It is possible that many companies think early turnover is just “the cost of doing business.” My recent work with the U.S. Census Bureau makes clear that there are fewer new workers coming our way, so I think it is time that we get a lot smarter about who we hire and how we retain them. Here are four ideas that I promise will work because if you don’t address it now, turnover may just cost you your business.
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.
While exit surveys bring a concept that at first glance should be helpful to our overall retention quest, the combination of poor survey design, minimal truth-telling, and the absence of constructive follow-up all dilute their value. You should be asking “Why do you stay?” versus “Why are you leaving?” to get better employee retention data for your company.
Each week I present here the absolute best information and solutions to implement Stay Interviews and cut employee turnover. But today, I want to invite you to spend a few days in Florida learning it all such that you could return home to MAKE IT HAPPEN…to not only reduce turnover but also slash open jobs, make real employee engagement happen, and improve productivity across your company.
Most employees can immediately tell you why they might leave, but few have actually catalogued in their minds why they stay. Stay Interviews Question 3 is important as it causes employees to self-search. And once they announce to you why they stay they also announce it to themselves…and they tend to never forget it.
Gallup recently announced that early in 2024 employee engagement had reached an 11-year low. Gallup attributes this absence of engagement improvement to areas like lack of job clarity, a short supply of manager skills, and survey burnout among other reasons.
Young workers are much more willing to abandon relationships that feel insecure or unsafe, both at home and in their places of work…and are much more willing to welcome relationships where they feel safe to be their authentic selves.
I addressed the crowd at the SHRM24 Annual Conference in Chicago and HR professionals who associate us with Stay Interviews alone often miss out on what I described in the session’s title as “the best-ever employee retention solution”.
It’s become common to complain about poor customer service, mutterings by those with clear memories of right-in-front-of-me employees who were eager to help. And those who mutter are right because a full 75% of American businesses have already turned away customers or cut operating hours because they can’t hire enough staff, making us wonder how much worse customer service can become.
The greatest variable in worker safety is people, in that each of us is different and “personalities can be hard to manage”. It takes more than a paycheck to make people satisfied with their work…and this has a direct correlation to injuries and claims.