Happy New Year!!
I hope you all had a great Christmas and New Years and you are ready to tackle the coming year. Have you made your resolutions? At the very least you have been thinking about the coming year. What are your personal and business goals for the coming year? What changes are you going to make? What do you want to do better and what do you want to stop doing?
Your employees have also been thinking!
Are they thinking what a great boss they have? How they could not find the same level of opportunity or advancement anywhere else? How much they enjoy going to work every day? How valued they feel? How much you have invested and will invest in them? They have the tools to attain their goals within the organization?
Congratulations, you are in a very small minority!!
For the vast majority, the employees are thinking very differently than the above. What are they thinking? They simply can’t take it anymore and have already made steps to move on. Anywhere will be better than where they are now. Their boss drives them crazy. The organization is not going anywhere or they question how the organization will meet its’ goals. The organizational values are not kept consistently throughout the organization. The list goes on and on. Even when your employees are not talking directly to the issues, they are giving you lots of clues. You just need to know what to listen for and what follow up questions need to be ask.
The New Year will bring an uptick of employee turnover
The first Executive Management group meeting of the company which I had just joined was a free for all. There were lots of opinions on our employee turnover and they were all over the board!! Everybody had an opinion and several of them contradicted each other. The truth of the matter is, none of us KNEW.
Over the years, I have learned how to glean through all the baloney. Determine what is really going on and do it very quickly, which is the key. You don’t have to interview everybody, though there are ways to get everyone’s opinion. Knowing who to interview and what to talk about is a major step to identifying the root causes. It will also help in figuring out how to attack the root causes and get the results you are looking for.
Back to my company with all the opinions, after speaking to the employees, we learned we were right about a couple of things. We were dead wrong about a couple of others and were clueless about a few more. It was only then when we were able to make progress.
Would you like a root cause analysis done on your employee turnover problem?
