The common belief is that the employees quitting during “The Great Resignation” are young and don’t make much money, so replacing their meager incomes is easily done with an Uber application. While true, two new reports throw a heavy wrench into the assumption the majority of quits are entry-level workers.
No blarney, the number one reason employees stay or leave, is how much they trust their direct supervisor. Stay Interviews are the number one method companies who successfully cut turnover use to build trust one-on-one between employees and supervisors.
Last Sunday after the Super Bowl, NBC New York 4 News aired a segment on Quest Diagnostics’ use of Stay Interviews to cut turnover, so far by 42%. We are thrilled to be the conduit for Quest’s success and if you watch the 3-minute video, you will quickly identify my favorite part.
Companies’ most frequent response to “The Great Resignation” is to raise pay. In fact, average increases rose from 2.6% to 3% during 2021 and are scheduled to raise to 4% during 2022. Let’s consult other data though, to better understand why all of this cash is having so little impact on the number of employees who are quitting their jobs.
The first week of January our C-Suite Analytics team reviews how much we helped our clients the previous year. We are tough on ourselves; did we miss an idea along the way? But we also identify our successes with specific obstacles and the solutions that did work to overcome them.
With much data circulating about “The Great Resignation”, you may think it’s hard to separate which information really matters. Recently, our Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, reported quits rate by state and the complete report reveals two Americas...and this data matters.
The science shows that helping managers solve turnover is equally as important as recruiting new hires, and at a time when the number of open positions AND the number of employees quitting across our country has never been higher.
This is your one-page guide to bring your executives and managers into the real world of recruiting and retaining now, so their expectations are real and they develop more patience for your work.
If I asked SHRM why engagement and retention are not on their list, I suspect they would tell me the primary tools for engagement and retention are surveys and SHRM has stayed away from the survey business.
Exit interviews have the appearance of leading to a solution because logically if we know why employees leave and we can fix that, then we can cut turnover and employees will stay. That logic breaks down, though, in practice.