Retention Archives - C-Suite Analytics

Economists Predict When “The Great Resignation” Will End

Richard Finnegan — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 21:13:27 +0000

The news is in…and it isn’t good.

Last month the Wall Street Journal reported the results of a survey conducted with a large group of economists. Of the 52 economists surveyed, 22 predicted that workforce participation would never return to its pre-pandemic levels. The Journal summarized by saying this:

“Many expect the labor shortage to last at least several more years, and some say it’s permanent”.[i]

Time Magazine found a different angle on the Great Resignation, reporting just last week:

“Economists predict that the Great Resignation is only getting started, especially for Gen Z and millennial workers who are well-positioned to find new ways to earn income.”[ii]

Gen Z and millennials comprise more than half of our workforce. And since their dominance in our workforce increases each year, millennials alone will make up a full 75% of our workforce by 2025. So any prediction that their participation in the current Great Resignation period will continue to grow should send shivers through all of us. The oldest millennials turn 40 this year…meaning those generalizations that all young people are millennials or the reverse, that all millennials are young, have run their course.

As just one example, August’s Bureau of Labor Statistics’ report told us 4.3 million workers quit their jobs, the largest group being about 900,000 from restaurants, bars, and hotels. In a survey, nearly 80% of such workers indicated being hesitant to return to the restaurant industry, citing it as being “a dangerous environment, followed by low wages, difficult or unruly customers, unpredictable and/or inconsistent schedules and a lack of benefits.”[iii]

Where did they go? Driving Ubers, playing music, dog-sitting maybe. Or they took online courses during the pandemic to qualify for better jobs. The fact is that when restaurants and hotels did massive layoffs, those employees had to discover new ways to make money. And while the dog-sitting example above might be a stretch, maybe it’s not given the poverty wages restaurant workers continue to make. The reality is they didn’t have to generate much money in new jobs to replace the money they had been making.

Citing just one of their complaints from above, nearly any job is better than working unpredictable schedules…or taking flack from unruly customers. Who would want those jobs if they didn’t have to take them? And now they don’t. We learned in school about natural selection, how a species adapts to its environment for survival. The restaurant and hotel species has adapted. We forced them out and they’ve found better jobs as a result…and that result is permanent.

Remember way back in 2019 when recruiting and retaining our workers seemed so hard? The greatest take-away today is this:

The challenge of recruiting and retaining in 2019 was cake compared to what’s ahead in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Someday soon your company will plan a “Workforce Retreat” or a similarly-themed session to address this crisis. An executive will open by saying “Our associates have never been more important” or something like that. Then she will go on to say we have to ship our products on time/provide great healthcare for our patients/retain enough call center agents to interrupt people over dinner…that type of stuff. Here are your top five items for your agenda for that meeting:

Yes, pay matters but we can never pay our way to victory, nor can we afford it; besides, pay matters exponentially more when recruiting versus retaining.
Want a magic benefit? Pay their student loans in full. Nobody stays for pet insurance.
Our best retention strategy is to give all of our employees a great boss who builds trust and develops them to their potential.
Those bosses should learn to facilitate Stay Interviews the right way…by asking five questions, listening, probing, taking notes, and solving at least one problem for each employee.
Employee referrals stay longer, perform better, and are easier to recruit so you must gain 50% of your hires that way going forward.

The bottom line is stop waiting for this to pass because it won’t.

Hosting a workforce retreat or meeting? I’d be glad to attend virtually and free of charge to help you set the right course for retention, referrals, and real solutions. Just email me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com

[i] https://www.wsj.com/articles/labor-shortage-missing-workers-jobs-pay-raises-economy-11634224519

[ii] https://time.com/6111245/young-workers-quitting/

[iii][iii] https://www.post-gazette.com/life/dining/2021/10/29/Restaurant-staffing-shortages-Pittsburgh/stories/202110310048

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Connecting Thanksgiving, Poverty, and Stopping Absences (2018)

Richard Finnegan — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 13:19:45 +0000

I spent part of Thanksgiving reading about poverty, recognizing the irony when most of us are noting our abundances. My reasons were my natural interest stemming from an undergraduate degree in sociology, along with a specific drill-down on how can companies better retain employees who come from such rough, disadvantaged backgrounds.

I grew up in a run-down neighborhood on the north side of Pittsburgh, one that will never be confused with gentrification…ever. We were officially lower middle class, and my wonderful parents made sure we had all we needed, but little else. Kids only know their immediate surroundings, so we never knew what we didn’t have.

But this wasn’t poverty. In their book titled Bridges Out of Poverty, authors Payne, DeVol, and Smith define poverty as “Extent to which an individual does without resources”. They then list nine categories of resources that go way beyond money: financial, emotional, mental, spiritual, physical, support systems, relationships/role models, knowledge of hidden rules, and coping strategies.

I kept searching for clues as to how a poverty-stricken person views work, clinging to the naïve notion that work = money = getting out of poverty, so therefore one would give all to their job as the ticket out. Then I read this:

Like many individuals who live in poverty, Sally doesn’t know the middle-class rules about not missing work or being late. She has brought her poverty-culture rules to work. They include relying on others to cover her workload while she takes care of her kids. The supervisor, operating from a middle-class orientation, is baffled by Sally’s chaotic lifestyle, a boyfriend whom Sally cannot rely upon, and the failure of Sally to find some consistent way to solve her childcare needs. Sally has held a number of jobs not the quality of this one. She never kept any of them very long.

So a big lesson for me is that a poverty-stricken person’s reality is worse than I thought, citing Sally’s lack of support systems and knowledge of hidden rules.

Our reality, though, is we face 3.7% national unemployment so many of us take chances on imperfect candidates hoping they are productive and stay. Our hearts hurt for people like Sally, yet our job requirements sometimes call more for rules than heart. While we cannot improve the lives of every Sally who comes looking for a job, we must recognize the only behaviors we can change are our own…so how can we do a better job of hiring and retaining poverty-stricken applicants like Sally?

Here are a few ideas, starting with pre-hire:

Make even more clear your attendance and tardiness policies; say them, hand them out in writing, tell how many employees you terminated in recent months because of these policies
Tell a story about an ex-employee who tried but failed to meet these policies due to complex life issues, withholding the employee’s name but providing as many details as you can
Make clear the procedure for notifying if one will be absent or late, saying that notifying is required versus being a no-call-no-show
Ask if the candidate has transportation for work, and follow up on specifics she offers to ask if those methods are reliable
Ask the candidate’s confidence on a scale of 1-10 that she can achieve your attendance/tardiness policies for the first 90 days; ask her to remove herself from your applicant pool if she has any doubts she can get to work according to your requirements.

Then after hire, coach newly-hired employees who miss work as you can now ask more detailed questions. With very supportive words and tones, ask about back-up childcare, back-up transportation, and probe for other problems that cause employees to miss work or show up late. Help them identify solutions they might not have discovered on their own.

None of these ideas guarantee your new hire will consistently show up, but this last idea might help the most: change your exit reason for new hires who violated your attendance policy from “attendance” to “attendance/bad hire”.

I could offer many reasons why exit interviews are ineffective, and one of these is several exit reason categories provide no solutions and therefore no accountability. Think “better opportunity” as an example which provides no clear path for what could have been done to retain this employee, implying “we did the best we could”.

Changing “attendance” to “attendance/bad hire” makes clear that whoever was involved in the hiring decision took a bad risk. We should expect HR recruiters to screen for attendance with more detail than hiring managers…though some hiring managers might actually do better. Regardless, those who take risks based on a candidate’s past employment trends or answers to our questions are likely to think harder and decide better when they know they are accountable for the outcome.

Schedule a free one-on-one strategy session with our team and we will listen to your concerns, probe deeply to learn more about your workplace challenges and needs, and work together to find solutions to cut turnover and improve employee engagement. https://go.oncehub.com/TeamFinnegan

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Our New Year’s Gift: The Employee Retention Secret Sauce

Richard Finnegan — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 22:08:45 +0000

What is the largest improvement in cutting turnover in 12 months that is realistic? Is it 88%, 46%, or 41%? Any of those are the correct answer for three of our recent clients.

First, some perspective. Cutting turnover by more than 40% saves small companies hundreds of thousands of $s and large companies millions. Most companies don’t set turnover improvement goals but those that do set them at 20% improvement, tops. Forty percent improvement is unheard of.

Here’s what our clients did not do: Raise pay, start new benefits, have more company meetings, implement a career coaching system, use data to forecast turnover, conducts engagement surveys, conduct exit surveys, or implement any new employee program.

Here’s what those clients did: Developed the dollar cost of turnover, implemented retention goals, hired applicants who would stay, and trained all managers to conduct stay interviews.

What are the key differences between the two approaches?

Targeted vs broad, as treating all employees the same is the ticket to retention failure
Tops-down driven since getting executives to take action requires them to see turnover as dollars versus percentages
Implementing hiring tools we’ve developed that screen out retention risks

And most importantly, leader accountability steers all retention efforts as the number one reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their boss.

We learned long ago that common sense does not imply common practice. Said another way, we sometimes follow others rather than think about better solutions. We look forward to connecting in this new, ambitious year to continue sending productive thoughts.

May this year be the very best in your life, ever. Peace.

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7 Reasons to Choose Stay Interviews

Richard Finnegan — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 21:25:59 +0000

Stay Interviews are both more effective and more efficient than other retention initiatives because they actually lead to improved engagement and improved retention. Here are seven reasons why:
Reason #1: Managers conduct them and not HR…and we know now that leaders on all levels drive engagement and retention with their direct reports.
Reason #2: Managers then provide solutions that are individualized, one-on-one, rather than program solutions that are one-size-fits-all but don’t fix anything.
Reason #3: Managers learn to ask the right questions and then probe deeply for the absolutely most important issues for each employee…rather than have superficial “How’s it goin’?” hallway conversations.
Reason #4: Aggregated data leads to company-wide fixes for work/life balance and other white-hot issues…and is fresher and more reliable than any engagement survey results.
Reason #5: Never again will an employee’s exit cause you to say, “Had we only known this, we could have fixed it”.
Reason #6: Stay Interviews are targeted to both continuing and newly-hired employees…and data tells us that fixing engagement and retention issues early leads to longer engagement and retention overall.
Reason #7: Engagement and retention solutions happen from the bottom up rather than tops-down or from HR on the side…and most if not all of the engagement and retention action happens with each employee’s relationship with his supervisor, peers, and duties; this is where the engagement and retention action happens!
And here’s a bonus reason, #8: Stay Interviews will teach your supervisors to build trust…or teach you and your executives that they can’t build trust.
One other way to apply Stay Interviews is to supplement your engagement survey process. Since surveys bring data but no solutions, ask your supervisors on all levels to conduct Stay Interviews as part of their survey action plans. Then they can dig deeper into survey results and develop solutions that address the needs of the group and also for each individual employee.

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