Employee Turnover - What Will You Tell Your CEO?

In today’s economy employee retention is up, and we are all experiencing a sigh of relief from the high cost of turnover.  While turnover rates may be low for some industries, others still struggle.  Even low turnover can be very expensive if key positions must be replaced.  It is inevitable that every HR leader is, or will be, faced with sitting in front of the Chief Executive Officer and discussing why valuable employees are being lost. 

The vast majority of HR executives have attempted to gather some sort of useful information to explain the turnover occurring in their organization.  It may be casual conversations with staff about the on-goings of a department or discussions about the leadership style of a manager.  Perhaps, you have even conducted exit interviews; but given the challenges of getting employee participation, these can be sparse and have questionable truthfulness.  Who wants to burn their bridges, right?  We have to ask ourselves if we want to try to summarize our recollections of numerous exit conversations while occupying that warm seat in front of the CEOs desk, or is a more formidable strategy needed.  

CEOs live for data.  The professionalism of the HR role has risen in the past two decades because the executive team learned we can significantly affect the bottom line.  One of the greatest impacts we can have is to develop credible strategies to cut turnover.  But where do we start.  Is it really just about paying more money to our employees?  Not according to research results.  It is more likely to be about a lack of growth opportunities, or a leader that is less than inspiring, or even worse lacks a thread of appreciation for the efforts of his or her team members.  It may be a feeling that the job is overwhelming and no one is going to lift a hand to help a coworker get through the day.  No teamwork, no dependable friends at work, who wants to come in for that scenerio.  For others contemplating leaving, the job just wasn’t what they expected.  Some got a more challenging opportunity elsewhere, while with a little job enrichment and a counter offer, they really would have preferred to stay right where they are; who really knows?  
 

To the CEO, it better be the HR executive.  And we better have some data to back up our “opinions.”  We can’t be critical or supportive of a manager, a program, or employee strategy without facts to support our position.  Sifting through a file of loose notes from exit interviews, or pulling numbers from an organization survey from a couple years ago and hoping the CEO buys a weak explanation of our turnover causes, is an approach from days gone bye.   

Today we can get data.  It is readily available real time, by manager, by organization, by job, by issue, by demographics, and the possibilities are endless.  Reliable information right from the thoughts of our employees can be gathered at low cost, and via a phone call, a short computer survey or like the past, on a piece of paper that can be entered into a database.  This is the power of the modern day employee survey process.   

A strong HR leader is at the table.  Not the dinner table, the executive decision- making table, because she/he can deliver current, accurate information to support tough and often, expensive employee strategies.  These recommendations can be easily supported as having a justifiable return on investment because real-time reports of what employees really need to keep engaged with your organization is readily available.  Now we can sit along side our CEOs and review print outs or focus on a computer screen, with confidence that our input is no longer an opinion, but rather, a fact-based report of what or who is really causing turnover and what can be done about it.  It comes from solid survey data. 

Not all surveys are created equal.  There are characteristics HR leaders should expect from the survey tools they select.   
 

1. The surveys should come with well researched categories of questions that cover issues critical to employee retention, engagement, and leadership effectiveness.
   
   
2. You should be offered the opportunity to customize the survey to fit your organizations needs, however, you should not be required to create the survey.  Expertise should come from your survey vendor; again be confident research supported the questions offered to you.
   
   
3. Surveys should be available in a variety of delivery methods.  Completing surveys online has to be an option; it is the least expensive approach.  But not everybody in an organization may have computer access.  However, it seems like all employees have a phone in their pocket or nearby, so calling in survey responses should also be a choice.  If all else fails, be sure you can still hand out a paper survey and get responses added to the database.
   
   
4. Report information should be real time and immediately available.  It is amazing that in this computer age many vendors try to convince their clients it will take weeks or months to return the results of information captured today.  A quality survey delivery system gathers the information, gets it into a data base and has the results available instantly.
   
   
5. Reports should be numerous and customizable.  You should expect to have information specific to a manager, an organization as a whole or in any segment.  Information should be divisible by a multitude of demographics such as location, manager, job type, age group, sex or other personal characteristics.  Information should be deliverable in numerous formats and you should have the customization options to slice that data as you choose.  Expect powerful reports that will meet your organization’s needs and reflect your professional approach to supporting the strategies you deliver.
   
   
6. Be sure you’re not just offered a list of numerical questions.  Employees should be offered the option to provide comments.  These should also be able to be customized.  You may want fill-in-the-blank comments specific to certain topics or general in nature.
   
   
7. Expect a reasonable price.  The low cost option may not give you the best of products, but the high cost options are just that, you are often paying for the vendor’s name, and the survey and reports offer no more than other competitors, sometimes far less.
   
   

One last recommendation, and yes we recognize how self serving this is; use a vendor.  Employees want the assurance of confidentiality they can only feel if they are giving their opinions to someone outside the organization.  They want to give honest information, not their name.  A quality vendor will never offer individual results.  Vendors build powerful platforms with information gathering approaches and reports that a home-built system can never compete with; see a demonstration then compare. 

What will you tell your CEO?  If you adopt the ideas offered here, you will explain you researched the market, found a formidable employee survey, and now you have gathered data you are excited to present and have used to create strategies you are ready to present.  Thank you for continuing to raise the reputation of the human resources profession.