133. How you can improve retention in high turnover positions

Transcript – Episode 133: How you can improve retention in high turnover positions

Joe: Are you struggling to attract or keep great people in particular job roles or in your industry? If so, I’ve got three questions for you today that will dramatically improve retention in high turnover positions. Stick around. [Music]

Joe: Welcome to the Boss Better Now podcast sponsored by Boss Hero School where we teach leaders and business owners how to activate employee commitment in today’s everchanging workplace. All right, if you’re struggling to find and keep great people in specific roles. I’ve got three questions for you today to dramatically improve retention in those high turnover positions. And I want to start with this question. And it’s the first question we have to ask ourselves if we see this pattern of ongoing turnover, ongoing retention issues in specific positions or areas of a company. The first question is what would make this place the very best place to be a blank? And in that blank, I want you to put the title or category of the position. So, if you’re running a restaurant, what would make this place the very best place to be a waiter? If you’re uh running a landscaping company, what would make this place the very best place to be a day laborer? If you’re running a hospital, what would make this place the very best place to be an ER nurse? When we start with this question, it forces us to look at our industry, to look at our competition, and to look at the circumstances and conditions that people in these specific roles work in frequently. And it asks us to figure out how we can outdo our competition, how we can stand out for people who do this particular kind of work. And so, yes, we are talking about things like pay and benefits and other forms of compensation, but we’re also thinking about things like career pathing. We’re thinking about things like quality of life. How does this job fit into people’s lives? This it forces us to adopt a recruitment mindset to think of our company as a high-performing football program. Think of your favorite college football program. And if you think of the top college football programs in the country, they embrace this recruitment mindset. It’s not just about getting talented kids through the door. It’s about saying, “What’s going to keep them here? What’s going to develop them? what’s going to make our program a program that they’re going to want to be loyal to for throughout their college career. And when we bring this mindset to recruitment and reducing turnover, it starts to allow us to have conversations about the conditions we can change inside our organization. Recently I was the keynote speaker at a conference with nearly a thousand auto repair shop owners and managers and they asked me to come and speak about employee and speak about uh creating a destination workplace a place where people never want to leave and where they give it all they’ve got and this is because in these auto repair shops there is a bit of a revolving door among technicians and mechanics and people who do that kind of work and so I brought them the three questions I’m sharing with you today. But more importantly, I brought them case study after case study after case study of auto repair shops who had embraced this question, who stopped and said, “What would make this place the very best place to be a mechanic?” And so, they took a step back, they zoomed out, and they started creating programs like certification reimbursement, profit sharing, 4-day work weeks. They looked at ways to create mentoring programs so that people were uh getting advice and thinking about how they could advance in their career. Things like performance pay, internal training, flexible schedules, advancement plans within the organization. And what happened in all these places? They saw an increase in applicants for positions when they were open and they saw a decrease in the number of people leaving those positions. The other thing that happened is that their employees became their best recruiters. They became evangelists for their employer. And so, when an opening did crop up, they would turn around to the people in their network, good people that they trusted and knew and felt good about inviting to join them in their company. And they would say, “Hey, this is a pretty great place to work. You should come work for us.” This first question, what would make this place the very best place to be a blank, is a powerful question because it changes the problem that you’re solving for. Too often, business owners and leaders think that the problem I’m solving for is a staffing shortage. The truth is, in this moment, the real problem you’re solving for is a great jobs shortage. People do a great job when they believe they have a great job, and they will stay with an organization when they believe they have a great job. And so instead of blaming people or population distribution in a particular area, we step back and ask what would make this place the very best place to be a blank. And when you create a great job, it is much easier to retain top talent. All right. Once you get them through the door, you’ve got to keep them though, right? So that takes me to the second question, and that’s this. What would make this place the very best place to be name? What would make this place the very best place to be Janet? What would make this place the very best place to be Lamar or Peter or William? Understand that we are operating at a moment right now where quality of life is a primary driver of decisions around continued employment in places. We have to understand that when we get them through the door, we can’t just set it and forget it, right? Recruitment and attracting people to roles is not something that we can do without constant ongoing attention. And so, this question, what would make this place the very best place to be? Name keeps us in that recruitment mindset because loyalty is something that is either earned or undermined on a daily basis. And so, we need to create an environment where our employees want to choose us every day, even when things get hard, even when another opportunity comes along that might on the surface look like it’s paying a little more or be more appealing in certain ways. And so, this question forces us to engage in the ongoing dialogue with our direct reports that keeps us in touch with what’s most important to them. It means that we’re having conversations and thinking about how does this job fit into this person’s life? How does this job align with their career goals? This forces us as leaders and employers to embrace a set of practices that keep our finger on the pulse of what keeps activating people in their jobs. So, things like stay interviews where instead of doing exit interviews, we are having ongoing conversations where we ask people what do you like about your work? What energizes you about it? What would you like to do more of? If you were going to leave, what would be the reason? So that we never get surprised by someone deciding they’re looking for something to change for them. This means that as employers and as leaders, we’re also embracing things like job crafting and career pathing. Job crafting is the practice of tweaking the duties of a job role to allow people to do the things that they’re really good at, the things that align with their strengths and talents, and allowing them to do the things that they’re interested in doing. That doesn’t mean we get rid of all the hard stuff that people don’t like to do. We have to do those things in jobs, of course, but it means that we are around the edges whenever possible, aligning the job with what that person is interested and good at. It also means that we’re thinking about how they can continue growing their career if they want to earn more. If they want more responsibility, if they want some sort of upward trajectory, this reminds me of a conversation I had with the owner and CEO of a company called Oklahoma LED, which refabricates lighting in commercial buildings in Oklahoma to upgrade to more recent technology. And when I interviewed Joe, the CEO, one of the things that he told me repeatedly was, “You know what? I have been a day laborer. I have worked physical jobs. I knew how I wanted to be treated.” And when he started his company, the foundational question that he asked himself and that drove every decision he made about how to run his operation was what would make people never want to leave? What would make people think I am treated so well here that I don’t ever want to go anywhere else? And it’s that mindset that when we bring it to recruitment and retention changes how we think about the work that we’re doing. The truth is if you want your best people to never consider going anywhere else, you have to create for them a life that they can’t get anywhere else. That forces a calculation if another opportunity comes along where they look around and they go, “What would it cost me to leave here? What would I be giving up?” because boy there are a lot of things I get here that I can’t get in this other place. So that’s your second question. What would make this place the very best place to be name? Well, what if you’re doing all of that and people are still leaving? What if you’ve really focused on standing out in your industry, optimizing a particular job role to really uh create a better environment for quality of life? What if you really do the work person to person, direct report, direct report, direct report to create an environment that really allows people to want to stay and be a part of what you’re doing and there’s still people leaving? Then the third question you need to ask yourself is this. Is there toxicity? Is there some kind of persistent unpalatable situation there that is driving people away? When I wrote my second book, No More Team Drama, and I was keynoting around that all over the country, I would constantly get leaders and organizations who would call me up and say, “Hey, can you come speak about that cuz we’re struggling? We’ve got a lot of conflict. We’ve got a lot of drama.” And I would always ask this question. Is there one person there or maybe two who if they left today and never came back, most of these problems would be solved? Sometimes that revolving door in the workplace is being driven by an actual toxic person. Someone who has maybe been there a long time, a legacy employee who poisons the well every time you get a new hire. It’s that person who pulls the new hire aside a couple weeks in and says, “Let me tell you how things really are around here.” And they do damage to what you’re trying to build or the environment you’re trying to create for that person. Maybe that toxic person is a bad boss, a frontline or mid-level leader who is not treating people in the way that leads to them staying and wanting to be a part of what you’re doing. Or maybe the toxicity in in this particular role or in your organization is some form of chronic stress that these employees endure maybe as a result of unbalanced workloads or difficult customers or a lack of resources. This question, is there toxicity? Reminds us that sometimes we have to clean up our own house first before we invite people over. And if we don’t fix what’s going on internally, then we’re just sabotaging all of our efforts along the way. When I teach leaders about this practice in our Boss Hero School 3 master class, I spent a lot of time talking about what I call pulling the weeds. Weeds in a garden do one thing. They strangle the life out of the garden. And if you’ve got a particular circumstance or person who is acting as a weed in the garden and you don’t pull that weed, then no none of the flowers or plants in that garden are going to grow and thrive. And so, we have to pull the weeds. What’s funny is that every time I use this analogy in our Boss Hero School program or if I use it in a keynote or a workshop, inevitably a few weeks or even months later, I will get a phone call or an email from somebody in that audience who said, “You know what, Joe? I just had to tell you; we pulled a weed.” And oh, my goodness, what a difference it made. So, this third question, is there toxicity? is a key way of once again turning the mirror inward and asking ourselves what do we need to fix internally that could be driving people away and contributing to our turnover issues. One final thought on this friends as you think about how to improve retention. You might be doing everything right and people choose to leave and that’s okay. I want you to be open to the boomerang. The boomerang is when somebody leaves and then figures out that the grass wasn’t necessarily greener on the other side. And sometimes the only way to figure that out is to go and see for yourself. And so, if someone decides to move on, if someone thinks that a next step for them is an upgrade, thank them for their service. Wish them well. Tell them clearly, hey, if you get there and this isn’t what you thought it was going to be, keep in touch with us. You’re always welcome back here. I mean, unless they’re one of those weeds and then you can, you know, farewell, thanks so much. But if there’s someone that you are sad to lose or that you know is a contributor, leave the door open and keep in touch with them. You never know when you might get that boomerang person coming back and they could end up being even more of an evangelist for your workplace because if they’ve gone out and seen what it’s like out there, they can come back and tell everybody in here, hey, yeah, it’s not like this everywhere else. This is a pretty great place to work. So those are your three questions. What would make this place the very best place to be a title? What would make this place the very best place to be name? And is there toxicity? Answer those three questions and you’ll be well on your way to increasing retention in high turnover positions. Now, I’d love to know what you thought. Drop a comment in the box below the YouTube video or if you’re listening on your favorite podcast channel, shoot me an email at boss bettergmail.com. And don’t forget to subscribe to the channel so that you don’t miss all of our future episodes. Thanks for being here. See you next time.

Joe: Hey friends, did you know that I have been publishing my Boss Better email newsletter for more than 10 years? That’s right. If you want to keep in touch with me and keep your finger on the pulse of all things employee engagement and retention, workplace culture and leadership, then go to boss better.com to subscribe.

[Music]