It seems too intangible or simple to say that supervisors who build trust will improve retention, even more than traditional solutions like pay, benefits, onboarding, training, and everything else. But it’s true that the the lens through which your people see their relationship with their manager is how they see your company.
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?
Here’s what’s true: Higher engagement leads to lower turnover. But does conducting more surveys lead to higher employee engagement? Today I’m diving deeper into my research from one of my books to address the question.
Why is Q2 “What are you learning here? And what do you want to learn?” Because Q2 is the low-hanging-fruit way for supervisors to identify how they can add one additional brick to the foundation of building trust with each member of their teams.
My professional passion for cutting turnover began decades ago with my CEO saying words that HR professionals, dread: “Turnover is high so HR, go fix it.” Looking back, I knew then that I had learned a lesson mostly unknown across HR circles.
Employee engagement directly impacts productivity far more than pay, benefits, and other compensations. However, most employee engagement conversations are centered on survey scores because scores are tangible. But engagement is more than just a number, and one day of data isn’t enough metric to measure it effectively.
If improving employee engagement and retention is top of your priority list, consider changing just one Employee/Manager meeting to a Stay Interview where employees talk about their needs, not their performance.
It’s likely that in the next few months our national workforce data (open jobs and unemployment) will get closer to “normal”, but the data is painfully clear, that we will not have enough workers to fill our open jobs for a long time. So says the Census Bureau which has released a chilling chart.
When it comes to the US Marines, US Air Force, and national pharmacy chains, retention is faltering due to lowering standards instead of building trust.
Gallup’s ongoing reporting shows that engagement has stayed the same for years, long before the pandemic, through “The Great Resignation”, and shows no signs of improving in the future. But there is a way you can move engagement from stagnation to success starting right now and I have proof it works.