“Pride in their work and loyalty to colleagues are the strongest correlates of readiness to stay with an organization. Competitive pay supports recruiting, but organizational culture, is what makes them stay. Improving organizational culture is a leadership challenge that is more complex than finding the money to increase compensation or correcting the problems that cause unhappiness. After all, in life in general, happiness is something beyond the absence of unhappiness.” (excerpted)

Employee Retention Lessons from Outside Healthcare

While the original article focused on healthcare, the insights resonate across industries. Consider these results from a manufacturing client with high turnover rates across nine U.S. facilities. Historically, 50% of new hires left within the first 60 days, leading to production delays and inflated recruitment costs. The goal? Achieve 80% retention at the 60-day mark.

The key to success was empowering front-line team leads to conduct Stay Interviews and actively participate in retention initiatives. Initially skeptical, the leads embraced their new responsibilities. By scheduling Stay Interviews on day five and again during the sixth week, these leaders created personalized action plans to address potential issues early.

Within six months, the plant not only met but exceeded the retention target. The transformation didn’t stem from higher pay or better benefits but from equipping team leads with the tools to foster stronger relationships with their teams.

——

Further reading: HBR Article on Customers also Applies to Employees

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First-Line Supervisors: The Untapped Retention Engine

Gallup research underscores this point, showing that 70% of employee engagement is directly influenced by front-line supervisors. Yet many organizations continue to invest heavily in surface-level perks while neglecting this pivotal role. Leadership needs to shift focus and invest in the day-to-day managers who make or break the employee experience.

So, what doesn’t work?

• Higher pay alone? Nope.
• Flashy benefits packages? Nope.
• Employee appreciation events? Nope.

What does work? Equipping supervisors with skills, data, and accountability.

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Further Reading: What’s a Direct Route to Distinguishing Your Culture?

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The 5-Step Turnover Reduction Framework for 2025

The latest research and field-tested strategies point to our proven framework we call Finnegan’s Arrow for reducing turnover by 30% or more:

1. Dollars: Translate turnover rates into financial metrics. Use tools like the Turnover Cost Calculator to get your CFO on board with concrete financial implications.
2. Goals: Analyze past turnover data to set specific, measurable retention goals for the entire workforce and new hires.
3. Stay Interviews: Train supervisors to conduct structured interviews, using five targeted questions to uncover retention risks and craft individualized retention plans.
4. Forecast: Have supervisors predict the tenure of each team member, fostering proactive engagement rather than reactive responses.
5. Accountability: Track retention metrics with the same rigor applied to sales targets. Recognize high-performing supervisors and coach those who fall short.

The Bottom Line for HR Leaders

In the early ’90s, political strategist James Carville coined the phrase, “It’s the economy, stupid.” For HR executives in 2025, the mantra should be: “It’s the supervisors.”

Front-line leaders shape the culture and retention outcomes more than any other factor. Equip them with the right tools, and watch your turnover rates plummet while engagement and productivity soar.

You Can Cut Turnover No Matter Your Industry

There is an established solution for employee turnover…start here to learn about our comprehensive turnover solution, and watch the 2-minute video to open your eyes to fresh thinking for cutting turnover 30% and more. Then schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.

[i] Harvard Business Review, What Makes Health Care Workers Stay in Their Jobs?, March 2^nd, 2023 by Patrick T. Ryan and Thomas H. Lee.

The post Employee Turnover in 2025: Why Culture Matters More Than Compensation appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

We’ve invented a turnover cost calculator, an actual algorithm, that you can use that will produce a reliable cost for any employee who leaves. But the ongoing accumulation of these costs on company productivity plus the spinning wheel of hire/onboard/train/wave good-by is like an ever-worsening chronic illness. And I’m certain that illness has killed off some companies. And it’s possible those companies thought early turnover was just “the cost of doing business”, flying blindly, right up till the end.

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Further Reading: Escape the Benchmark Data Trap and Calculate Turnover’s Real Cost

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Data Says Much, and an Impact Example is Manufacturing’s Monthly Turnover Churn

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that the median tenure for US workers has slipped to 3.9 years, down from 4.1 years in 2022 and the lowest since 2002.[ii] This slip seems tiny except when compared to the average tenure of baby boomers which has been greater than 8 years which is double the above amount.[iii]

We will miss them in oh so many ways. Even the “get off my lawn” ones who still brought day-to-day grit to their jobs.

Many manufacturing companies tell us a tale like this one:

Last year we lost 241 employees and hired 236. We’re trying to grow staff but it’s impossible because every month we’re hiring about as many as we’re losing.

This is probably why we buy faulty products. The machines that make the products work OK but not the people who run them. One must wonder how well these new hires are trained when rushed into production, and how much they care if they feel unwelcomed or unprepared. I’ve actually heard stories of managers who say I won’t memorize their names until I know if they’re going to stick around.

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 Further Reading: Young Workers, “Grit”, and New-Hire Turnover

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The Cavalry Isn’t Coming to Fix Turnover

My recent work with the U.S. Census Bureau makes clear that fewer new workers will come our way, and the quality of those workers offers no greater promise. That sentence is as meaningful as any in this report, so it’s time that we get a lot smarter about who we hire and how we retain them. Here are four ideas that I promise will work.

New-Hire Retention Idea #1:

Invest at least 10 hours to develop a realistic job preview. Start with the top 3 reasons employees in this job quit and the top 3 reasons you fire them. Take candidates on a realistic job tour, turning on the “tell’ and turning off the “sell”, using these examples:

• How hot/cold/wet does it really get in here?
• How much overtime and is it forced?
• How many people have you fired this year because of attendance?
• When will my pay increase?
• How much time do I have to ramp up to meet the production standards?
• What must I learn in the first 30 days?
• What’s the real percentage of time I must travel?
• Is your return-to-office policy final or might it change?

Then ask each candidate (1) what’s the least attractive part of this job, and (2) how unattractive is that part on a scale of 1 to 10? Some you will pass on and others have already gone out the door. But the remaining group is better prepared to stick around.

New-Hire Retention Idea #2

Advise them to accept your offer only if they can see themselves working with you for at least one full year. The counter is they might have plans to take your job short-term till they get a better one, or return to school, or move away to another town. Stress how much actual job training and coaching you will provide such that two-way trust is required to move forward.

While a few might lie, some will refuse your job based on their personal integrity…and those who take your job will recall their commitment during a bad day in their fourth month. These are both good outcomes and will improve your productivity and reduce workforce errors.

New-Hire Retention Idea #3

Hold first-line supervisors accountable to new-hire retention goals. Calculate the percentage of new hires who reach 30/60/90/180 days to determine the targeted retention period, and then establish a goal to improve it. Tell supervisors they are accountable for that goal and how you will report it…and then tell them 1-1 if they are making their goal and what they need to do better.

New-Hire Retention Idea #4

Hold your in-house recruiters accountable to the same new-hire retention goal, knowing they represent the first gate to employment with your company. And if you have multiple recruiters, horse-race them against each other to see who advances the highest percentage of new hires who stay through the goal period.

And if you want to ensure early retention success, invite us to train those first-line supervisors to conduct Stay Interviews in the ways I invented that concept way back in 2012. Open their minds to the precise reasons why each newly-hired employee joins, stays, and might leave, along with what that supervisor can address in order to retain that treasured worker.

Getting an “A-ha!” to Tackle Turnover

You can use our free turnover calculator to see what even just one open job is costing your organization. Costing turnover is the beginning for gaining vigorous support from your c-suite to then establish retention goals for leaders, implement Stay Interviews, and all other solutions that are part of Finnegan’s Arrow®.

Email me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com to discuss holding a Cost of Turnover session with your executives to calculate your dollar cost of turnover together as a team. I guarantee, it will stun everyone and give you proof of value for addressing turnover.

[i] ASHHRA 2024 Healthcare Workforce Report, October 2024

[ii]https://www.bls.gov/news.release/tenure.nr0.htm#:~:text=For%20women%2C%20median%20tenure%20was,See%20tables%201%20and%203

[iii] https://www.careerbuilder.com/advice/blog/how-long-should-you-stay-in-a-job

The post Four Proven Ways to Stop New-Hire Turnover appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

It Matters Where You Get Your Employee Engagement Data From

Many companies seek out this data, either as part of their engagement survey results or as a separate purchase. Those companies are already accustomed to securing benchmark data for operational areas like sales data, quality data, and more…so it seems right to make the same commitment to comparison data for employee retention and employee engagement.

Let’s focus first on employee engagement, where most survey companies will include comparative data in their contracts. So if our data source then becomes ABC engagement survey company because they are our vendor, then our only comparison data is from companies that also use the ABC engagement survey company. And of course we are also bound by that vendor’s engagement survey metric scale which might be different than for other vendors’ engagement survey scales.

To highlight this issue of measurement metrics, Gallup frequently points out that other survey vendors’ scales produce higher engagement scores because Gallup grades more conservatively. For example, Gallup places each survey outcome into one of just three metric categories which are engaged, not engaged, and actively disengaged…one positive, two negative…whereas other vendors might place survey outcomes for example into five categories for which two or even three might be classified as positive, as “engaged”. So again, your comparative benchmark data is restricted to just those companies that contract with your same vendor. And that could be a small number of companies, and if the comparative data pool is small then the comparative data might include companies across all industries instead of just your industry.

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Further Reading: To Cut Turnover, Survey Results & Benchmarks Don’t Matter

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The Major Employee Engagement Benchmark Problem

The bigger problem, though, is that somewhere along the way the average scores have become the goal. Regardless of whether your employee engagement benchmark group is large or small…depending on the vendor you choose…if the benchmark score is let’s say 62 and your company also scores 62, then the assumption can easily become, “If others scored 62 and we scored 62, then we must be doing pretty good because 62 must be the best that we all can do”. Or if you beat the benchmark by one point, then you might see yourself as the head of your class.

For engagement surveys, ask your vendor to compare you to their top ten percent, and strive to earn your way into that group.

How Turnover Benchmarks Go Awry

Imagine these contrasting conversations regarding turnover data:

Turnover-reporting scenario #1

HR: “Our annualized turnover is now just 18%, and according to benchmark data we are ahead of our peers.”

CEO: “Great work, Monica!”

Turnover-reporting scenario #2

HR: “Our annualized turnover is now just 18%, and according to benchmark data we are ahead of our peers.”

CEO: “Great work, Monica!”

HR: “This means our annualized turnovers’ overall costs are now down to just $6.2 million.”

CEO: “What did you say? Let me see those numbers. We have to do better!”

Reporting turnover in percentages only is speaking a foreign language to executives whose minds are trained to think in dollars…which results in their placing more value on comparative benchmark data than they should. Because there is no universal standard for turnover percentages, the external benchmark becomes the standard…so reporting turnover in dollars makes fixing turnover more obvious, more of an emergency.

Many executives see turnover like rush hour traffic, something that is inevitable so they must work around it…until they grasp turnover’s cost which drives them toward real solutions. Besides, uninformed CEOs believe turnover is driven by pay and benefits so they feel very OK about staying in the middle of the pack rather than increasing their company’s costs. Except that pay has little to do with why employees leave, and benefits mean even less.

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Further Reading: Should Referral Rewards Correlate to the Cost of Talent Turnover?

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Two Guidelines for Moving Forward Measuring Employee Engagement and Retention

Guideline #1 is always compare your company’s performance on engagement and retention to your own past measurements versus any other company’s performance.

The missing piece here is that very few organizations establish an actual turnover improvement goal…and far fewer establish an engagement improvement goal. So “doing better” by itself will never be enough. Your company’s very important operating metrics are all connected to goals at the company level and often-times at department levels…or even individual employee levels…and performance against these goals is reported frequently. The same must be done for employee retention and engagement.

Guideline #2 is that reporting turnover in dollars removes any reference to outside comparative data. And you can use our proprietary turnover cost algorithm today to place the cost of turnover on any of your company’s jobs: https://c-suiteanalytics.com/cost-calculator/

And btw, I am copied on and study each turnover cost entry, so I’ll be glad to reply to you with suggestions to improve your entry if I spot one or two. Enjoy!

Employee Retention for Organizational Success

If you know you have to address turnover or improve engagement, but aren’t sure where to start, email me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and I promise to offer specific ideas to jump start your employee retention strategy based on your current status and goals for 2025.

The post Escape the Benchmark Data Trap and Calculate Turnover’s Real Cost appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Two Bad Examples of Ducking Turnover

Recently I’ve seen two examples of organizations essentially avoiding fixing turnover by saying that increased turnover is unavoidable and then proposing work-around plans that are not proven. In fact these examples are from entire industries saying there is no fix for turnover.

The first “do not do” approach comes from a lead article in the Supply Chain Management Review, with the title Why Chief Supply Chain Officers Should Embrace Employee Turnover.[i] The author represents Gartner, a national-leading consulting firm, who cites their own data that turnover is likely to increase in the next five years. She goes on to say that “turnover is inevitable and it’s better to accept this fact, embrace it and turn it to your advantage.” Her advantage methods include conducting career counseling for opportunities both inside and outside of the organization, and then she cites that too often companies risk retaining disengaged employees with their overall efforts to retain their entire teams.

My gut reaction is you are coaching your productive employees to leave your organization and how will you replace them given our fast-increasing workforce challenges. As to her second idea, my suggestion is you should be coaching your disengaged employees and then take steps to fire them if necessary.

The second “do not do” approach comes from a keynote speaker at a national nursing conference I attended in April. Her pitch to the audience of nurse leaders was that nurse turnover is inevitable so find new ideas to work-around it. Coincidentally, this is a keynote speaker who has quoted my work extensively in her books, so this was completely counter-intuitive to those references. And, if she had attended the exceptional presentation at the same conference by Linda M. Valentino DNP, RN, NEA-BC, Stay Interviews & Human Centered Leadership: A Winning RN Retention Duo, she would have learned that Mt. Sinai West didn’t work-around nurse turnover, they solved for it and cut it by 43%.

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Further Viewing: Mount Sinai West’s Linda Valentino & Stay Interviews for Nurse Retention

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Is High Turnover Inevitable?

These things are true:

• Turnover is generally higher than we would want
• Our workforce shortage will get worse, not better
• Therefore the easy conclusion is turnover will get worse as well

If you were the above-cited author or the keynote speaker, you obviously believe that turnover cannot be fixed. But it’s not true that there is no solution to reduce employee turnover.

Do This! An Example of Cutting Turnover Versus Working Around It

When speaking at the SHRM annual conference in Chicago last month, a gentleman asked from the back of the room whether the retention tactics I described can work with non-profits. This is an insightful question because those who work in non-profits are more tied to their organization’s mission than their pay which is usually less than for a similar job in a for-profit company.

In that same room was Cliff Reyle, an executive with Youth Villages which has a total of 4,000 employees who provide emotional health services to young people who need them. Youth Villages is a client of ours and we are working to improve retention among their live-in residential counselors, the toughest group to retain. So in a room with about 600 folks I turned to Cliff to ask how much turnover had come down, to which Cliff replied “35 percent”…against an original goal to reduce turnover by 20 percent.

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Further Reading: Message at SHRM24: Stay Interviews Require Accountability

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In addition to reducing their turnover this much, Cliff told me how they are performing on their new-hire goal, as so often reducing new-hire turnover improves retention for all jobs over time. With a goal to retain 80 percent of new hires for their first 90 days, new-hire retention has improved to the following:

• 94% 90-day retention
• 88% 6-month retention
• 75% one-year retention

I would add that few who are reading this have a job that is as difficult to solve retention for as live-in residential counselors for challenged youth. But either way, Cliff and his team didn’t surrender to an inevitable fate to work-around, they took charge and did something about it.

You CAN Cut Employee Turnover

Those who read this column regularly know what comes next. That our research-based solution does indeed cut employee turnover…and it involves (1) converting turnover to dollars, (2) establishing retention goals, (3) training leaders to conduct Stay Interviews so they can build 1-1 stay plans with each member of their teams, (4) asking those leaders to also forecast how long each employee will stay, and (5) holding those leaders accountable to their goals and their forecasts.

Our method is based on research versus being whimsical or a combination of “best practices”. Yes, there is work and a dedicated effort to making these changes within your organization, but the results are significant and sustainable compared to a hands-in-the-air surrender with no proven solution or value.

Please email me if you’d like to learn more at dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com.

Master Training: Employee Retention Intensive for HR Leaders

Based on Dick Finnegan’s ground-breaking work with Stay Interviews and Finnegan’s Arrow, our expert facilitators will equip you with all the tools you need to refine and implement your retention strategies to build a thriving, engaged workplace culture. Secure your spot today!

[i] https://www.scmr.com/article/why-chief-supply-chain-officers-embrace-employee-turnover?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=TWISC&oly_enc_id=3458C7955823G5X

The post Don’t Do This! Bad Examples of Waiving the White Flag on Turnover appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

More on nursing homes in a minute…but let’s first consider if this same command rippled through all healthcare. What if all hospitals, clinics, urgent care, dialysis centers, and more had to report their cost of turnover in their financials by applying an agreed-up dollar figure to their data. Then board members, and even the public, could see the dollar cost of turnover on an organization’s financial reports and use it to assess and set concrete goals for improvement.

The Dollar Cost of Turnover is Rarely Reported

How important is this? Many finance professionals in publicly traded companies start their days by opening their computers to the standard run of finance reports, looking for ways to save money or generate more revenue…all while millions of dollars are going out the door due to turnover. Why? Because dollars associated with turnover are not reported, not budgeted, not visible in any financial reports anywhere. Not to the boards of directors, not to Wall Street, not to current shareholders nor to potential buyers of your stock.

The same is true for small businesses, privately-held businesses, and non-profits. Seriously, pause for just a moment. How can any chief financial officer say her standard financial reporting presents a total picture of her organization’s financial performance if it doesn’t account for the dollar cost of turnover?

The True Dollar Cost of Turnover is Often Shocking

Finance and accounting pros are in a constant search for quarters in the couch compared to the millions in dollars in cost of turnover often overlooked or simply not accounted for.

Several years ago, I worked with an aerospace company that made rockets…and invited the CFO to participate in a turnover cost study. We ultimately agreed the cost of losing an engineer was $121,450. We talked after the meeting and I suggested his company’s total cost of turnover was likely a top-5 cost, competing with the costs of facilities, materials, and people. He called the next day and said he couldn’t sleep, had gone to work early to extrapolate some numbers…and determined turnover was his second-highest cost. How is that for a reality check!

Do you know your dollar cost of turnover?
Use our free Turnover Calculator to determine the
specific financial impact of turnover for your organization.

Turnover Data Incorporated Into Nursing Home Reporting

But let’s return to this great service our government is providing us by reporting nursing home staffing and turnover statistics. Go to https://www.medicare.gov/care-compare/?providerType=NursingHome and then follow the prompts to enter the name of any local nursing home to reach this incredible information as you imagine that you are trying to find the best nursing home for a loved one. The first data presents overall staffing rating on a five-point scale, and then each of the following data points compared to the national average:

• Total number of nurse staff hours per resident per day
• Resident nurse hours per resident per day
• LPN/LVN hours per resident per day
• Nurse aid hours per resident per day
• Total number of nurse staff hours per resident per day on the weekend
• Physical therapist staff hours per resident per day
• Registered nurse hours per resident per day on the weekend

And then you will find specific data relative to turnover:

• Total nursing staff turnover
• Registered nurse turnover
• Number of administrators who have left the nursing home

This same report contains the following makes-sense quote that contains a clue as to these data’s importance:

CMS has explored the relationship between staff turnover and quality of care and a preliminary analysis indicates that as the average staff turnover decreases, the overall star ratings for facilities increases, suggesting that lower turnover is associated with higher overall quality. 

Turnover Data Impacts Ratings AND Revenue

The star ratings mentioned here refer to each nursing home’s being assigned one to five stars based on metrics related to health inspections, staffing, and quality measures. Each star rating computes to dollars as these ratings are used by regulators, consumer, practitioners, insurers, lenders, and investors, as well as some designated Medicare payments.[ii]

So who is taking the lead to initiate reporting and financial accountability for each organization’s employee turnover? Our U.S. government is. Let’s see if other healthcare organizations will be next up to repair the gaping hole of not reporting turnover’s costs.

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Want to improve your retention but not sure where to start or how to convince your executives of the importance? Write to me DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or connect with me to schedule a FREE one-on-one consultation.

[i] https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/advance-information-quality-care-cms-makes-nursing-home-staffing-data-available

[ii] https://thegreenfields.org/growing-importance-nursing-home-5-star-ratings-impacted-survey-findings/

The post Nursing Home Employee Turnover Data Transparently Reported appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Job Survey Data Says…

These are his data points that jumped out the most:

• In 2017, 24% of respondents to a Pew survey said their job or occupation was very important to their identity. In 2021, just 17% did. Later surveys corroborate this finding. 
• More workers are taking their full slate on vacation days, sick days, and other opportunities to skip work.
• Men worked 30 hours less last year than in 2019, and the drop was concentrated among upper-income college graduates.

The author points out that these upper-income college grads are likely now working from home, so gone is the never-said-out-loud competition to see who arrives first to the office and is last to leave. These former workaholics can instead easily respond to any extended-office-hour requests on their phones from restaurants, the gym, or wherever.

Work From Home and Layoffs Signal White Flag for Employee Retention

While the overwhelming number of CEOs don’t approve of their employees working from home, our long-continuing worker shortage gives employees the upper hand. As one frustrated CEO said in the article…

“If you have a person working in finance who’s not coming to the office, why wouldn’t you hire that same person in India or in the Philippines?”

How’s that for waving the white flag on employee retention and engagement?

Then consider the must-be-at-work jobs like those for blue-collar workers, restaurant workers, teachers, or those in healthcare who are consistently winning concessions on pay increases, scheduling, or even by striking and winning.

Some might say that layoffs forecast a future-soon economic downfall. Recent reports though say Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Netflix employ roughly 50% more workers than before the pandemic…and Amazon’s workforce remains twice as big as it was in 2019[ii]…despite each of these company’s recent layoffs being in the news.

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Further Reading: Do Layoff Announcements Mean Hiring Gets Easier?

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Employees Have the Upper Hand…

…and they know it. And the strongest upper hands hang off the arms of your top-performers. And because good workers all over are in short supply, let’s include your middle-performers, too. Workers can call their own shots such that a full 68% of those who changed jobs in February moved to a new industry.[iii] Let’s chew on this for a moment, that a large majority of job-changers moved to new industries with likely no same-industry experience and maybe no proven skills for their new jobs, yet employers opened their arms to take them.

How desperate is that?

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Further Reading: Pay or Disrespect – What Drives High Performer Turnover?

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The Real Employee Retention Issue

Any head-above-water CEO would agree that retaining good performers is a better fix than posting and re-posting their jobs on Indeed…even that guy above who saw no difference between hiring an employee from home vs outsourcing his job to a foreign country and culture. Making the retention case is easy. The hard part is knowing how to retain. What should CEOs and their teams actually do?

My post-grad work with an industrial/organizational professor re-directed my career because the gap between real research and on-the-ground organizational practice was as wide as the Pacific Ocean. One way to consider this is that all jobs bring with them pre-established work processes, for example an accountant walks into work and knows how to be an accountant. Same with a plumber. But until now no one has known how to actually solve employee turnover because there have been no successful, research-based processes to do so.

There are wrong processes though…like improving onboarding, raising pay, delivering new benefits. These are all good things, but they have no proven impact on consistently improving employee retention.

And The Employee Retention Solution Winner Is…

All meaningful employee retention solutions must be driven through first-line leaders because the number one reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their boss. No one ever leaves for better benefits and very few leave a job they like for more money. And onboarding has little impact a week later if you assign that employee to a jerk boss. This does not mean everyone who quits didn’t trust their boss because employees bail for many reasons…but instead that solving turnover requires making first-line leaders your bulls-eye for solutions.

This was true twenty years ago, is true today, and will be true twenty years into the future.

Those who are familiar with our work can anticipate what I write next:

1. Engagement per Gallup has been completely stuck for 17 years.
2. That only 33% of our employees at best are giving their all
3. The culprit here is engagement and exit surveys, because we believe data identifies easy solutions…but data only provides data, not solutions.

Imagine cutting your turnover by 43%, 45%, or 67%…and the impact this would have on reducing open positions, improving employee engagement, productivity, profitability, and obviously reducing employee turnover. Our most recent three clients achieved these turnover reductions by applying the principles of Finnegan’s Arrow in their organizations which include: Dollars, Goals, Stay Interviews, Forecast and Accountability.

So what’s the best response to “Americans don’t care as much about work”? Take these research-proven actions to retain the ones who do.

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Want to improve your retention but not sure where to start or how to convince your executives of the importance? Write to me DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or connect with me to schedule a FREE one-on-one consultation.

[i] https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/americans-attitude-work-data-0c2e487c

[ii] As quoted in The Week, 3.15.24

[iii] Revelio Labs The Digest, 3.13.24

The post WSJ Says “Americans Don’t Care as Much About Work” appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

The things that destroy love and marriage often disguise themselves as unimportant. Many dangerous things neither appear nor feel dangerous as they’re happening. They’re not bombs and gunshots. They’re pinpricks. They’re paper cuts. And that is the danger. When we don’t recognize something as threatening, then we’re not on guard. These tiny wounds start to bleed, and the bleed-out is so gradual that many of us don’t recognize the threat until it’s too late to stop it.

The author goes on to say that he entered his marriage believing it could only end if major tragedy happened like either partner having an affair, or spousal abuse, or a destructive gambling problem. But what he learned was his persistent habit of leaving dirty dishes in the sink and then disregarding his spouse’s request to not do so was just one splinter in the fingers of their marriage…and that those dishes and several other ongoing splinters deteriorated the underpinnings of their mutual love, trust, respect, and their feeling of safety toward each other.

Wow. What a lifetime wake-up call. One other way to say this is when I ask you to do something simple and you refuse to do it, it sticks with me and carries over to other parts of our relationship. So the point is that we’re talking about more than dirty dishes in the sink.

The author says his marriage died because of one hundred paper cuts, and he goes on to say this:

If I had known that this drinking-glass situation and similar arguments would actually end my marriage—that the existence of love, trust, respect, and safety in our marriage was dependent on these moments I was writing off as petty disagreements—I would have made different choices.

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Further Reading: Do Managers Create as Much Stress as Spouses?

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And This Is Why Many Employees Quit

So let’s have a debate. The common thinking about why employees quit is usually associated with pay, benefits, career paths, and other broad one-size-fits-all expressions that by their nature present themselves as too hard to fix. The genesis of this thinking is engagement surveys, exit surveys, employee committees to fix engagement survey results, and the ongoing spinning wheel of “HR, go fix turnover” so HR has to do something. The reality though is that many if not most employees are quitting their jobs today because of the compilation of paper cuts by their direct supervisors.

When employees sit down for dinner and their partner says, “How was your day, dear?”, no one says their day was frustrating because they don’t have pet insurance. They tell freshly-recalled tales of bosses, colleagues, and duties. And no one has ever said “My boss treats me like dirt but I’m sticking around for employee appreciation week.”

Think how lame this is. Employees report on their annual engagement survey that they want more recognition…so an employee engagement committee designs programs for employee-of-the-month, employee-of-the-year, an employee-of-the-month special parking space, and for continued service you get a backpack at five years and a clock at ten.

Gallup consistently reports that employee engagement has been the same for over 20 years and the reason why is clear. Employees don’t want backpacks but instead just want their boss to tell them they did a good job. End your surveys and engagement committees because you don’t need them.

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Further Reading: Who Jeopardizes Engagement the Most? Gallup Math Says It’s Managers

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Stay Interviews Are a Far Better Idea

Please accept that the #1 reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their boss. There are many quit reasons so this doesn’t indict bosses as the forever reason that employees quit. But it does present a bullseye for fixing turnover because any fix that doesn’t involve direct supervisors, that we would call a one-size-fits-all, is likely a waste of time and resources. No one leaves a good boss/good team/good duties for an extra dollar-an-hour…even though jerk bosses say they do.

Come on over to the Stay Interview side. Follow our lead by (1) first converting your executives to see the full cost of turnover along with the role first-line leaders play in causing employees to leave or stay, (2) then partner with your top team to develop achievable employee retention goals, followed by (3) informing your leaders on all levels that they are now accountable for achieving those retention goals, (4) then train your leaders to conduct Stay Interviews as I designed them to be done, (5) ask leaders to also forecast how long each employee will stay, and (6) hold those leaders accountable to their goals and their forecasts.

It is no coincidence that we designed our solution to measure each leader’s performance against both goals and forecasts because this is how salespeople are also measured. CEOs know these same two metrics work…and applying them here makes the transfer of retention accountability from HR to the operations team make far more sense to them.

In Conclusion, It Really Is About Paper Cuts

Employees know by their second week if their manager is willing to listen and address issues that are important to that employee. This is when the good boss/bad boss decision begins…and it’s not about pay and benefits.

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Looking for new ideas and ways to improve your new hire retention but not sure where to start or how to convince your executives? Write me: DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or connect with me to have a one-on-one conversation on ways you can get started today on your journey to cut turnover.

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[i] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/marriage-problems-fight-dishes/629526/

The post How Employee Turnover Is Like Losing a Marriage appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Where Did I Start Addressing Turnover?

The scene was a large regional banking company, and the CEO was responsible for 70 branches in Florida. He had been commanded by his board of directors to cut turnover and had little instinct for why employees quit or how to fix it. So he passed his own feelings of being threatened by a higher authority onto me, given I was the top HR exec so surely I had an improve-retention wand back in my office.

But there was no room for humor here. I was accountable for solving the company’s #1 problem according to our board, and my success would become the CEO’s success. Or his failure which, as they say, was not an option. Sound familiar?

After hearing my orders, I immediately went home to update my resume. No joke. I remember the green couch I was sitting on to this day. Little did I realize, though, that I was about to take part in a nearly ideal research experiment.

Unlike today, those were the times when customers had to travel to a branch to conduct most banking services. But the physical and functional architecture of our 70 branch banks was the same as now. The shingles and bricks of each building were identical…and so were the jobs, the pay, the benefits, and the furniture. So how could some branches have turnover as high as 70% and others had turnover of just 10%? The one variable…and we could easily argue the only important variable…was the manager.

This Was My “Ah-ha” Turnover Moment

If placed in this circumstance today, most HR execs would turn toward exit survey and engagement survey results, form an employee retention committee, and build a list of company-wide “solutions”. First up might be five steps to improve employee recognition which would be to award an employee of the month, give that winner a premium parking space, sponsor an employee appreciation week, and then ensure each employee received a company merch backpack at five years at a company clock at ten. Or to improve communication one would schedule more town hall meetings and provide a CEO video.

Many of these options were available to me at the time, but I knew I had to look at it from another angle. Instead of one-size-fits all programs, I dug into research on what the variables most impacted turnover based on academic studies versus routinely-published exit interview results. Only then could I determine the right course of action for cutting turnover.

What did I find? The branch manager was the primary variable. The difference between who stayed and who left was based on the direct supervisor. Further research and analysis showed it was actually a smaller sub-set of poor managers who drove our high turnover numbers company-wide.

“Ah-ha.” It wasn’t HR, but was instead the managers who drove turnover and who needed to be measured and held accountable for turnover. What did I do? Exactly what I recommend to this day today. Convert turnover from a percentage to a dollar cost so everyone understands how much each exit actually costs the company to lose just one employee. Gather front-line managers together to give them a measurable goal to reduce employee turnover and hold them accountable to meet it.

Want to convert your turnover percentage to a dollar cost?
Use our Free Turnover Cost Calculator.

The Turnover Accountability Push Back and My Push Forward

When speaking at conferences, this is where I say that the managers immediately offered several “suggestions” and each of those suggestions ended in “sucks”…as in “the pay sucks”, “the benefits suck”, and…well…you get the idea. There were stormy moments, all started when one brave manager raised his hand and said, “Now let me get this straight. You expect us to cut employee turnover?”

Our answer was yes, we did expect those managers to cut employee turnover. And our only offer to “help” was to distribute a monthly report that showed their progress against their goal, and it was a separate report, so this data wasn’t buried alongside other data. We didn’t raise pay, didn’t provide additional training, and we offered no additional benefits.

Looking back, in my mind the idea of holding managers accountable for turnover was really a shot in the dark. It was so different from the sameness of the setting, especially when set against the great gaps in turnover across the state. I didn’t know then that one “ah-ha” moment would lead me on a greater journey including further research with a professor of industrial psychology to help me clarify my ideas into these three bedrocks:

• The number one reason employees stay or leave…or for that matter engage or disengage…is how much they trust their immediate supervisors.

• This does NOT mean that each time an employee quits it is because she doesn’t trust her boss because employees quit for lots of reasons…but it might be because she didn’t trust her boss.

• It DOES mean, though, that each individual leader must become your very best employee retention solution.

I outline more on this in my book titled HR’s Greatest Challenge which provides summaries of 25 studies that back this up.

What Are the Key Takeaways from My Turnover “Ah-ha”?

So 90 days later our turnover had decreased by 19%. In the interim I had worked with finance to conduct a cost study for losing one teller and the result was $4,933 per exit…locked in my memory…resulting in our total savings at that point to equal over $4 million. The board was happy, and I had saved my job.

Looking back, I knew then that I had learned a lesson mostly unknown across HR circles. Simply said, that any retention effort that does not include holding first-line leaders accountable for turnover would be a bust.

Much has happened in my professional life since then, but my passion for this remains rooted in these science-based beliefs and it works. I have seen the results of those who have used my SHRM books to implement Stay Interviews and while working with scores of clients to help them save hundreds of millions of dollars for their companies by cutting turnover. One thing I routinely share in jest when speaking at conferences always gets a chuckle from HR people, but it sums up my passion for this work succinctly: When was the last time you heard a really good worker say, “My boss treats me like dirt, but I’m holding on for employee appreciation week. I’ll get a balloon and a hot dog, and I’ll feel great!!!”

Passionate about improving your retention but not sure where to start or how to convince your executives? Write me DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or connect with me if you want to have a one-on-one conversation on how you can get started on your “ah-ha” journey to cutting turnover.

The post My “‘Ah-Ha” How to Cut Turnover Moment appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

The Reports, Numbers, and Trends Don’t Lie About Employee Retention

What is consistent, though, are reports that employee quitting remains strong. So strong in fact that the highly-respected Gallagher 2023 Workforce Trends Report says in their survey of 4,000+ organizations that employee retention remains priority #1.[i] A full 66% of HR executives say so, but more eye-grabbing is that greater than half of operations executives said the same. This means the manufacturing execs who must get product out the door now see turnover as their main obstacle, just as healthcare CEOs are seeing nurse turnover as the major driver of patient-care shortcomings along with ever-increasing agency costs.

The deep-seated cause is not “The Great Resignation” but is instead “workforce shortages”. Get ready to see less of the former term and more of the latter. I could list bunches of contributing data here including as just one example that COVID has removed more than a quarter million people from our workforce. But the major factor is baby boomers are retiring and there are flat-out not enough native-born Americans to replace them. During the next ten years our total U.S. workforce will grow at a slower pace than at any time in our history, all while striving to retain our position as the world’s top economy. Side-stories abound but here are two:

• Our Census Bureau says 51% of new workers will be immigrants beginning in 2030, and that percentage will increase for as far out as they can predict.[ii]

• Whereas baby-boomers have stayed with employers an average of 8 years 3 months, millennials stay 2 years 9 months and gen Z an average of 2 years 3 months.[iii]

Making this last point scarier, millennials and gen Z comprise a full 51% of today’s U.S. workforce…and millennials alone will dominate by being 75% of the workforce by 2025. Remember when we said young workers can’t keep up the constant job-hopping because the economic realities of adulthood, families, and rest will eventually sink in? Young workers have won, assisted by the historically high number of job openings that isn’t going away.

Right Problem, Wrong Solution for Cutting Turnover

But here’s where the Gallagher report gets way off course because their opening solution for cutting turnover is about pay:

Retention far out-ranks other top operational and HR priorities in 2023 – putting total rewards and the employee experience in the spotlight, right alongside heavy investment in base salaries.

And they go on to say…

Responding to labor shortages and turnover, many organizations enhanced compensation and benefits to lower the risk of losing the talent they need to meet business objectives. In 2022, private industry worker costs rose 5.1% for wages and salaries, and 4.8% for benefits compared to a year earlier.

We could offer Gallagher a pass regarding their comp and benefit bias because they are a for-profit consulting firm that added a sub-title to their report which reads, “Benchmarks for benefits, HR, and people strategies to help organizations thrive”.

Yet I would ask Gallagher this question:

Can you show me proof, actual academic research, that says that increasing pay or benefits provides a long-term impact on employee retention?

I don’t think they can. Nor can Gallup or any other research and consulting organization. And no one is predicting “The Great Resignation” is over because employers have raised pay.

HR’s Greatest Challenge is the name of a book I authored several years ago that contains summaries of 25 highly-respected studies that all point in the same direction…that the #1 reason employees stay or leave, or engage or disengage, is how much they trust their boss.

Yet organizations continue to listen to consultants who put them on this path:

1. Review engagement survey and exit survey results.
2. Identify the top employee concerns.
3. Appoint an employee committee to identify solutions.
4. Implement one-size-fits-all solutions.
5. Re-survey to find the same problem has not improved.

Example: Employees’ top concern is recognition so solutions include employee-of-the-month, employee appreciation week, free parking space, get a backpack at 5 years and a clock at ten. Then future reports show no improvement.

Focus on Individuals, Not Systems and Surveys for Employee Retention

Failure here is because employees are asking that their manager recognize them instead of a system. That as humans we crave for human emotional experiences that are sourced from someone important to us…in this case the one person we interact with each day who determines our job security along with our daily feelings about our jobs.

You can read more about the sketchy impact pay has on retention, along with 6 examples of clients across all industries that have cut turnover by 20% and more by implementing Stay Interviews and holding leaders accountable for retention goals.

We should thank Gallagher for their excellent research about the importance of employee retention. And then we all need to become better informed on why employees quit and how to fix it.

Need help establishing retention goals based on trust not pay?
Schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and we’ll discuss the numbers and needs you should have to evaluate your retention goals. We work with companies in every type of industry to cut turnover by 20% and more by building trust and accountabilities.

[i] https://www.ajg.com/us/-/media/files/gallagher/us/2023/workforce-trends-report-2023-organizational-wellbeing.pdf

[ii] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p25-1144.html

[iii] https://www.careerbuilder.com/advice/blog/how-long-should-you-stay-in-a-job

The post Gallagher Reports #1 Workforce Priority is Still Turnover appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Surveying the SHRM23 Crowd

Speaking to a crowd of 1,500 on why employees are really quitting their jobs, I first polled the audience on whether they believed exit surveys help them cut turnover. About 5% said “yes” while many in the dominant “no” group shouted out “employees don’t tell the truth”…which was the beginning of the real-life struggle to get clean data.

Let the Data Do the Heavy Lifting

Next we explored four popular “why employees quit” surveys and learned the same lesson. Pew Research surveyed actual employees who had quit[i] while SHRM surveyed HR managers[ii]…with both groups putting pay at the top. MIT looked to Revelio Labs which scrapes data electronically from LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and other employee input sources, and their conclusion was the opposite…putting toxic corporate culture at the top with pay all the way down to #16.[iii] Gallup named their top quit reason to be employee engagement and culture while saying just 14% of employees are quitting due to pay.[iv]

Survey Says It’s Toxic Culture, Not Pay

What to make of this conflicting data mess? First, asking employees why they quit isn’t the truest data source because as the audience majority said, “employees don’t tell the truth”. But as importantly, beware of labels that researchers use to group exit reasons together such as toxic corporate culture and employee engagement and culture.

What did MIT name as the actual quit reasons behind their #1 label of toxic corporate culture? (1) failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, (2) workers feeling disrespected, and (3) unethical behavior.

And Gallup said employee engagement and culture was their sum-up title for (1) lack of respect, (2) advancement and development opportunities, and (3) unrealistic job expectations.

So let’s list these six #1 quit reasons together:

• Failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion
• Workers feeling disrespected
• Unethical behavior
• Lack of respect
• Advancement and development opportunities
• Unrealistic job expectations

Now let’s add to this data stew a few findings Gallup has told us many times in the past…that the common belief that companies have consistent, universal cultures is wrong because each supervisor develops her own culture, and also that first-line supervisors drive no less than 50% of turnover and 70% of engagement.

I studied under an industrial/organizational psychology professor during mid-career because I wanted invent a research-based solution to reduce employee turnover. My eyes got huge when Professor Murphy sent me academically-completed research papers on why employees leave…and the overwhelming reason was whether those employees trusted their immediate, first-line supervisors.

Proof if You Change the Culture, You Cut Turnover

As proof of this finding, I showed the audience a list of nine client corporations that had cut turnover 20% and more during “the great resignation” by (1) training first-line leaders to conduct Stay Interviews with each member of their teams, (2) building stay plans based on each Stay Interview outcome, (3) forecasting how long each employee would stay, and then (4) being held accountable for the resulting two metrics which are achieving retention goals and developing accurate retention forecasts.

Not coincidentally, these are the same metrics organizations apply to salespeople…making your goals and developing accurate forecasts. So CEOs instantly relate to this type of talk versus turnover percentages and exit survey results.

These examples of client results show the diversity of jobs they impact and therefore our solution’s universal opportunity to cut turnover across all industries:

• Mt. Sinai nurse turnover down 25%, in a building where large coolers held COVID bodies just a couple of years ago.

• Clayton Homes’ turnover down 28% while saving 1,200 jobs which they value at $5,000 each, resulting in total savings of $6MM…so far.

• Wayne Sanderson has cut turnover nearly in half, processing chickens for Chik Fil A.

• Waste Management has reduced turnover by 30% among workers who pick and sort trash.

• United Facilities has cut forklift driver turnover by 58%.

• And Covenant Health in New England has cut turnover by 31% across all healthcare jobs.

The common approach for all is that they direct every retention solution directly through their first-line supervisors, from the CEO on down.

It’s Not Pay, It’s the Culture of Your Direct Supervisors

Think of your managers and supervisors as your employee retention “portals”. When employees seek support regarding recognition, development, scheduling, stress and mental health issues, inclusion, pay, that they can’t work with their colleagues, or any other of the daily employee needs, their supervisor is their go-to source. Or should be.

Or said another way, one-size-fits-all programs are essentially worthless unless the boss is seen as being trustworthy by her team…and this includes pay.

Beware also that pay never works in a vacuum. If I offer you $1 more per year and you like your job, then you will say “no”…but if you dislike your job you are then more likely to say “yes” in order to abandon a supervisor or some other part of your job you dislike. Very few employees leave a job for pay alone.

You Can Cut Turnover by 20% or More, No Matter Your Industry

There is an established solution for employee turnover…start here to learn our comprehensive turnover solution, and watch the 2-minute video to open your eyes to fresh thinking for cutting turnover 20% and more. Then schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.

Missed my mega session at SHRM23? SHRM.org published a recap here: https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/compensation/Pages/employee-turnover-retention-problems-is-pay-the-problem.aspx

And you can access a pdf of my presentation deck here: https://c-suiteanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/SHRM23-IsItPay-Finnegan-FINAL-20230611-N1.pdf 

Want me to present my mega session to your top team virtually? Just ask! Email me at: DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and we’ll find a time that works for you and your team.

[i] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/09/majority-of-workers-who-quit-a-job-in-2021-cite-low-pay-no-opportunities-for-advancement-feeling-disrespected/

[ii] https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/pages/report-hr-pros-rank-top-reasons-for-turnover.aspx#:~:text=As%20the%20top%20reason%20for,budget%20for%20compensation%20was%20adequate.

[iii] https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/toxic-culture-is-driving-the-great-resignation/

[iv] From Gallup’s new book Culture Shock, by Clifton and Harter, published by Gallup Press, 2023, page 68.

The post From SHRM23 Las Vegas: Is It Pay? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.