By Bob Kelleher
2019 is shaping up as the year your firms’ employees are finally in the driver’s seat. We’re in a perfect storm of a shift in the employee / employer – supply / demand curve: Unemployment levels are near record lows, businesses are growing, and thousands of boomers are moving into retirement EVERY DAY. Can’t find enough good people? Get used to it, as these challenges are not going away anytime soon. To exasperate the shortage of finding good people, what if you are also LOSING good people? The only thing worse than a hiring shortage, is a hiring shortage COUPLED with a retention issue.
Why should you care? Employee turnover is expensive. Many studies show that the total cost of losing an employee can range from tens of thousands of dollars to 1.5-2X annual salary.
Consider the real “cost” of losing an employee:
• Cost of hiring and onboarding a new person (advertising, interviewing, screening, hiring)
• Lost productivity until the employee is trained y of an existing person)
• Lost engagement and therefore a loss of discretionary effort
• Customer / client service issues as new employees have a longer learning curve
• Pied Piper effect – whenever someone leaves others take time to ask “Should I be Looking too?”)
Author and researcher Wayne Cascio (Investing in People) says that the residual effect caused from rounds of layoffs during the recessionary years, often takes the ‘surviving’ employees years to recover their pre-layoffs level of commitment and engagement.
I don’t think I’m being an alarmist. In fact, Gallup’s 2018: State of the American Workplace Report concludes that only 34% of the workforce are engaged. The scariness of this statistic is amplified in my “Who’s Sinking Your Boat?” viral You Tube video (over 1M views). This video metaphorically describes the state of employee engagement by asking us to imagine we’re part of a crew team. As you look behind you, you discover that only a few of your crew mates are rowing your butts off, while 5 of your fellow rowers are casually looking at the scenery, and remarkably, several are attempting to sink you boat by bringing water on board. Can your crew team win the race? Of course not. But according to the Gallup study, that is precisely what is happening in the workforce.
I anticipate significant job movement as we continue into 2019. Your retention and engagement investments (and goals to become “The Employer of Choice”) should not be analogous to a light switch – you shouldn’t just turn them on or off. You need to have a strategy in place that can sustain the good times, and the “not so good times’. Think of your engagement investments and efforts as a dimmer switch – during financially challenging times, you lower slightly, and during boom times, you elevate slightly, while continuously communicating with your employees the realities of your business challenges and successes.
Companies need to focus on their engagement and retention strategies today to be prepared for tomorrow. These strategies need to focus on the following essential engagement best practices:
1. Create a line of sight describing where the company is going, how you’re going to get there, and what role all of your employees play in helping you get there.
2. Train your first line leaders on creating an engaged culture with their employees. Why? Because the number one driver of employee engagement is one’s relationship with their boss.
3. Create a robust communication culture built on transparency, honesty, and consistency.
4. Drive high performance because A players want to work with A players.
5. Foster a culture of celebration and recognition.
6. Doing well by doing good. Identify both the ‘what’ it is you do (what you sell), along with your ‘why’ (your purpose or mission). This will enable you to crystalize your purpose which will allow you to win in the marketplace. In fact, according to research by Jim Collins (Good to Great), firms that focus on Purpose out perform their peer group 6X!
About the Author
Bob Kelleher is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and consultant and travels the globe sharing his insights on employee engagement, leadership, and workforce trends. Bob is the author of the best-selling book, LOUDER THAN WORDS: 10 Practical Employee Engagement Steps That Drive Results, CREATIVESHIP, A Novel for Evolving Leaders, EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT for Dummies, and the recently released I-ENGAGE, Your Personal Engagement Roadmap.
Bob can be seen or heard on national media (most recently on CNBC, CBS, NBC News, Business Week, Forbes, and Fortune), and is a frequent guest writer and contributing editor on many national publications.
Bob has presented to the leadership teams of many of the world’s top companies, and is a frequent conference keynote speaker, including recent talks in Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Warsaw, Belfast, Kiev, Dubai, and Mexico.
Bob is also the founder and president of The Employee Engagement Group, a global consulting firm that works with leadership teams to implement best in class leadership and employee engagement programs, workshops, and surveys.
January 2019
