The root causes of employee turnover are also the very things working against quality. When you have high employee turnover the focus is survival. Get the job done or get the product out the door. Quality starts with a caring attitude within your employees. In a high turnover situation, caring is in short supply. If you want to increase your quality, one of the first things you should do is attack your employee turnover problem. They are directly linked and they respond to both the good and bad of each other.
Your problems with quality will many times lead you to the root causes of your employee turnover. Conversely, your employee turnover symptoms will help your discover the root causes of your quality issues. This linkage will help in solving both of the problems. As the quality gurus will tell you – “Quality comes from processes and people”. What I have found is building the processes is the easy part!
I will never forget speaking with a business owner about his employee turnover, chronically open positions and skills gap. We spoke about these in detail and the symptoms were too numerous to count. During the conversation, his quality issues came up. As we discussed them, he saw that the two problems were feeding off of each other.
He had two main symptoms. He was not able to:
- Hire all the people he needed or
- Keep the people he wanted to keep
The first problem is always the easiest to solve. Most organizations do not know all of their sources of people. This organization was overly dependent on temporary agencies and recruiters – which are very expensive. I had to help him discover his specific sources and how to attract the people he could keep.
Recruiting should not done with a shotgun; but with a deer rifle and an excellent scope
The organizations recruiting and hiring process had to be rebuilt. The focus would change from “getting them in the door” to identifying the people we wanted to keep. The process of identifying who the people were, would lead us to how to keep them. This new organizational mindset would have a major impact on the quality of their products going forward.
Would you like to increase your quality while reducing your employee turnover?
