The employee life cycle is a six phase model of the life of an employee within an organization - from start to finish. It starts with the organization attracting candidates for their jobs, moves to recruitment, onboarding, development, retention and lastly separation. The life cycle itself can be helpful to see the life of your employee while employed by your organization. Employers spend countless hours and dollars on strategies to engage their workers during each of phases.
My experience is these strategies never actually address the root causes of the employee turnover. The organizations convince themselves they are addressing their turnover by the “life cycle” strategies. The organization then goes into full blown denial as their turnover continues as they continue to spend untold dollars and hours on strategies which are doomed from the beginning.
I have heard detailed explanations of life cycle employee retention strategies in countless organizations. All directed at the symptoms and irrelevant to the root causes. Employers use unusual office perks, food trucks, over the top employee benefits and an infinite number of “culture enhancers”. It all tells me one thing - they are wasting their money and their time. These will have little to no impact on their turnover.
Root causes of employee turnover include but not limited to:
- Lack of respect from management
- Poor front line supervision
- Lack of clarity of how employees advance in their positions or career
- Poor connection between compensation and performance
- No clear organizational vision
These are just a few of the major root causes. There are many others. My question is, how do the retention strategies discussed above have anything to do with fixing these root causes? The answer is simple, they don’t. This explains why their employee turnover continues unabated. Most people feel more comfortable dealing with symptoms and do not have the training to discover the root causes. Many organizations heap one symptom dealing strategy on top of another costing the company untold profits.
When the root causes are identified and dealt with appropriately, turnover immediately starts to fall. The symptom strategies are no longer necessary and the cost is recovered to the benefit of both the organization and the employees. As the root causes are eliminated the employees will be much happier and engagement will soar. Employees love it when you deal with the real issues.
Would you like some help identifying your root causes?
