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.
I’ve read over a hundred surveys on this subject and promise to not quote any of them because so much of the data is in conflict. Times change, moods change, and one day employees like working from home while managers don’t…and then the opposite becomes true.
An HR executive just told me his company raised their starting pay for all jobs because their main plant was surrounded by Amazon sites. That sentence is pretty standard.
Let’s start with the common belief that workers are collecting unemployment, waiting until September, and are receiving more than they were earning in their prior jobs. “Not so fast, my friend” is one college football commentator’s catchphrase for disagreeing with his Saturday morning colleagues…
The report is in. Microsoft has released “The New Future of Work, Research from Microsoft Into the Pandemic’s Impact on Work Practices”. All 65 pages of it. Here are three leap-out parts for me...
"I totally get what you mean when you say what matters is what employees talk about over dinner. My husband and I work for the same company though he works in a different division and a different location. Each night he complains to me about his boss over dinner. At some point I switched from being an HR person to being his wife, and I asked when he was going to quit. He said he knew the date, and during his exit interview he wouldn’t say a thing, just wanted to get out."
How hard is it to understand that employees do want recognition, communication, and career coaching…but they want it from their boss? Yet we persist to believe one-size-fits-all programs are worthy substitutes for our managers performing their jobs. So there is no mystery why employee engagement has been stuck for 20 years.
So now comes new information in the past seven days that drives home that this wacky idea of 3.2% unemployment by year end is real. And as hard as it is to retain your best current workers, retaining is a better strategy than recruiting…against the headwinds of all that is listed above. How does one recruit better when unemployment is becoming 3.2%? And maybe even worse in your local market?