers solve turnover is more important than recruiting new hires because of the impact of “workforce shortages” on productivity. Which is why the single most important metric regarding turnover is turnover by manager, and right behind that is turnover by length of service. This data is likely to reveal that your new hires are quitting soon after onboarding and that you’re in danger of the doom loop of recruiting, failing to grow your total headcount because new hires don’t stay, putting even more stress on recruiting as a solution to retention.

How Far Has Your Retention Come in Two Years?

Thinking back to SHRM21, attendees and I discussed precisely how to cut turnover by leveraging the seven proofs and implementing Finnegan’s Arrow which includes (1) determining turnover’s cost so executives establish retention goals, then (2) training managers to conduct Stay Interviews, followed by (3) asking managers to forecast how long each employee will stay.

Then, we discussed the resistance we often find when HR asks managers to do something extra like learn to conduct Stay Interviews including:

“We have too many meetings already, don’t have time”

“Employees leave because of pay”

“We do surveys and that’s enough”

“Employees won’t tell the truth”

“Millennials will leave no matter what”

The great news, though, is that if your executives are empowered with turnover data and dollar costs, they will be driven to require your managers to conduct Stay Interviews instead of HR requesting it. Having fully digested the cost of turnover,  the seven proofs, and the power of retention goals, it is now your executives who are instructing managers to conduct Stay Interviews and be accountable for retention instead of HR.

Closing the SHRM21 mega-session, I made the offer I make to you and anyone else who wants to have a frank discussion with their executive team on the cost of turnover. I am happy to present a short version of any of my presentations as an outside voice…an expert guide…to help the HR team shatter long-held beliefs about retention and engagement among their CEOs and other c-suite team in less than 30 minutes.

Need help establishing retention goals based on manager accountability not HR?
Schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and we’ll discuss the numbers and needs you should have to evaluate your retention goals. We work with companies in every type of industry to cut turnover by 20% and more by building trust and accountabilities.

This updated blog was originally published October 11, 2021

The post Seven Proofs Managers Drive Retention, Not HR appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

I love everything about SHRM…the website, webcasts, conferences and more. But at their core, this list is prominent on the SHRM site and summarizes their product line:

HR TOPICS

• Behavioral Competencies
• Benefits
• California Resources
• Compensation
• Diversity & Inclusion
• Employee Relations
• Global HR
• Labor Relations
• Organizational & Employee Development
• Talent Acquisition
• Technology
• Specialized Workplace Topics

Write me to tell me if you disagree with this statement:

HR’s primary job is to implement processes to acquire talent, engage talent, and retain talent. Everything else HR does contributes to these three responsibilities.

So my premise for why HR continues to conduct exit interviews is because HR needs a fix or the appearance of a fix to solve turnover…just as HR conducts engagement surveys to solve or appear to solve employee engagement. 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. They might also say every topic on their list contributes to engagement and retention.

Their real reason I suspect, though, is because our world hasn’t figured out how to solve engagement and retention. Witness Gallup telling us engagement hasn’t budged in the 21 years since they’ve been tracking it…and U.S. voluntary quits are trending at an all-time high during 2021 as I write this.

I think SHRM has delegated engagement and retention to vendors, the ones who fill their 3-football-field long expo hall at the SHRM annual conference, who continue to peddle worthless surveys of all types that result in more one-size-fits-all programs like pet insurance.

I recall once seeing a vendor’s booth with a sign that newsletters cut turnover. I asked that rep for the data behind that claim and he said, “Everyone knows employees quit because of poor communication so newsletters fix that”. Enough said.

Cue the bugles with triumphant music! The spotlights spanning across the crowd! There IS a solution to employee engagement and retention. And it is based on SCIENCE.

Some of you know I did informal post-graduate work under a leading Industrial Psychology professor so I could learn all of the science regarding cutting employee turnover. I digested scores of professionally-judged journal articles and dissertations regarding what processes influence getting employees to stay vs which ones fail to improve retention. The answers are (1) the primary reason why employees stay or leave or engage or disengage is how much they trust their boss, and…well, that’s all you need to know.

Promise yourself from this day forward you will carefully examine every sentence a vendor tells you…and you will avoid any publication that uses the phrase “best practice”.

We keep a list of companies where we’ve cut turnover 30% and more. The list is simple…company logo, percent turnover decreased, dollars saved in the first year. What follows are the “percents turnover decreased” for the first 5 companies on our list:

47%, 56%, 57%, 58%, 72%

And their accompanying first-year dollars saved are:

$212M, $1.8MM, $185M, $1.2MM, $412M

The science behind our solution calls for (1) converting turnover to dollars to alarm executives so they don’t find joy in worthless benchmarks, (2) establishing retention goals for leaders on all levels, (3) training leaders to conduct Stay Interviews and then immediately forecast how long each employee will stay, and then (4) holding leaders accountable for their goals and forecasts. This is how this science-based solution looks:

The easy way to think about our approach is it is identical to how companies manage salespeople. Salespeople know the dollar value for each sale for themselves and their companies, salespeople have sales goals along with sales tools, salespeople forecast future sales…and salespeople are accountable for achieving their goals and forecasts. Substitute “managers” for salespeople and “retention” for sales, and our models are the same.

This “identical to salespeople” comparison is vital because the time is now…as it was decades ago…to move responsibility for managing people from HR to operations. And that includes retention and engagement. Doing so requires that the right processes be put into place. Think of the processes your organization has for important outcomes beyond sales such as quality or service. Let’s move employee retention to those levels, those places where leaders are accountable not just for retention outcomes but also for retention process implementation, and CFOs report their outcomes to the executive team and the board.

Want Dick Finnegan to speak at your next company meeting or conference? Or your local SHRM conference? Please email him at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.  You are also welcome to forward this blog to anyone you believe would find it helpful.

The post There Is Finally A Real Engagement & Retention Solution appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

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.

The post Attention CEOs: Help Your HR Professionals Save 20 Hours Each Month appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

The answer is “no” for all. Those examples pop up in articles about “best practices”, those stories about organizations that did a thing while also doing other things that might have also influenced the outcome…but science is more controlled and develops more precise definitions regarding what works and what does not work.

Science does tell us, though, that the number one reason employees stay or leave, or engage or disengage, is how much they trust their boss, meaning their immediate supervisor. As said in last week’s blog, I presented 25 such studies in my book, HR’s Greatest Challenge, and will pull out just one here. Consider that Gallup surveyed over one million employees from a wide span of industries and concluded the following:

“Talented employees need great managers. The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor.”

Ask yourself now if you believe this to be true. And if your answer is “yes” as it should be, then look at your calendar and your to-do list to see how many other tasks you put in place of addressing this one. While doing so, consider that pet insurance and events with food don’t make one bit of difference for retaining and engaging your teams.

Finnegan’s Arrow®, then, is an INVENTION that solves employee turnover and disengagement…consistently cutting turnover 30% and more while raising engagement a corresponding amount.

And Finnegan’s Arrow works like this:

1. Dollars means working with your CFO to place true dollar costs on turnover for all jobs, thereby translating turnover and disengagement into the language of your CEO…and driving action as a result.
2. Goals refers to recommending specific improvement goals by leader for all turnover and also for new-hire turnover based on analysis of recent turnover data…and also recommending precisely who should own responsibility for goal achievement including executives, managers, first-line supervisors, HR recruiters, and on-the-job trainers.
3. Stay Interviews then become the skill-building linchpin for leaders on all levels who interview their team members one-by-one to learn why they stay, why they might leave, and what their manager can do to make work better.
4. Forecast provides another tool and a metric where leaders forecast how long each employee will stay, motivating those leaders to better understand each employee’s intentions while at the same time providing executives with crucial retention data.
5. Accountability then ties all components of Finnegan’s Arrow together as executives now have data for each leader’s performance against their retention goals as well as the accuracy of their retention forecasts.
6. Bonus – Recruiting and Selection Processes: Finnegan’s Arrow also includes recruiting and selection tools that are laser-focused to help organizations achieve their new-hire retention goals.

Finnegan’s Arrow contains many retention and engagement solutions, and here’s how one company put it to work. This 9-location manufacturing company struggled mightily to retain new hires as half of them left before 60 days. After first implementing the new-hire recruiting/selection tools, the team leads then conducted stay interviews on day 5 and day 30, knowing they had a goal to get 80% of new hires to the 60-day finish line. Then each week all who owned the 60-day goal including each plant’s recruiter, trainer, and all team leads and supervisors attended a meeting to review each employee’s retention likelihood in his first 60 days. The meetings focused on (a) what do we have to do to get each new hire to 60 days? And (b) how did we lose anyone who will not get to 60 days? This blend of tools and accountability has this organization greatly exceeding their 60-day new-hire retention goal.

Praised by BusinessWeek and Forbes, Finnegan’s Arrow is an invention, a science-based approach to improve retention and engagement…and as our clients would tell you, IT WORKS!

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.

The post Suffering from High Turnover & Low Engagement? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

1. Pre-pandemic, 7% of U.S. workers did their work from home[i]
2. University of Chicago researchers found 37% of all U.S. jobs could potentially be done from home,^[ii] meaning about two-thirds of our total U.S. jobs are outside of work-from-home consideration.
3. The most famous work-from-home buster was a working mom.

That disruption happened in 2013 when then-Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer declared shortly after taking office that all who worked from home would return to headquarters, saying “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. We need to become one Yahoo!”^[iii]

I’ve been tracking work-from-home surveys since the pandemic began, and the summary trendline is the longer time goes on, the less happy most people are with work from home.  And everyone includes executives, managers, and employees.

But another important fact is this pandemic-driven work-from-home experience is not a legitimate try but rather an imposed one. We are experiencing “shelter-in-place-work-from-home”. Let’s convert that into a new acronym: SIPWFH.

So, one could say many of the newfound opinions regarding SIPWFH are as artificial as our make-shift desks. Or that dining room table we share with our kids as long as they are in an artificial school environment, too. No one planned for this, just as we didn’t plan to wear masks in the drug store.

The ultimate decision-makers on who will work from home are our CEOs. And the Wall Street Journal just polled a bunch of them to learn their opinions.[iv] I’ll share some of those opinions here along with the company names:

• Netflix: “I don’t see any positives.”
• BlackRock: “I don’t believe BlackRock will ever be 100% back in office.”
• Chief Robotics: “We tried it. It’s just not the same.”
• JP Morgan Chase: “I think going back to work is a good thing.”
• Apple: “I can’t wait for everybody to be able to come back into the office.”
• Herman Miller: “That unplanned kind of interaction that contributes so much to how we build relationships with people and how we build culture, those things are what are missing.”
• Stifel Financial Corp: “I am concerned that we would somehow believe that we can basically take kids from college, put them in front of Zoom, and think that three years from now, they’ll be every bit as productive as they would have had they had the personal interaction.”
• Rite Aid: “We have adapted to work-from-home unbelievably well.”
• Microsoft: “We’re realizing that some people would rather have workspace at work once the Covid-19 crisis goes away because they want dedicated workspace with good network connectivity.”
• Facebook: “I think we’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale.”
• Waste Management: “Most of us are not hermits…We need that social interaction, not only from a business standpoint but truly from a kind of personal-development standpoint.”
• Carbon Inc: “What I worry about the most is innovation. Innovation is hard to schedule—it’s impossible to schedule.”
• Marriott: “It’s a much harder way to work for anything that requires a personal relationship.”

This is a small sample for sure, but the results read as though the absence of personal interaction will weigh down on problem solving and creativity. And I will add that it is hard to build the personal level of trust that is required for true engagement and retention without those in-person interactions that cover subjects like how little Joanie’s little league game was last night.

Or those big subjects like What are you learning here? which is the second of our five Stay Interview questions.

Many variables will contribute to the ultimate percentage of U.S. workers who work from home like how soon we move past this pandemic if ever, how many employees will feel safe returning to work, and how many employees will demand that they work from home even if they have to change jobs to do so. But it looks like CEOs will have the biggest vote.

What’s your preference? Would you prefer working from home, working in the office, or some mixed schedule?  Please email me if you will to tell me your answer and why.

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.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/Pages/Remote-Workers-Experiencing-Burnout.aspx?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial~Talent~NL_2020-6-3_Talent-Acquisition&linktext=Remote-Workers-Are-Experiencing-Burnout&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTldNM09HUTJOekU0TVRKayIsInQiOiI5NzVmZk9BTWlwdmhpa2UyNmtSMTJ1dFNFZEhJQk0wczIrNnorWFwvcFM0T0JFM0czbEkrYjdDOWZCNW1ZYk81TU9mZnN0WlFaZ0ZJQzl5bmlqaXZGS21ZSXBsZVFJWTRyTTArVEVWRU84S1pIY1I1KzErTUZiOWNNXC9kV24zV3l3In0%3D

[ii] https://brentneiman.com/research/DN.pdf

[iii] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2013/02/25/back-to-the-stone-age-new-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-bans-working-from-home/#57ced3c41667

[iv] https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-ceos-really-think-about-remote-work-11600853405?mod=hp_lead_pos11

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