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.
Recently I’ve seen two examples of organizations essentially saying that increased turnover is unavoidable and then proposed work-around plans with no proven track records. In fact these voices are saying that entire industries, supply chain management and nursing, have no fix for turnover and they should waive a white flag of surrender.
Who is taking the lead to initiate reporting and accountability for nursing home employee turnover? Our U.S. government. Imagine what we could learn if all healthcare companies reported turnover data.
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?
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 key turning point is when top team has determined the dollar cost of turnover and realizes paying a percentage of the cost to fill those jobs is a win/win, and actually a bigger win for the company.
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 forced work-from-home in 2020 and 2021 has led to two immediately-recognizable acronyms: WFH for work-from-home and RTO for return-to-office. From the employee side, WFH represents options. For employers, the combination of WFH + RTO = higher turnover, worse recruiting, and for-certain-resulting lower productivity.
Part of calculating the monetary cost of turnover for your retention efforts includes placing a dollar value on lost productivity, which is more complex, but more important than many of the direct costs we usually think of when we lose employees.
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.