Several years ago, AngloGold Ashanti invited me to help them lower their turnover rates in African gold mines…for jobs a full four kilometers underground. AngloGold Ashanti’s turnover situation was just like many of ours. Too few workers available, the jobs had their shortcomings, and their workers didn’t stay.
Remember way back when, before the pandemic, when it was hard to find qualified candidates for most jobs? That was February 2020, exactly one year ago, when our unemployment rate hit its floor of 3.5%. Consider the off-setting turbulence that same market will face in 2021 if unemployment falls to 3.2% within a year.
Employee engagement is a fuzzy concept that usually generates a fuzzy metric. Most of us conduct employee engagement and we assume the results never vary, that somehow a one-time snapshot on the third Thursday in March reflects how our employees feel about their jobs every day.
The bottom line is PEPCO’s Baltic states’ turnover has decreased by 67%...and PEPCO has yet to leverage the full power of Stay Interviews as they have taken them to the Area Manager and Store Manager levels only. Kristina tells me the likely next step is to implement Stay Interviews to include all PEPCO employees.
We have a client with very high entry-level turnover where we are implementing customized solutions to fix it. And we WILL fix it. But this story is about the top of the organization rather than the bottom.
This is a time when not only top performers can go anywhere, but all employees are taking stock of their own happiness, their families’ health and stability, and asking what matters to them most. Connecting, communicating, and applying Stay Interviews has never mattered more.
There continues to be a lot of action on the job-changing front. The data doesn’t lie
Choose any one of the hot current supervisory training programs, say Emotional Intelligence or Situational Leadership or Constructive Confrontations, and you’ll find they all hit the wall in practice due to a very easy-to-grasp reason.
SHRM and I are collaborating on a new book, aiming to re-direct companies to build entirely new cultures and identify new benefits coming out of the pandemic.
How popular is working from home during the pandemic? See if you can connect the dots through these numbers...