Yes, HR, You Were Always Right: You Cannot Solve Turnover By Yourself

800 hands immediately shot up in the air.

This was the scene at the SHRM Annual Conference in Chicago last month, when I addressed a large crowd on “Cutting Turnover by 40% and More”. When I said “Raise your hand if in any way your executives have said, ‘Turnover is high. HR, go fix it’”, no arms went up half way, no one hesitated. This was clearly a sore spot.

During that session I described four clients companies that had cut turnover by 40% and more, and how each of their forward-thinking HR teams had bought into crossing the boundary from HR to executives to implement Finnegan’s Arrow…to re-position employee retention from HR back to the operations sides of their companies.

Steps one and two are to invite finance to help place a cost on turnover, and then inspire the top team to address it in a way only they can, with retention goals for leaders across all levels. One must ask if turnover is so important, why haven’t they set goals for it?

Stay Interviews follow which are the absolute, most powerful retention solution for leaders on all levels, but will fall to flavor-of-the month status without the preceding costs and goals.

Forecasts then follow whereby leaders actually do just that, forecast how long each employee will stay, so those on top can provide help to keep top performers. Finnegan’s Arrow closes with Accountability, as leaders are now accountable for achieving their goals and developing accurate forecasts…just as salespeople have been doing for decades.

So thus far I’ve said (1) HR is unfairly held accountable for retention, (2) executives must lead with dollars, goals, stay interviews, forecasts, and accountability, and (3) here’s a plan to do just that. Yet most HR professionals remain stuck in wrong-accountability-land, and struggle emotionally each day on the job.

One reason they remain stuck is implementing Finnegan’s Arrow requires courage. HR must approach finance to help with the cost study, executives to establish retention goals, and then gain support for all additional tools. This is a major leap for many in HR who prefer instead to “solve” turnover with better onboarding and the plethora of one-size-fits-all employee programs that have proven over decades to be ineffective. In other words, we will implement HR-driven solutions that only require us to work with HR.

Our executives have never needed us more as employee retention and engagement top their lists of greatest obstacles to success. Our job, then, is to teach them that they hold the authority to fix these things. And then give them a plan to do so.

I’m offering you a resource as I’ll be glad to help. Please email me if you’d like to chat to learn more….dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com…and take care.