800 hands immediately shot up in the air. This was the scene at the SHRM Annual Conference in Chicago last month, when I addressed a large crowd on “Cutting Turnover by 40% and More”. When I said “Raise your hand…
Some managers give a knee-jerk twinge when asked to conduct Stay Interviews, to meet with their individual employees to learn how to make their jobs better. They instinctively fear a rebound response of something they can’t control like pay, promotions,…
I’m flying home from delivering a keynote address on employee retention to executives of Reser’s Fine Foods in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. After the address one of the group gave me a Reser’s hat, the baseball kind. I’ve never…
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…
About 20% of the executives we talk with say something like this: “We understand why you want our leaders to have retention goals, but that’s difficult here because our employees report to more than one supervisor.” The background is this…
I can’t think of a time when decisions made in Washington have so much impact on whether your employees stay or leave. Three areas of legislation come to mind that will likely make employee turnover even worse than it is…
Almost every type of manager/employee meeting is a one-way street. We have many names for these meetings…project updates, status checks, performance reviews of course, and in call centers they are called monitoring meetings. That’s when employees sit with their managers…
Everyone knows the drill: employee quits, HR or the manager asks questions about why they quit, a report with the reasons is drafted and distributed, then nothing happens. When speaking at conferences and in-house management meetings, I like to poke…
Let’s look at a shockingly stark contrast that applies to all of us in Human Resources and Recruiting. Here is a summary of what CEO's say they need most from a few recent studies and publications: • SHRM: Top challenge…
Often people ask how can a manager who hasn’t built trust do so by conducting Stay Interviews. We usually then rattle off the four skills we train managers to use: listen, probe, take notes, and take responsibility. They wonder what…