Let's start with, "Which method are you using to cut turnover?" This is a quiz with two possible answers, with one being right and the other being very, very wrong. And as a clue, the correct answer is based on science whereas the wrong answer is based on “best practices”.
A CFO participated in a turnover cost study, and we determined one engineer cost his company $121,450 – and how that fit in with other expenses. The next day that CFO said he couldn’t sleep, that he went in early to extrapolate numbers and determined turnover was their second biggest cost. A game changer.
There is a perpetual perceived link between turnover and pay, especially in the eyes of first-line supervisors who see employees walk out the door and can’t imagine it’s because of themselves. Pay becomes a target in part because it is tangible…and always controversial.
If we can safely presume high pay equals most essential, then there are at least 11 jobs in healthcare that are more important to retain than nurses who traditionally have a high rate of turnover. Yet these higher-paid workers almost never receive a Stay Interview or an assessment of their likelihood to stay.
Employee referrals are four times more likely to be hired, save companies over $7,500 per hire, perform their jobs better than their peer employees…and most importantly for our purposes, stay longer. What’s not to like?
We learned a new trick at home this past weekend, that when we turned on the captions the shows got better. It cleared up jumbled dialogue and we paid more attention to the background notes. Things didn’t notice before that add to the experience but still don’t compete with the primary story line, the continuously-developing plot, and the stars of the show. And the stars of your must-cut-turnover show are your first line supervisors.
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?
Working From Home is hardly new so any predictions about its strengths and weaknesses have already been proven, just not the grand scale that we might soon see. But having said that, WFH during the pandemic is not the same as regular, organized, we-all-buy-into-this WFH that we will see in the future.
In their weekly member newsletter yesterday, SHRM predicted a turnover “tsunami” once the pandemic ends, re-surfacing that employee retention is at major risk regardless of today’s unemployment rate.
I spent part of Thanksgiving reading about poverty, recognizing the irony when most of us are noting our abundances. My reasons were my natural interest stemming from an undergraduate degree in sociology, along with a specific drill-down on how can…