Take 3 Steps…Literally…To Fix Turnover and Engagement

Wherever you are right now, please do the following:

1. Stand up
2. Take 3 steps to your right
3. Tell yourself the top 5 things your company is doing to improve retention and engagement
4. Move back to your original place
5. Now take 3 steps to your left
6. Acknowledge that the top reason employees stay or leave, and engage or disengage, is how much they trust their immediate supervisors
7. Now return to your original position.
8. And in a moment of candid reflection, ask yourself if your company’s initiatives to improve retention and engagement are totally, directly targeted at improving your supervisor’s trust-building abilities…or targeted somewhere else.

It is no coincidence that the number of employees who voluntarily quit their jobs is at its all-time high, nor that employee engagement hasn’t changed this century. And chances are you just proved why.

The primary villain in this scenario is employee surveys, followed by its usual subplot of “HR, go fix it”. Whether you are reading now as a CEO, COO, or an HR professional, we have collectively…across all six inhabited continents…taken the bad-tasting bait to survey our employees, read off their top disappointments, and then build one-size-fits-all employee programs to “fix” them. HR is often first on the receiving end of this assignment, so HR proceeds with best intentions while handicapped with no authority. Most in HR know which managers cannot build trust because they are constantly listening to their employees complain, and then refilling their jobs when they leave. Yet when asked to fix engagement or retention, HR defaults to what they are empowered to do…arrange recognition events, more company meetings…and as we sometimes say wryly, more events with food.

Benchmarks make this situation worse. CEOs speak in dollars but see reports with turnover percentages or engagement survey scores, causing them to seek better data. That next-best data is how their company compares to others, and any sliver of good news in the form of “We’re as bad as the rest” stifles any real solution-making.

Stay Interviews delivered as part of Finnegan’s Arrow are THE answer. True confession here. One of my books is the top-selling SHRM-published book in history. When I first typed the words of The Power of Stay Interviews, I had no clue it would sell even one hundred books let alone reach such lofty status. That was before our company and I had worked with hundreds of client companies to make Stay Interviews real for them. And before we helped their supervisors implement a solution that pulled these supervisors and their teams through disclosure, empathy, and problem-solving to make their work truly better. Finding ways to remove unnecessary reports, get parents home in time for dinner, and other this-is-what-really-matters-to-me issues have been the missing glue-builders that keep our best employees near us. And these are the issues that no employee engagement survey nor exit survey will ever uncover, let alone fix.