What makes employees decide to leave? In most cases, employees make incremental choices that lead to their departure long before they give their two weeks’ notice. Understanding these retention checkpoints can help your organization build hiring, management, and recognition processes to find and keep employees.
Join BambooHR and The Predictive Index for insights on helping your employees stay engaged and productive through all the checkpoints of their career—from great beginnings, to graceful exits, and throughout the exciting, productive journey in between.
4. Employees ask two questions:
Can I do this job? Do I want to do this job?
Employee Empowerment Employee Engagement
1 2
predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
5. Employee Empowerment
When employers ensure that employees have
all the skills, resources, and connections needed
to accomplish their job duties.
predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
10. Teams that are engaged are:
More Productive
More Profitable
More Innovative
Why We Care
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Less likely to leave the company
Less likely to have quality incidents
Less likely to have safety incidents
13. predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
In the U.S., the composite
engagement rate is 71%.
Annual Employee Engagement Report 2019
www.predictiveindex.com/engagement2019
2019 Employee Engagement Report
14. People feel more satisfied with their jobs and their co-workers
and less satisfied with their managers and their organizations.
2019 Employee Engagement Report
Annual Employee Engagement Report 2019 | www.predictiveindex.com/engagement2019
predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
15. 2019 Employee Engagement Report
9 of the top 10 drivers
of turnover pertain to
the organization.
Annual Employee Engagement Report 2019
www.predictiveindex.com/engagement2019
predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
17. Conducting an engagement survey
1. Commit to taking action on the results
2. Plan ahead on the communication plan
3. Conduct the survey
4. Analyze the results
5. Communicate the outcomes and next steps
6. Take action
7. Diagnose
predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
18. Yes Not Now No
Help employees feel heard
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19. Communicate at the Right Level
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● Issues to address during onboarding
● Issues for managers to resolve on an individual basis
during conversations
● Issues to address with specific departments
● Issues to resolve with a company-wide announcement
21. Collect data with exit interviews.
● Why are you leaving?
● If you were to be offered the job again, what
changes would have made it a fit?
● Get feedback on their whole tenure.
predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
22. BURNED OUT EXCELLING
TOXIC UNINSPIRED
Unempowered Empowered
DisengagedEngaged
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23. predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
Candidate Experience Evaluation
● Sourcing Reports
○ Post & Pray vs. Targeted Sourcing
● Pre-boarding
○ eSignatures sent in advance
○ Icebreaker survey
● First Day Optimization
○ Orientation
○ New hire checklist
○ Team lunch
● Extended Onboarding
● New Hire Survey
25. predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
Performance Management
● Regular informal feedback from managers and coworkers
● Monthly one-on-one meetings between manager and employee
● Regular follow-up on employee goals
● Employee self-evaluations and peer feedback every six months
26. Managers account for 70 percent of
variance in employee engagement levels.
predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
27. 58 percent of managers reported
receiving no management training.
predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
28.
29. Checkpoints for existing employees
● Annual compensation review
● Regular career pathing conversations
● Stay interviews
predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
30. ● What are your professional goals for the next six months?
● What job tasks do you enjoy the least?
● What job tasks do you enjoy the most?
● Do you feel that your job tasks are using all of your talents
and skills effectively?
Career Trajectory Questions
predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
31. ● What are the strongest motivators that make you want to come to work
every morning?
● What are some of the things that make you not want to come to work?
● What do you appreciate most about our workplace/team?
● What are the biggest things that prevent you from getting your work
done?
Career Trajectory Questions
predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
32. ● Do you understand why we use our practices and processes
in the workplace?
● What would you change about our practices and processes?
● If you moved to a new position, what would it be?
Career Trajectory Questions
predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
33.
34. ● Identifying the cause of turnover starts with analyzing
employee data
● Targeted hiring, performance management, and high-level
strategy all play a part in employee engagement
● Employees need to be heard, empowered, and engaged
Key Takeaways
predictiveindex.combamboohr.com
35. Questions?
Receive a free job posting on our ATS and full HRIS for one week.
We will contact everyone within the next few days to set this up.
Try our job assessment to make your next hire the right hire.
https://go1.predictiveindex.com/request-job-assessment-demo
SHELLY:
We're excited to be partnering with the Predictive Index on today’s webinar - Employee Retention Strategies: Data-Based Checkpoints for Turnover Management.
We have some really great content for you today, but before we get to know our presenters a little more, we have a few housekeeping items to cover.
First off, we’re happy you’re joining us today! Please feel free to submit questions throughout the webinar using the chat feature on the interface. We will have a Q&A session at the end of the webinar, time permitting, and will address as many questions as we can.
Also, we will be sending out a copy of the slide deck and a recording of the webinar to all registrants within three business days, so check your inbox for that. Make sure to also check your spam folder if you don’t see it hit your inbox as some filters move our emails there.
Lastly, this webinar does qualify for 1 hour of SHRM credit. If you attend for at least 50 minutes of today’s panel, you’ll automatically receive that certification information within the next three business days. Our system tracks your time automatically, so you shouldn’t need to worry about tracking your time.
JD and KRISTEN to intro themselves: (Kristen starts)
JD Conway - Head of Talent Acquisition at BambooHR
JD has over a decade of experience in talent acquisition acting as both a third-party recruiter for boutique technical recruiting firms and as an in-house technical recruiter. His work includes managing talent acquisition teams in high-growth SaaS companies and servicing Fortune 500 clients for the world’s largest recruiting corporation. From organizational health and development to recruitment marketing and employer branding, JD has used his expertise to change the very way companies structure and view the functions of talent acquisition.
For those of you not familiar, BambooHR is an all-in-one HR software designed to streamline how small-to-medium sized organizations collect, maintain, and use people data & analytics. People are at the heart of everything we do and this extends to every step of the employee lifecycle. So, in addition to tracking your people data and helping you make sense of that data, BambooHR includes solutions for hiring, onboarding, compensation, and most importantly for our conversation today, culture.
Kristen Robertson - People Operations Manager at The Predictive Index
Kristen is the People Operations Manager at The Predictive Index. She leads a team of talent optimizers that are responsible for collecting people data and taking action so that current and prospective employees can have the best experience at work. Kristen also works cross-functionally with managers on performance management programs and ensures that everyone has sufficient growth opportunities.
JD:
Have you ever been in an exit interview that you never saw coming?
Someone who seemed solid and dependable, someone who was doing great work?
It’s at these points that you wonder what happened and try to find out where your organization went wrong.
But by this point, there’s little you can do to encourage employees to stay. Why?
Because the circumstances that led to this decision happened over time. Small changes in direction made the employee’s path branch out further and further from your organization.
Today, we’re going to go through the employee journey and find ways to recognize the points where your organization can make the biggest difference in encouraging employees to stay.
These points range from beginning to end, from the hiring process all the way through the exit interview.
Because there are so many possible exit points, it’s important to use data to differentiate the signal from the noise, as Charles Wheelan put it in his book.
Using data helps you recognize the difference between turnover from a bad hire and turnover because good hires are having a poor experience.
While these decisions can be complicated taken all together, from the beginning to end, employees are asking themselves two simple questions:
JD:
How they answer these questions determines their next steps.
These questions pair with two essential concepts in HR: Employee empowerment and employee engagement.
And just so we’re not leaving viewers in the dark and talking lingo, we’re going to define these terms as we go along:
**More on delineation
JD:
This is when employers ensure that employees have all of the skills, resources, and connections needed to accomplish their job duties.
This doesn’t mean that you have to have perfect candidates, an unlimited budget, and perfect managers that can do anything.
Hiring vs. Training for skills
Soft skills vs. hard skills
But you do need to have the skills, resources, and structure to accomplish your organization’s specific mission and vision.
JD:
Mission: the reason your organization exists (aside from normal daily operations).
Are you a non-profit that serves single mothers in the chicago area?
Are you a hedge fund with the goal of maximizing returns for your investors?
Are you a software developer dedicated to creating better places to work through core HR software and unparalleled service? Or maybe you’re a talent optimization platform that empowers business leaders to align your people to your business strategy? In case you were wondering, those were the mission statements for BambooHR and Predictive Index.
After establishing your mission, you can develop a vision:
JD:
Vision: Where you want to go.
This is a result: become the #1 recommended HR software for SMBs. Reduce childhood hunger in the metro area by 10% annually.
JD:
And one more: Values: This is how your organization achieves your vision.
Off the top of your head, you can probably think of organizations that exemplify greed, philanthropy, innovation, support, customer service, or any number of other principles.
Whether or not these organizations listed them explicitly as values, their actions have shown what they value.
Defining your ideal mission, vision, and values is the first step to developing empowered employees. These guideposts help your organization and your employees discover what needs to change to align their performance with the results you’re after.
This perspective helps shift the ideal situation from finding perfection in the moment to finding the right path for everyone to progress. Or as we say in one of BambooHR’s values, to grow from good to great.
The other half of the equation is employee engagement.
KRISTEN:
Employee Engagement: The emotional commitment to the company and its goals. It’s the shorthand for determining whether you’re getting the most out of your hires. When you have engaged people, you’re teams are more productive, profitable and innovative.
KRISTEN:
When you have engaged people, you’re teams are more productive, profitable and innovative. When your employees are more engaged, you have a higher likelihood of having a workforce that exhibits discretionary effort, or the effort given above and beyond just getting the job done. The more your employees are engaged at work, the easier it’s going to be for them to want to get out of bed in the morning and contribute each day. It’s a win-win.
KRISTEN:
Job, people, managers and organization are the four leading indicators as to why someone might LEAVE your org. You can measure engagement in relation to 4 categories: their job, other people at work, their manager and leadership, and the organization as a whole, which includes the company culture. When someone feels disconnected to one of these four categories, it makes total engagement, or again, the commitment to an organization, very difficult.
KRISTEN:
Engagement vs satisfaction: Engagement measures whether you’re hiring the right people for the organization and giving them the right opportunities and challenges in their work to be more productive. It’s a long-term feeling (3-6 months) that gets people actively thinking about their goals in the job/organization and working towards them.
Satisfaction is more of short-term feeling. An organization may offer an employee a job, benefits, culture etc., that they are happy with in the moment, but it doesn’t necessarily motivate people to perform to the best of their ability.
We recently conducted a survey of 3000 employees across multiple industries to narrow down the biggest drivers of engagement and turnover. Some key findings:
KRISTEN:
The composite engagement rate in the US is 71%
KRISTEN:
People are more satisfied with their jobs and coworkers than their managers and organizations
Again, satisfaction is more of the short-term feeling
**JD - We tend to look for swift “band-aids” in HR to increase engagement, when really we’re applying short-term actions to solve long-term problems
KRISTEN:
Yet, 9 out of the 10 top engagement drivers involve the company and its senior leaders (#1 being “I believe my organization has an outstanding future)
This includes: faith in and personal alignment with the organization’s mission and leadership
Growth and learning opportunities for employees
Positive culture
Transparency and communication
But it’s important to remember the point of any efforts to evaluate engagement is not just to determine if it’s good or bad.
KRISTEN:
The results are neon signs that tell you if you are headed in the right direction, and what areas you need to work on. The point of engagement surveys is to take action. The action may be creating a change initiative, but it can also point to more people data that you SHOULD be collecting or digging into. For example, your engagement survey could point to dissatisfaction with benefits. Your follow up activity might then be to review your benefits package and get qualitative feedback from existing and exiting employees on what aspects of the benefits package wasn’t fulfilling employees’ expectations.
What other people data do I need to collect?
What changes need to be made?
Are these problems specific to a certain group, or is it widespread
KRISTEN:
Conducting an engagement survey:
Make sure you’re committed to taking action because there’s no better way to lose your people’s trust than to conduct a survey and then do nothing about the results.
Get buy-in from senior leadership by letting them know that this is one of the few ways for the company leaders to learn about what’s really happening in the organization. Engagement creates productivity, which leads to results.
Leadership can also help set the tone of trust across the organization that the company cares about the survey results and will act on them if provided honest feedback.
Taking action here doesn’t have to be large, sweeping changes. Something as simple as communicating the survey findings and letting people know that you’re digging deeper into the data can help make employees feel heard.
Create a communication plan:
How will you communicate to employees about the survey and encourage them to take it/trust the organization?
How/When will the results be communicated? Who will communicate the results?
How will the action plan be announced and implemented so that it has the impact that it’s meant to? (There’s nothing less effective than making a change and not telling anyone about it)
Conduct the survey
Determine what questions to ask, or not ask (i.e. things you won’t act on, vague questions, things that make employees too identifiable)
Take a look at your organization and ask yourself “what data points might be related to engagement, satisfaction, performance management?”
Again, instill trust with employees by communicating that this is an action-oriented initiative and that they won’t be punished for their feedback.
Analyze the results, look for themes, and take action
If there are many areas where you didn’t score well, take it piece by piece and start with one initiative.
The action, again, might be that you need to collect more data about a particular topic. This could be in the form of having candid conversations with employees throughout the organization for feedback, or putting it as a data point to make sure to collect for the future. A good talent function comes up with informed hypotheses and goes back to test them against qualitative feedback.
Communicate the action plan to employees and what next steps you will take or they need to take.
Loop back to this engagement driver in the next engagement survey and see if the dial has moved.
JD:
Sometimes the only action that needs to happen is additional communication to clear up misunderstandings or provide reasoning.
But it can be just as important to make sure that employees understand the difference between “Yes” “No” and “not now”, especially when dealing with benefits and culture.
Example: asking for a change in the PTO policy: employees want it now
Organization might not have the budget
The immediate action will be to introduce it to the leadership conversation
Then leadership can review information with all the knowledge not available to every employee.
These apply to decisions on benefits, hiring, everything down to putting spoons in the break room.
Having strong tie-ins to your values helps make this communication easier
Why no spoons in the break room? We’re doing the right thing for the oceans and doing the right thing for our building maintenance budget.
JD:
Not every decision needs a company-wide announcement. Part of this conversation should decide whether to
address the issue during onboarding,
Train managers to resolve the issue on an individual basis as employees come to them,
Meet with departments who have specific concerns
Make a company-wide announcement
How you choose to communicate these decisions should help employees see the link between leadership decisions and the organization’s values.
Trans: How you communicate will also help employees understand aligned in the long-term with the company.
KRISTEN:
You have to differentiate between healthy vs unhealthy turnover (and voluntary vs involuntary turnover)- an employee may have a great experience at the company and just need to look outside of the company because that’s the next step in their career path. Though there can still be pain and messiness around the exit and having to fill the position, it’s a very different kind of turnover than someone who leave due to disengagement/dissatisfaction or inability to perform in the job.
Turnover is a great place to get objective data on why people leave. Are people leaving because of an issue of skill or will? (aka do they not have the skill for the job (which points to a problem in the hiring process), or are they able to do the job, but won’t (which may point to problems in management, or the team dynamics)? Use your turnover as an opportunity to gather more data to make sure you’re not consistently losing good people for the same reasons
KRISTEN:
Ask consistent questions
Make sure you’re asking questions you’re willing to act on. Listen for whether the feedback is specific to their experience, or something that multiple people have mentioned. Use this feedback to either take action, or get more data through subsequent surveys. Above all else: ask questions that will help determine the WHY: why is this person willing to leave the organization? Why are they looking for another opportunity? What could we have done to prevent this from happening if it was an unexpected separation? Ask questions around the four engagement factors: job, people, manager and org, to help determine if these employee’s departures are connected to a larger engagement issue.
JD:
As you review the contents of your exit interviews, you’ll start to notice patterns in exiting employees’ performance and engagement levels.
Four quadrants of turnover - Engaged/Competent (Empowered?) matrix
Engaged/Empowered - the star employee, one who has the will to do the work and the structural support/buy-in to accomplish it. They rev the engines, their managers point them where to go, and they get going.
Engaged/Unempowered - the underutilized employee, the one who would go further and lead from where they are with more support.
These employees exist in spite of their circumstances, the martyrs that are willing to stomach poor management due to other parts of the work that keep them engaged
Over time, it becomes a battle of whether the factors that engage are enough to overcome the sources of their disengagement.
A good example: Teachers
40% of American teachers leave the teaching profession within five years after feeling the effects of long hours, little sleep, and near-constant criticism from administrators, parents, and students alike.
Of nearly 7,000 teachers who completed the Teacher Burnout Assessment Tool on notwaitingforsuperman.org, 38% reported regular headaches and stomach pains. heart palpitations, chest pain, dizziness, and shortness of breath.
And to top it off, teachers in many areas have to contend with low salaries.
Disengaged/Empowered - the reluctant employee in a competent leadership structure. This employee follows instructions and does the bare minimum to keep their salary/benefits, but doesn’t work on stretching or growing.
Gallup labeled these employees as “not engaged” in their annual global engagement surveys, and they’re consistently the largest group of employees.
These employees are highly vulnerable to competing offers
Disengaged/Unempowered - These are the toxic employees who not only can’t do the job, but won’t do the job. Ideally, managing your hiring and performance can limit the number of employees who end up in this category.
Easy it is to slide quadrants -
JD:
Now that you’ve evaluated some of what’s contributing to your turnover, you can go back through the employee life cycle and analyze the checkpoints to see where these issues start popping up. Let’s start with hiring.
Indicators that hiring is the problem:
Multiple employees with short tenure
Additional point from JD
Sourcing Reports
Post & Pray vs. Targeted Sourcing
Pre-boarding
eSignatures Sent in Advance
First Day Optimization
Orientation
New Hire Checklist
Team Lunch
Extended Onboarding
New Hire Survey
Retention numbers (BHR Case Study)
Trans: Now it’s time to really start tracking performance and setting expectations
KRISTEN:
Onboarding lasts 90+ days
Check in with their performance, their experience and their goals
Make sure the manager and the employee are 100% on the same page. Goals and expectations are clearly defined...helps create more trust in the relationship
JD:
BHR case - This regular attention to employee performance does double duty:
It helps empower employees with the resources they need to do their jobs
And it helps engage employees by showing the organization is invested in their performance.
After you set the pattern during onboarding, it’s important to continue it with regular performance management conversations.
JD:
Here are a couple of unsettling facts:
Research from Gallup has shown that managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement in the organization, whether for good or ill.
JD:
But a study by CareerBuilder.com shows that 58 percent of managers said they didn’t receive any management training.
How many managers in your organization are promoted based on tenure or ability in their everyday work?
Using management as a form of recognition works well if the manager in question has the needed skills or the capacity to develop them.
Without developing these skills or receiving direction from leadership, managers are left on their own to figure out what it means to be a manager.
Results can range from the soul-sucking micromanager to the laissez-faire loner to the permissive weakling who fears confrontation, with a few natural leaders mixed in.
If your organization is going to have consistent performance management across teams and departments, then you need a structure. developing a structure for performance management doesn’t just make managers’ jobs easier.
A structure also helps them deliver regular performance management that advances your organization toward its mission and vision while upholding your values.
JD:
This is one of the main reasons BambooHR developed a performance management module alongside our core HR software.
We recognized the difference that software made in the lives of busy HR managers when they had a central location to store people data without relying on spreadsheets, email chains, and crowded inboxes.
Making this change in their process gave them back time, and that gave them space for more effective efforts.
Managers can see the same benefit with the data they need to be concerned about: their employee performance notes.
The point of a performance meeting shouldn’t be to excuse or defend behavior, but to solve issues in real time so employees can learn and grow.
Trans: And there are particular checkpoints that we need to have on a regular basis.
KRISTEN:
It’s important to continuously keep your ear to the ground for feedback. Purpose of a stay interview is to determine an employee’s satisfaction and engagement, mostly as it relates to their job, but other areas of opportunity could come up during a stay interview. One could ask questions such as:
What’s something you absolutely love about your current job?
What’s something you wish you could change about your job?
Do you feel any of your talents/strengths aren’t currently being utilized?
Is there anything that would make you want to leave your job/org?
JD:
We have a few recommended questions for these career path interviews.
These questions help determine if your employee feels like they have an opportunity to do what they do best, every day:
What are your professional goals for the next six months?
What job tasks do you enjoy the least?
What job tasks do you enjoy the most?
Do you feel that your job tasks are using all of your talents and skills effectively?
JD:
These questions help determine their collaboration skills:
What are the strongest motivators that make you want to come to work every morning?
What are some of the things that make you not want to come to work?
What do you appreciate most about our workplace/team?
What are the biggest things that prevent you from getting your work done?
JD:
These questions help determine if an employee believes in the company’s mission:
Do you understand why we use our practices and processes in the workplace?
What would you change about our practices and processes?
If you moved to a new position, what would it be?
Tracking the answers to these questions and reviewing them during one-on-ones can help reassure employees that their long-term trajectory is on the right path while reassuring managers and leadership that the organization is putting employees’ skills to their best use.
(Read Questions)
JD:
Employees need to know that their organization-level concerns are heard just as well as their immediate concerns.One tool to help with this process is what we call an employee Net Promoter Score, or eNPS an eNPS survey consists of two simple questions. The first is a straightforward rating system:
On a scale of 1-10, how much would you recommend (your organization) as a place to work?
This question lets you divide employees into three groups:
promoters who gave you a 9 or 10,
neutrals who gave you between 6 and 8, and
detractors who gave you a lower score than 6 (equivalent to an F on your company report card).
After processing these results, the survey gives a free-form field that encourages promoters to write what they like about their workplace, and neutrals and detractors to write what would make their workplace better.
When kept anonymous, this survey data can get unfiltered feedback about manager performance or other blind spots that employees may be too kind or awkward to bring up directly.
Trans: And this is one of the final, necessary steps to have gather comprehensive data, distill that same data, and give you action checkpoints that you should be building into your day to day.
SHARED:
Identifying turnover causes starts with analyzing employee data
Targeted hiring, performance management, and high-level strategy all play a part in employee engagement
Employees need to be heard, empowered, and engaged
You can’t keep every employee. But as you make your organization a great place to work, you can help your employees grow from good to great. And as you do, your organization will follow suit.
SHELLY:
Thank you again for joining us for today’s webinar - we hope you’ve been able to get some great takeaways that you can start implementing in your organization to improve your recruiting and retention. If you enjoyed today’s webinar, check out our content library for more great webinars!
As a reminder, we’ll be sending out the recording and slide deck from today’s webinar to all registrants within the next three business days, so be watching your inbox and spam folder for that. We’ll also automatically send out SHRM credit to anyone who attended for at least 50 minutes today.
SHELLY:
We want to give a big shout out to our partner The Predictive Index - thanks for teaming up with us on today’s webinar and for sharing your insights and best practices.
Please make sure to reach out to our presenters on LinkedIn - they’d love to connect with you. And follow BambooHR and The Predictive Index on social media. We both regularly deliver great content that can help elevate your teams and organizations and would love to see you at our next webinar.