Turnover costs are a fact of life, and some are harder to quantify than others – like losing a great employee that was really starting to make a difference in the business. I think the best way to start reducing turnover is to look at some of the causes.
This is by no means an all-inclusive list, but it does capture five of the more frequent causes we encounter:
- Lack of Purpose: We tend to hire employees to do a job. If you’ve spent any time paying attention to Gen X and Millennial workers, you’ve noticed that they tend to look beyond their work as a job and instead are interested in purposeful work on something really meaningful. If it’s drudgery, they’re not going to like it.
- Compensation: Intuitively, this should be the most common reasons why employees leave, but there’s not a lot of research to back it up. Few employees have real data to support the notion they’re underpaid. Instead they’re subconsciously measuring value, which involves much more than compensation.
- Work environment: No one wants to work in a toxic environment. Leaders create the culture, and there is little middle ground in judging workplace environments. Your employees either think it is or isn’t a good place to work.
- No Recognition: Employees who leave due to lack of recognition aren’t looking for, and don’t respond to pats on the head. Instead, those employees want to know that their work adds value to the company and be appreciated for it.
- Growth: Lack of growth and development opportunities is another killer area with today’s generation of worker. Personal growth and professional development is expected much earlier in the workplace than us old fogies experienced it in our careers.
Now let’s talk about the important stuff, like what we can do about reducing turnover. Instead of just trying to do the opposite of the things discussed above, I’d suggest that if we do the following four things, we won’t have to worry about turnover being a problem in the first place.
- Be smart with your hiring – take this to heart! Simply said, the hiring process needs to be about more than applications and HR interviews. Know what you need and want to hire, build your process to meet that need, and focus on hiring the right person rather than settling for the best available.
- Onboard your employees – unfortunately, we often hire employees, show them the break room, supply cabinet and copier, and tell them where to show up in the morning. Nothing starts a relationship off in a worse way. Onboarding doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but it does have to be done with at least one intentional outcome –setting clear expectations. You can’t assume that employees know what is expected of them or what “good” performance looks like. You have to tell them.
- Affirmation – the number one thing that employees want and don’t get is positive feedback. This isn’t about employee of the month or big award presentations (although those don’t hurt). Instead, it is about the personal stuff – the informal water cooler kind of affirmation where heartfelt acknowledgement of a job well done makes an employee feel genuinely valued. This one little thing will go farther than any amount of money spent on compensation surveys and the like!
- Have an exit plan –occasionally, we make a not-so-good hire. The exit plan allows you to help mis-hires move on to something that fits them better, and does so with minimal disruption of your workforce. The old adage of hire slow, fire fast is good advice; the worst thing you can have is a toxic employee on your team.
One of the main reasons I think studying turnover can be a waste of time and money is that it rarely points to our failures to do the right stuff on the front end. I’m not suggesting you ignore turnover – measure it if you want – but use the data to validate that your front-end efforts are working rather than as a measure to tell you something is wrong.
Good retention strategies, like those above, are pretty simple. Fortunately, they can be pretty easy, too.
