How would you feel about a higher employee retention rate in your organization?
Have you really thought about employee burnout and retention costs and the impact they have on your bottom line?
Employee burnout and ultimately employee turnover are a trillion dollar a year cost to companies and to the economy.
Your company is probably losing a fortune because of burnout and turnover.
How much is burnout and employee turnover costing you?
About 41 million employees, one quarter of all workers, will leave their job this year and go work somewhere else. Three out of four workers who quit, last year could have been retained by their employers if they had a few core skills and strategies.
Burnout and disengagement cost to companies amount to the hundreds of billions annually in lost productivity, healthcare, and legal costs alone.
When left unchecked, the cost of employee turnover can add up quickly. Organizations foot the bill for direct exit costs whenever a person quits, but you also cover the costs around recruitment, productivity, training, knowledge, morale and more.
Click here to use our Employee Turnover Cost Calculator
See how much your company can save by re-engaging employees to reduce burnout & turnover.
Turnover costs can range from $7300 each, for a frontline entry level retail worker, to $13,800 each, for a seasoned retail worker, to $122,000 or more per lost employee, for a highly skilled salesperson, manager, engineer or other professional.
Bottom line – high employee turnover hurts your company’s bottom line.
Research indicates that gross turnover costs typically begin at about 23% of total annual compensation for front line workers (including salary, benefits, taxes, overhead, etc.). Turnover costs can average as high as 238% of someone’s total annual compensation if they are a driver of revenue, serve a critical role, or have highly specialized skillsets.
Employee turnover can be costly, yet many companies fail to recognize it as a priority until it is too late.
Ongoing churn of your workforce can also damage morale among remaining employees leading to more burnout, disengagement, and loss of productivity.
Additionally, in the current economy, jobs, especially those requiring advanced skillsets or unique creative or technical abilities, outnumber job seekers for the first time on record.
What’s worse, the departure of just one or two top performers can trigger a subsequent spiral of recurrent and cascading turnover in your organization.
When unemployment is low and there is a skilled labor shortage, like in the current market, employees are much more likely to leave their jobs in search of something better.
Not unlike what a business trying to get and keep customers, employers must now work harder to recruit and retain the best employees as well.
Research indicates that more than half of all employees in the United States are actively searching for a new job.
But, interestingly… no one writes a check to “turnover” or “burnout”.
Companies simply indirectly pay the costs of these silent business killers.
Sadly, with the coming talent crunch due to retiring baby-boomers, your employee retention rates promise only to get worse without intervention.
Turnover rates for all industries taken together hover around 13-14%. In law firms nearly 20% of new associates leave in any given year and 17 out of 25 new hires don’t last.
And turnover rates are far higher in the service sector, including restaurants, hotels and retail, where the average turnover is upwards of 31% annually- one in three workers having to be replaced each year.
The retention crisis has already intensified as Millennials, who are notorious for job hopping, have taken their central role in the workforce. It will undoubtedly only intensify even more as Gen Z becomes a larger part of the workforce.
Unless you learn to eliminate burnout and prevent turnover before they happen – which can be done, the costs to your company will be staggering.
When you learn the tools, skills, insights and strategies to minimize employee burnout and employee turnover – the cost savings, efficiency gains, productivity gains and ultimately profits you put back in the company pockets will have massive value.
With that in mind, we will provide your two powerful examples – the first a tale of terrible engagement and high turnover, and the second, the story of a company that got it right.
We will break down what made the difference and give you concrete tips and strategies to eliminate burnout and minimize turnover in your company.
Story #1 – How to ensure ongoing turnover & massive burnout.
This is the story of a large law firm that hired the top law students out of the top universities across the country and lost virtually every associate it hired that year.
It’s a story that shows us how costly turnover happens, not just in law firms, but in companies just like yours as well.
It’s the story of people and an organization with the bests of intentions, who lacked the systems and skills necessary to eliminate burnout and turnover.
It begins with the hiring process itself. Many young law school graduates don’t really want to practice law at a big firm. Unfortunately for this firm, several of their new hires fell into this category.
Most were excited about their new careers and showed up on the first day fully committed to the firm.
But there was a problem. The onboarding was terrible. It started late. It was a boring mix of surface training on the computer systems and a rote walk through the office with perfunctory greetings of key leaders.
The best members of the firm weren’t even involved because they were too busy working that day to greet the new hires and welcome them.
And with that, the new recruits were left to figure out for themselves what to do.
A few days later, several of them were sent to work at a clients remote litigation support center a few hours from the main office under the pretense of it being a two week document production project.
That two-week document production project was continually extended over and over, but without a clear end in site.
It was monotonous work that didn’t require great thought or expertise, but because of the nature of the case could only be done by attorneys as all documents were “attorneys eyes only.” And while everyone knew it would go on forever, the leaders kept saying it would just be another month. Again. And again. And again.
Needless to say, this impacted morale. People who lived near the office and had planned a life with a 30 minute commute, were now facing a two hour commute which was soon replaced by a life living at the Ramada rather than spending four hours in the car each day.
The young associates, at first, worked hard and made the best of it. But there was no attention paid to their development. There was no concern demonstrated for their growth or their career path. Worse yet, there were ongoing lies about how long the project would continue.
And the partner on site leading the project was often completely disengaged and didn’t really like her job or managing the team — unless she was under pressure because of deadlines. Then she would be fully engaged to micromanage the team, often standing over their shoulders while they worked, or giving specific directions that were at best uninspiring and at worst condescending or insulting.
As the project grew beyond the firm’s ability to handle, they actually hired contract attorneys to assist and required the associates to supervise them as well.
It turns out that the 80 hour work weeks for the associates resulted in no overtime or bonuses, but the contract workers with lesser skills who were being managed by the full time associates were making literally 65% more money because they were getting over time. It was demoralizing and insulting to the full time associates who felt like they were being taken advantage of and mistreated.
There was no effort made to rotate associates in and out of other projects so they could gain experience to further their careers.
There was no effort to provide training and development.
Senior leaders were completely disconnected and showed up once every few months with pomp and circumstance to take everyone to lunch and have superficial conversation.
Senior leaders were exceptionally poor role models as well.
One senior partner was proud that he was at work while his wife was in the hospital having cancer surgery because he believed it demonstrated work ethic. When an associate’s wife needed a surgery and he put in for the week off months in advance, the partner’s answer was “we’ll see what we can do, depending on work loads that week.”
They threw free lunch at the team and dinners at the hotel saying “spend whatever you like,” assuming that this so called perk would make everyone happy. It didn’t. The angrier and more resentful they became, the more they spent on meals.
Eventually, every single associate on that team quit the firm within the first year and a half of being hired. Most waiting until they completed the first year to ensure they received the promised “bonuses”.
Within a few months after receiving the “bonus”, which proved underwhelming to most, every single first year associate had quit. And many others as well.
The problem was that the leaders of that firm were attorneys, not trained leaders or trained & skilled business managers.
They made many mistakes because they hadn’t the training in the skills needed nor the systems needed to minimize burnout and minimize turnover.
Their mistakes included:
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- Poor hiring decisions
- Failure to set appropriate expectations
- Poor onboarding process
- Poor management & leadership
- Poor communication
- No role models
- No true mentorship
- Lack of clarity of roles & goals
- Failed to value & appreciate their employees
- Didn’t invest in training & development of employees
- Didn’t have connection with their employees
- Didn’t foster sense of team
- Didn’t show path of growth for employees
- Didn’t care about employee development
- Didn’t compensate fairly for the job and work actually being done
- Didn’t know how workers felt
- Management was completely out of touch
- They were reactive, not proactive.
In the short run, they were primarily focused on doing what they could to provide what their clients needed moment by moment, and to be able to generate billable hours.
But in the longer run, because they didn’t focus on and invest in their employees, they had massive ongoing turnover.
In time, it grew worse. The firm’s reputation was damaged among recruits and their ability to recruit the top talent was diminished, ultimately leading to negative longer-term results and continuing massive turnover costs.
Story #2 – How to minimize burnout and virtually eliminate turnover
This is the story of a company that was expanding rapidly and hiring dozens of new advertising salespeople. It is the story of leaders and managers who did it right.
They were clear in their ads about what they were looking for so the people coming through the doors for interviews were a good fit from the start.
They had a strong screening process to ensure the potential hires fit and wanted not just a job, but that job.
Prior to arrival on their first day, new employees were given phone calls to set expectation, build connection and provide useful orientation information.
When they arrived on day one, their desks, computers and everything they needed was set up and ready for them.
They were welcomed by all key team members and given motivational training to get them rolling. There was excitement in the office about their arrival and in general.
They hit the ground running and were given one on one and group training to make sure they had the skills and strategies needed to be successful. The company was not afraid to invest in making sure they had the skills and support they needed.
The first days were long but filled with purposeful activity that required each new hire to dig deep.
Once they were prepared they immediately dove into meaningful work.
There was clarity about their role and what was expected of them in terms of day-to-day behavior metrics and specific goals/outcomes they needed to hit on a weekly and monthly basis.
Their manager loved the company, loved the work, loved her team and was passionate about the company and it’s mission. She shared this passion with her team and made conscious and intentional efforts to get to know and connect personally with each new team member.
The work was intense and demanding. Deadlines included extreme pressure. But she made sure they felt like they were a team and would succeed together. There were team rituals that were fun and playful and took the edge off when pressure was high.
She made sure on an ongoing basis they had access to exceptional training to become better and to be more successful.
She provided positive feedback regularly and coached periodically where there was weakness. She listened to her team. Really listened. When they had needs she could meet and requests she could fulfill, she made them happen quickly.
When she had to draw boundaries, enforce rules or put pressure on the team because of deadlines or business needs she did so with fairness, compassion and consistency.
There was focus and planning on what the future would hold for the company and for each team member.
Some would choose to be salespeople indefinitely with clear direction and focus upon earnings growth potential. Others would be groomed and trained for leadership & management positions.
Bonus structures were clear and well designed to align incentives.
They were regular enough to create excitement and substantial enough to make an impact. They were also difficult enough to foster the positive competitive drive to succeed.
Team members were afforded flexibility and autonomy as long as they hit their numbers, leading to people truly taking ownership and responsibility.
When goals were hit or deadlines met, they had parities and celebrations. Over time they co-created additional company traditions and rituals through which the entire team connected.
Success, and credit for that success, was shared.
And when there were setbacks and failures, which happened on occasion, there was open and honest discussion of how to fix it. There was an environment where personal responsibility and accountability were the standard – the rule, not the exception.
The team members developed close friendships because they faced and overcame obstacles together and were in a work environment where they could be authentic, accepted and valued.
The team became even more unified because they came to feel they were one team battling hard against their competitor. They felt that their product & service was superior to that of the competition, seeking and finding ways to continually improve and ensure that they always would be superior.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was exceptional. There was still stress. There was still pressure. There were still problems. But at the core, the team had an unshakeable sense of purpose, an exceptional feeling of clarity, and a powerful sense of connection. Burnout was nonexistent and turnover was virtually inconceivable.
Takeaways from both of these stories are powerful. You can reduce employee burnout and employee turnover and save your company tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, while making your team happier, more engaged and more productive.
The 16 Keys to Eliminating Employee Burnout and Employee Turnover
1. Hire the Right People
It may seem obvious, but many companies spend too little time and effort getting clear on what they need in their people.
Clarity about job scope, duties and responsibilities as well as the skills & abilities required to do it well are the first step in ensuring that whoever is hired will stay for the long term.
Deeper than that, having clarity on your company or departments values, work style, and culture are critical – a good fit here increases the likelihood of a longer term relationship.
You want to hire someone with the right attitude in general, and the desire to be a part of your team & your mission specifically. They should have hard skills that are required and should have the potential to learn and develop the additional soft skills that will be needed to succeed.
The old adage, measure twice and cut once definitely applies to hiring. Every job has someone who will hate it and someone else who will be thrilled doing it. Find the people who have a high likelihood of being thrilled with the position you provide.
2. Onboard Well
The onboarding process is another seemingly obvious area which many organizations should have well in hand, but a surprising portion of the time a failure here leads to burnout or turnover down the road because the solid foundation is not in place from the start.
Make sure you provide realistic expectations. Be ready with space, systems and people on your new employee’s first day. Train on pivotal skills first and make sure the training is exceptional.
Have a solid orientation process and be clear on expectations both from the employee and from your organization and your leadership/management team. Create excitement.
A disproportionate number of employees who work a short first day are less engaged and less committed going forward, when compare to those who dive into a compelling or challenging project or training on day one.
Whenever possible make sure new employees do a lot of work and have an intense and long first day. This sets the precedent of effort and engagement going forward. Few things are more satisfying than diving in deep together on a compelling project from the start.
3. Train Well, Train Early and Train Often
Investing in your people is one of the best investments you can make.
They should receive high quality training on specific job related hard skills. They should also receive powerful training on the soft skills that allow them to be better team members, better leaders, better problem solvers, and better communicators.
These skills improve cohesion and productivity internally, and are critical for any employee who is customer facing or drives revenue and sales.
“What if we invest in our people and they leave?” you ask.
What if you don’t invest in them and they stay?
Training and development ROI is always substantial when the training is high quality, expertly led, and delivers practical skills, tools and insights.
This is the area where companies often make a major mistake. They invest too little thought in what kind of expertise and training is needed, and worse, allocate too little budget to procure quality.
Employees can tell when you have skimped on the quality and expertise. Most people want to learn, grow and improve and appreciate the opportunity to gain useful skills, strategies and abilities.
4. Make Sure You Have Extraordinary Role Models
Exemplary role models and true mentors are pivotal to employee retention, employee satisfaction, and ultimately employee productivity. Make sure your senior team is up to the task.
Taking someone to a perfunctory lunch and having superficial conversation is not the answer. We have to actually be interested in knowing our team and care about their growth and wellbeing.
Mentoring is a skillset. It requires the ability to understand emotions and what makes people tick, so we can truly understand the feelings and perspective of the person we hope to lead. It requires the ability to communicate, to influence, to persuade, to coach and to inspire.
These skills must be learned, practiced and mastered to become a truly great mentor.
When employees feel like they have a true mentor interested in the development, they will go the extra mile for your team and your organization.
5. Have Clear, Effective and Open Communication
How you communicate is as important as what you communicate.
Transparency is crucial, not just to improve employee retention, but for your organization to be highly functional in general.
Transparency breeds trust. Trust is critical to team function. This doesn’t mean sharing confidential or non-public strategically valuable information. It doesn’t mean giving away trade secrets. It doesn’t mean sharing every detail of your thoughts with every employee, nor does it mean sharing your confidential acquisition plans.
It’s more in defining your default mindset.
Rather than asking “Do I really need to share this info with the team?” ask yourself “Do I have a compelling reason why I must keep this info from the team?”
If there is a good reason to keep something secret, by all means do so. But absent a good reason for withholding, the default of sharing with your team creates an environment of mutual trust and clarity.
Transparency breeds trust. Trust breeds collaboration and dedication. Communicating openly and clearly with your team, is one of the most powerful ways to keep employees happy and engaged. It also makes them stick around for the long term.
Providing expert training so that your leaders learn, understand and master the keys to communication is a powerful tool in minimizing turnover.
The ability to effectively persuade, engage, inspire and motivate your team is a cornerstone of highly functional organizations.
Skills in emotional intelligence also play a powerful role in minimizing burnout. Understanding the key drivers of human behavior and personality are also highly valuable to leaders who want to minimize burnout and turnover.
6. Invest in Training & Development for Your Team
Of all the investments companies make, the one that has the most direct impact on revenue and profitability is the investment in people.
About three in four Gen X workers say professional growth and development is important to them, though many of them are already in senior positions.
Almost 90% of Millenials say that professional growth & development opportunities are very important. For Gen Z the numbers are even higher.
And people don’t just want job or task specific training. They want to develop the critical thinking, problem solving, and leadership skills.
If your people have better emotional intelligence and communication skills, they will be more effective. They will also be more productive and more efficient. They will also report substantially higher levels of job satisfaction.
These “soft skills” are the glue that holds organizations and teams together.
When you invest in making your team members better communicators, team members and problem solvers, they will pay you back exponentially with the results they create day to day.
In companies where high quality, expertly led training and development is a priority, turnover and burnout are substantially lower than in those who fail to provide employees with these skills.
7. Help Employees Find Purpose & Believe in a Compelling Future at Work
Purposeful work is a key factor in employee retention, especially in the current market where 2 out of 3 younger employees said that they must work somewhere that makes a difference in the world.
One study found that workers would take as much as a 33% pay reduction, for a job with work that was significantly more meaningful.
Does this mean that everyone wants a job finding the cure to cancer? No. What it means is that companies and leaders who help people find meaning in their day-to-day work, are companies where employees are highly satisfied, and where employees tend to stay.
There are brain surgeons who are bored with their jobs and find no meaning.
There are floor sweepers who love what they do and see the value they bring every day to people in the building they clean and know they are a part of something bigger – doing their part to help achieve the overall company mission.
When you can, involve employees in decisions that affect their jobs and the overall direction of the organization.
Involve them in the discussion about your company’s vision, and most importantly, your goals. They need to own it and be a part of it if you want them to live it.
Provide opportunities and help employees see a direction for career progression. An exciting and compelling career path is a powerful deterrent to employee turnover.
Provide the opportunities for career and personal growth through expertly led training & education, challenging & engaging work assignments, and by trusting your team with more responsibility.
Learning to engage employees emotions, so they can see why their contributions matter is a skill.
Having the ability to help illustrate how employee efforts positively impact the team, your clients, your community and the world around you is something that can be taught and learned.
8. Really Understand Your Employees and Their Needs
Having your finger on the pulse of your team is critical. Assuming that everyone on your team is fine is the mistake leader all too often make.
The best leaders know that you must regularly review and assess your employees’ satisfaction and concerns.
They don’t merely ask surface level questions. They dig deep to find out what really drives their team. They address legitimate concerns quickly and with intention. They listen well and communicate well.
They know what makes people tick and know how to bring out the best in anyone. They know how people respond to pressure and have the skills and tools to help people thrive under pressure and through change, adversity or challenge.
People will go through the worst of situations happily with a leader who understands and appreciates them. They will be patient and shoulder great burdens when they are part of a team, with proactive leaders who really get it.
Conversely, people will leave a leader who does not understand or appreciate them even under relatively good circumstances, let alone challenging ones.
The good news is that we can be trained to increase empathy and understanding. We can be trained to improve our ability to communicate and clarify areas of concern. We can learn the drivers of human function and the keys to personality and behavior.
If there is a morale issue or motivational issue, it can be addressed and alleviated by expert intervention.
If team members feel disconnected or discouraged, they can be re-engaged and re-inspired to be the high performer that lies in all of us.
If we are facing massive change, we can be taught to thrive and be unstoppable in any situation or circumstance.
Pay attention to employee engagement.
This should be obvious, but far too many leaders’ interest in engagement is limited to the results of rudimentary engagement surveys.
Keeping your finger on the pulse of your team is critical. Making sure people stay fully engaged is key.
As long as leaders truly have learned to have empathy and understanding for their team, loyalty will generally rule the day.
9. Empower and Respect your Team
Clarity about roles and goals leads to confidence, trust and ultimately results.
People generally work hardest and smartest when they believe what they do matters AND when they feel like they can actually make an impact or drive a result.
When we really understand how our work is essential to the business’s success, we always have added motivation to succeed at our job and bring our best to any situation.
Create a mission that people feel deeply about. Amazing leaders create and share a vision that people want to be a part of.
Empower people to make decisions and take appropriate risks. Create leeway to learn from “failures”, rather than punishing them, so your team can be creative and innovative in this fast changing, competitive world.
Recognize excellent performance, with rewards that range from praise and accolade to financial bonuses. Everyone is different, so understanding what drives each employee is necessary to ensure you reward them in a way that is most meaningful to them.
Key employees are motivated when their exceptional efforts and results are recognized and rewarded. They can become discouraged when they see underperforming employees rewarded equivalently.
Celebrate success. Mark the passage of important goals as they are achieved. Small or large gestures are valuable to your team as long as they feel the thought behind them
Showing appreciation for employees’ unique contributions is a great way to keep them engaged and inspired to continue contributing at a high level.
Specificity is also critical. It isn’t enough to simply say “good job.” More detailed praise, recognizing specific contribution and its impact, is more meaningful to both the receiver and the organization as a whole.
A team that values and demonstrates mutual respect as a baseline way of being is a place people want to work. Empowered and respected employees are much more likely to stay for the long term fully engaged and contributing at the highest level.
10. Really Care About Your Team
Employees who feel appreciated and successful are substantially less likely to leave. Employees who “love” their managers will endure difficulty and challenges without hesitation
Empathy is the key.
When asked what empathy means, you’re likely to hear words such as understanding, sympathy, kindness, compassion, sensitivity, responsiveness, flexibility, consideration, thoughtfulness, kinship, recognition, concern, and care.
Genuine understanding, concern and care is something we can all feel when it’s present.
11. Encourage Your Teams to Develop Connection and Friendship
Multiple studies repeatedly confirm that connection with teammates and colleagues are one of the top reasons people love their jobs.
Absence of connection is a key reason for departure. When asked what makes people give their all money and prestige were not the top response. Peers. Teammates. Friends. These were the top drivers of engagement.
People are often willing to do more for those they care about than they are willing to do for themselves.
Friendships at work come about when you have highly functional people. When you have well trained people. When you have mutual respect. When you have purpose. When there is open and quality communication and when people feel trust.
You can’t make people become friends, but you can train on the skills and implement the systems that make those friendships much more likely to come about.
12. Enhance Employee Wellness – Mental, Physical and Emotional
It sounds simple. And it is. When your employees are mentally, physically and emotionally healthy, they have what it takes to be more effective and productive.
Wellness goes beyond a basic health care plan or paid sick time off, though. Encouraging your team to be physically fit can pay off substantially in health care cost savings, and, more importantly, increased productivity.
Mental & emotional wellness are critically important as well. Poor mental health and unmanaged stress cost companies in excess of $425 billion annually.
Expert training and development in these areas delivers massive value.
When your team develops better mental frameworks for problem solving, creativity and innovative thinking, productivity soars.
When your team learns to manage time, stress, and emotions, you often see massive increases in effectiveness and productivity.
Resilience training, employee engagement training, thriving through stress training and flexibility training provide your team the skills, tools and abilities to face any challenges with the mental and emotional strength needed to succeed.
13. Make Work Fun!
People want to enjoy their work. Period.
Creating a fun and engaging workplace is not as simple as having open floor plans and ping pong tables. It’s not as simple as having parties or rote traditions in place.
A winning culture is a culture in which fun is the norm while doing the actual work – even when under stress, even when facing challenges, even when there are difficulties.
People who smile often every day aren’t just happier and more productive, they live longer.
People who laugh several times a day, aren’t just less stressed and more engaged, they actually live substantially longer lives than those who don’t.
Most importantly, for your company’s bottom line, the data is crystal clear.
People who enjoy their work stay. People who don’t enjoy their work will leave at the first real opportunity to do so.
14. Fire Bad Employees, BUT…
Fire bad employees. This sounds harsh, but it’s one of the most powerful pieces of advice given to any manager, business owner or leader. Fire bad employees.
BUT…
Before you fire anyone… make sure they actually are bad employees and not simply good employees behaving badly because they lack skills or because management lacks skills.
Most employee attitude problems can be changed. Most poor employee behavior can be changed.
You see, there are many reasons that good people will act in ways that are not so good.
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- Poor management and poorly trained management leads to poor employee behavior.
- Poor systems lead to poor employee behavior.
- Excessive stress without training to thrive in the face of it leads to poor employee behavior
- Poor communication leads to poor employee behavior
- Lack of emotional intelligence and skills to manage emotions leads to poor employee behavior
- Massive change without training to thrive through change leads to poor employee behavior.
- The list could go on and on…
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So before deciding an employee is “bad”, make sure that you have provided your leaders and team the skills, tools and abilities needed to be their best selves, even when under stress and pressure.
Often times, stressed out employees want nothing more than to learn how to be better. They don’t like being upset on an ongoing basis. They want to enjoy their work and their team. They want to be excited about goals. They want to be part your team and your company’s success. They just lack the tools to manage their thoughts, perceptions, emotions and behaviors. They lack insight into what drives themselves and others. They lack the skills to communicate clearly, especially when buttons get pushed.
Give people the tools to improve. Most will thank you and use them.
Then, and only then, getting rid of problematic employees is a must for any business looking to keep turnover at a minimum.
Employees who are grossly incompetent, who perform poorly on a regular basis or who have a negative attitude, even after being given the tools to change, can destroy your organization.
Their negativity can often spread, influencing others and ultimately leading to a cycle of ongoing burnout, negativity and turnover.
Don’t ignore workplace negativity. Research repeatedly confirms that the more people in a workplace vocalizing negative thoughts and feelings, the more likely that otherwise happy and productive employees will become negative as well.
Get to the root of the problem. If it truly is a “bad” employee, terminating them is likely the best option.
Eliminating or minimizing negativity in your workplace is a worthy goal.
Just make sure the negativity is not being caused by poor leadership, poor management, poor systems, or poor training.
Because if it is, upbeat new hires will be demoralized quickly and the cycle will continue and perpetuate.
15. Provide Your Leaders & Managers Expertly Led Training & Development
A manager’s ability inspire, engage, motivate, communicate and lead – is a key ingredient in any team’s success or failure.
An employee’s manager can often have a greater effect on his or her overall job satisfaction than their pay, work schedule, or benefits. The manager’s ability to effectively lead their team is the key to employee engagement, effectiveness and productivity.
So it should go without saying – you must provide expertly led, high quality training to managers with high turnover on their teams. And the sooner you provide it, the better.
Often it’s that manager’s communication style or lack of emotional intelligence skills that is causing the problem. Often they don’t handle stress well, because they have not been trained to lead through stress, change or adversity.
If they were promoted from within, they may have been good at their previous job, but haven’t yet learned the skills needed to be an exceptional manager or leader.
Sometimes the stressor may be something the manager has no control over – for example pay levels or deadline schedules set by outside factors. Some jobs are repetitive and seemingly uninspiring. Still, a great leader has developed the skills and ability to get people to happily do something difficult that they had no idea they even wanted to do. Great managers and leaders can make any situation better. Well trained manager and leaders can engage their teams to thrive in the face of any challenge.
Investing in leader and manager training will save your company time and money.
The cost of replacing a manager (from 1/4 to 3 times their total annual compensation) dwarfs the amount you would invest in a high quality training & development program for that leader and their entire team.
And it’s not just your leaders with high turnover who can benefit from training. Even your good leaders and managers can benefit from improved leadership, communication and emotional intelligence training.
People who leave, don’t usually leave a company, they leave a poor manager.
People who stick around and contribute massively for the long haul, love their company, love their product/service, love their team, and love their managers and leaders.
Training your leaders to be exceptional is one of the best investments your company can make.
16. Don’t Be Reactive on Burnout & Turnover – Prevent Employee Turnover Before It Happens
Companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year recruiting people to fill jobs that others have recently left.
And it makes sense. An empty chair doesn’t get any work done, so we do whatever it takes to fill that chair.
We have to spend the time and money to fill that job because it’s empty. We are putting out a fire and it has to be done now.
So we spend on recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and onboarding. We pay the legal costs that sometimes come about with turnover. We lose productivity. We lose sales and revenue. We distract or demoralize other team members with the constant strain of employee churn.
Yet, we could have spent exponentially less time, effort and money had we prevented the turnover in the first place.
This is basic human nature. And it’s one of the biggest mistakes we make.
We don’t fix problems until they are big enough to warrant our attention.
We can’t afford the upkeep & maintenance on our car so we don’t do it when needed. Then the engine explodes and we have no choice but to get a new car.
We don’t call the A/C repairman for regular maintenance on our A/C unit, but in the heat of the summer when it breaks, we pay whatever is needed to replace it.
We don’t go to the doctor or dentist for preventative checkups, and then we pay the price when we end up in a health crisis costing massive amounts of time, stress and money because it has become so bad we have to deal with it.
REACTIVE SPENDING ALWAYS COSTS MORE.
Investing in training and development of your leaders and your team is the preventative maintenance that prevents the massive costs of burnout and turnover.
HERE IS ONE OF THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL RULES OF LIFE & BUSINESS:
When reality exceeds expectations, people feel good.
The better it is compared to our expectations, the better we feel.
When our situation falls short of our expectations, people feel bad.
The larger the difference, the worse we feel.
So why do employees leave? Why do we have employee turnover?
Often it is because the employer is not understanding employees and meeting their expectations and needs.
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- Leaders must learn to better understand what people need and how to meet those needs.
- Leaders must learn how to better communicate and better manage employee expectations.
- Leaders must learn to better understand how employees feel, and to influence those feelings for the better.
- Employees must gain skills to better manage their emotions, thoughts and behaviors.
- Employees must develop the initiative to communicate their needs effectively.
- Employees must be taught and learn how to better thrive through change and uncertainty.
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When do employees stay? When do burnout and turnover all but disappear?
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- Employees & team members stay where they feel connected, empowered, valued and understood.
- Employees stay when leaders provide clarity of purpose.
- Employees stay where they feel certain they can make a meaningful impact.
- Employees stay where they feel they can grow and become more.
- Employees stay where they are appreciated and feel like they are a part of something exciting and significant.
- Employees stay when they receive quality training in skills that will help them thrive in this world of constant change.
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So what will you commit to doing right now to help your company vanquish employee burnout and eliminates employee turnover going forward?
What steps will you take to ensure your leaders have the skills needed to engage and inspire your team?
What will you do today, to make your company into a place where employees want to work and can’t imagine leaving?