Over the last weeks it has been interesting for me to see a number of discussions pop up on blog sites and social and business networking relationship sites that I belong to about the correlation between employee retention and employee satisfaction. The dialogue includes questions like:
- Is there a direct or indirect correlation between employee retention and employee satisfaction?
- Which is the more important measurement to employers; employee satisfaction or employee retention?
- What is employee engagement and should I be measuring it?
I will respond to those questions the same way I responded to them on the sites- assuming that there is a direct or indirect correlation between retention as measured by average tenure and satisfaction is potentially dangerous and misleading.
Employee retention at its most basic is a function of turnover. How many people join and how many people leave your organization over a given period of time. If you want to be more sophisticated you might measure “regretted turnover”, those you wanted to keep; versus “unregretted” turnover, those you didn’t mind seeing leave. I would concur that those can be very different.
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A young protégé of mine recently began negotiations with a rather large financial services organization and as she shares her experiences I have to tell you that I remain disappointed and a little surprised at how poorly so many employers are handling this process!
On one hand she is very interested in the position, on the other she is more than a little put off on how much the process resembles a transaction rather than an invitation.
Most of our employment models are and have been based on an acquisition model. We create sets of rules or protocols for everyone; applicants, hiring managers, and human resources to follow. The model isn’t an invitation to join up, it is a transaction.
We aren’t facilitating a relationship with a whole person; we are acquiring a piece of human capital!
How we continue to hold on to those concepts was reinforced for me a couple of ways recently.
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Everybody that knows me knows that I essentially see myself as being in the people business. The art and science of identifying the right people whose values are aligned with your organizational culture and values; and ensuring that over time they don’t lose that alignment.
Over the last several years I have written volumes about engagement, the “phenomena” of perfecting that alignment in your organization and nurturing it beginning with your employees and then building on that base with your customers, suppliers, and community.
Years ago I quoted an article that indicated 60% of new managers fail within their first 18 months because of their inability to build and sustain relationships. I don’t think we have improved our track record much. We still use leadership and management as interchangeable concepts and skill sets; they aren’t and never will be.
I read a comment recently on LinkedIn, a very popular business/social networking site, where the author felt the U.S economy would never regain its international leadership position again because of the “limited” productivity of American workers.
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While we all see, read, and scan countless blog posts on a daily basis, how many stand out? And why does a certain post stand out? Recently, I read an excellent post on Google Plus (link provided at the end of this post), and not only the title but the message have remained with me.
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Are your employees committed to achieving business results?
Imagine a company where employees come to work engaged, determined and committed to support the goals of the organization (physically, psychologically, and emotionally). 95% of the time this is the case when an employee starts working for you; before things get in the way of their enthusiastic engagement. What gets in the way?
- Unclear expectations
- A variance in what the employee is doing and what we want them to do
- Lack of appropriate preparation and/or training
- Poor management
- A lack of alignment between the employee’s personal values and goals, and the organization’s values and goals (real or perceived)
The list can go on and on. As employees disengage, their enthusiasm is muted under the weight of uncertainty, procedures and compliance. The important point is to understand that the desire to engage exists, but we as leaders and managers maintain a culture that disengages employees. The good news is that we are just as capable of creating a culture to reengage them, through respect, responsibility, information, rewards & loyalty. I refer to this transition from disengagement to engagement as moving from compliance to Commitment®.
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Your culture can be positive, empowering, poisonous, passive-aggressive or anything in between.
Successful companies invest in building a purposeful culture where engagement is a daily priority and shared responsibility of individuals, managers, and executives!
© BlessingWhite 2012
A number of years ago I became concerned about what I saw as the opportunity costs of employees who were coming to work and either withholding or not being given an opportunity to fulfill their responsibilities at 100%.
Because by nature I am an optimist, I subscribe to the theory that better than 95% of employees show up at work, at least initially, wanting to do the right work and to do it well.
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Over the last week or so I have seen three different discussions from colleagues that I really respect that cause me to believe that much of our society and especially the business sector are still chasing what I fervently believe to be the wrong paradigm.
In the first instance a colleague posed the question of whether or not an organization should focus on its fiscal health, i.e. profitability or acting in a more socially responsible way. We see similar questions posed daily about whether employee satisfaction or employee satisfaction (engagement) should be the higher priority.
Because I know my colleague I knew that he was posing the question rhetorically, but my concern is that the vast majority of executives and leaders you would pose that question to wouldn’t see it that way. They still continue to see it as either or.
The second instance a question was posed as to whether the leader of an organization should be capable of both creating the vision and crafting the implementation of the strategy to insure its execution.
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As I have indicated before I like using analogies both for my own edification and as an illustration point for others in explaining a concept. It may be that I am the only one often that sees the connection, but I hope not.
The Broken Road, performed here by Rascal Flats http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-vZlrBYLSU&feature=fvsr, is a song I first heard back in the late 90’s. It really struck me then as not just about relationships, but a metaphor for the road of life if we choose to hear it.
The last week or so has been an interesting dense pack of a lot of things for me. A week ago Sunday my brother and I had the opportunity to join a couple in a round of golf. The introduction took me a little askance when the husband took me aside and asked me to be patient as his wife is suffering stage four brain cancer, essentially terminal and that it impaired her vision and he sometimes needed to get her set up correctly to make her shots; that four hours or so was a lesson in life and in golf. She was one of the most gracious and positive people I have met in a very long time. She also had a wonderful, consistent approach to her golf game, never overpowering the ball or her stroke. Unlike the other three of us she took a short cut and played exclusively the fairway and the greens on her way to the ball…
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I read a recent blog post by author and leadership expert Erika Andersen. The title of the post was “Why It Feels So Terrible to Be Managed.” Andersen shared two recommendations but one has stayed with me: Be the manager you’d like to have.
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Any of us who have ever watched a gangster movie or read one of the many novels about crime families and the mafia have heard the expression making your bones. The expression most literally is interpreted as committing a murder or execution on behalf of the family, becoming a made man or full member of the secret society.
Another interpretation that I would like to explore in a non- crime, non- mafia context is that of establishing your credibility as a professional.
As many of you know I started my career three decades ago in a profession at that time we called Personnel, these days we refer to it with a number of titles, most commonly human resources.
When I started my career in Personnel we did not occupy a space at the top of the pyramid. In fact my advisor asked me why I was wasting my talents pursuing a field that lacked professional credibility and the kind of acknowledgement of other real business disciplines.
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A number of years ago I had an opportunity to attend a demonstration by a man named Monty Roberts who was the primary proponent of a new methodology of training horses. Although Monty is reasonably well known in horse circles a more common vehicle for the average person to connect with him is that the character played by Robert Redford in the movie The Horse Whisperer, was based on Roberts and his methods.
Conventional wisdom has been that you break a horse in. You teach them obedience by imposing your will on them. They learn to obey you and depend on you. Roberts’ methodology was and is a little revolutionary. Instead he argued you should give a horse the opportunity to join up with you. He explained that horses are a herd animal, they can’t survive in the wild on their own. Given the chance they have a natural proclivity to join up with other horses or even other animals of horses are not available. As my wife is an avid horse lover I have had a chance to see this phenomenon personally.
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A colleague of mine created a model some time back that she calls KindExcellence. Her premise is that kindness and excellence and forever linked and that in order to have one you must have the other. I agree with her.
I have been a human resources practitioner, C level executive, and management consultant now for over thirty years and it concerns me how we seem to be losing some of our ability to be kind.
I don’t mean kind in terms of charity or graciousness or acts of philanthropy; but rather kindness in terms of tolerance and respect for the viewpoints and rights of others.
As I have watched the political debates, read the blogosphere, and participated in conversation the dialogue I hear continues to be more and more mean spirited and divisive.
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I had two recent customer service experiences that couldn’t have been more different, and as a result, I started to think how the two establishments valued service and repeat business. In the modern era of instant communication, thanks to social media and the myriad of sites available to anyone with a smartphone or tablet, a recap of a good experience or a bad experience can appear anywhere from a small blog to thousands of YouTube views to the national TV news.
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A few years ago I had the opportunity to become certified in what was then looked at as essentially a sales training program. I was working for a credit union at the time and like a lot of other credit unions we found ourselves at a crossroads.
Credit unions properly managed and run are not banks or banking light. Their primary purpose when they were created was to pool the resources of members and use that pool to provide loans to other members of that particular community to do things like purchase a first car, a first home, finance an education or the like.
The community aspect was very important. The community dimension was created because membership was usually as a function of belonging to a specific group; an employer, association, or some other connection. Credit unions are also not for profits, there are restrictions on what kinds of loans and the kinds of business they can do.
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I admit it, I read a lot. I find myself very curious about many things not the least of which is the viewpoints of other people. Since I wrote my last post things have been pretty crazy.
I am working with a client to help build a bridge between philanthropy and businesses as one part of a new model to address some of our issues around the management of health and the delivery of health care.
To many it may be just a matter of semantics; but I see philanthropy as different than charity. Philanthropy to me has a connotation of investing in a larger cause or purpose. I am not saying charity is bad, but I rather like the idea of making investments in societal infrastructure to achieve a better quality of life for everyone and more comfortable for me. I don’t really like codependency between adults in any form very much.
I also see the management of health and delivering health care as being related, but different. I think that managing health is a collaborative effort that involves patients/people, providers, payers, educators, etc. in investigating and creating solutions; hopefully on a proactive rather than reactive basis.
My clients organization is mission driven, they are a not for profit. We have had interesting discussions about how their role in delivering health care is really the how of what they do rather than the what. It is really a delivery mechanism rather than the goal itself. We have been discussing of late whether the role of his team is actually an important bridge to that larger mission because it allows people from the community to get involved in a lot of ways that is not direct care giving.
I saw a statistic last week that said over 75% of people are not feeling fulfilled in their jobs. I know from my work in employee engagement that less than 30% of American workers consider themselves highly engaged and in many cases they feel they don’t trust the senior management of their organization or the leadership of the country. I find that very sad, but also a significant opportunity.
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Well by tomorrow we will have survived our first week of 2012! I have to say for me so far my cautious optimism continues to hold out. Part of it may be bluntly that I live in Phoenix and we have been experiencing unseasonably warm, sunny weather. I know there are those who love the seasons, but bluntly I have lived on the East Coast and in the Pacific Northwest long enough that warm, sunny weather doesn’t bore me.
I am also kind of jazzed to see the stock market up a bit. I will be honest I don’t pay a ton of attention to it as a small business owner. I kind of tend to gage what is happening with the economy by my personal reality- do clients call me to do work and can they pay me once the work is done.
I am starting to hear more and more people talk about doing things differently as well. I won’t say it has become a movement yet, but I seem to be encountering more people recognizing that doing things the way they have always been done may not solve our problems and that working collaboratively rather than finger pointing may even yield some positive results.
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I had mentioned before how I had the opportunity to attend a webinar based largely on Stephen M.R Covey’s (or Covey Jr as I like to call him) book, The Speed of Trust, and how I found his discussions of the trust dividend versus the trust tax very interesting.
Over the last week I have had a chance to participate in a number of activities that I found to carry through on a similar theme for me at least and I thought I would share that perspective.
As anybody who has read any of my stuff knows I am a big believer in relationships; I think it is important however to distinguish investing in relationships versus transacting. I think of this as “three dimensional” versus “two dimensional” relationships.
Over the last week I have been the beneficiary of several people who took an investment approach.
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I think it was Einstein who I paraphrase in saying- Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Yet still we persist.
I read a lot. I read blogs, articles, books, etc. I am always curious to benefit from the thinking of people smarter than I am which I have calculated to be about 95% of the population of the world at this point ( if you have any doubts just ask my family).
I see illustrations that kind of make me go huh daily. One that caught my eye today was that the U.S. Postal Service is going to extend the amount of time it takes to move a piece of first class mail to reduce expenses. It seems that a combination of shrinking demand and increasing expenses for operations is causing them to lose more and more money. Their biggest single expense is the cost of retirement benefits and retiree medical benefits. It must have eluded me as to how reducing the level of service you offer is going to address either of these issues.
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What’s the core of leadership? I have often wondered about this. Like everyone, I have worked for individuals who have the capacity to inspire and energize an army, and I have also worked for people who would have been a better match for jobs where they could have worked without ever encountering people. But recently, I read an interesting quote, and I believe it defines the true core of leadership.
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I just read an article on BNET http://bit.ly/9d7KjH about customer service in an industry that sadly needs it.
We had the opportunity to experience the “hospitality” of the U.S. airlines quite a bit this last week. I personally got to experience it returning from a preliminary relo trip and then two of our guests who flew in to attend my daughter’s college graduation got to experience it on steroids.
They stranded one of our guests on the way home and the other both coming and going! The almost pathological indifference to their customer’s situation was mind boggling!
Contrast this to the level of service described in the enclosed article on Virgin Air. The other interesting thing about this article is that it describes the process used by Virgin Air to hire and select their employees and then the training they put them through before they ever set foot unsupervised on a flight.
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