50% of Doctors…

Several years ago I severely injured my knee playing basketball and required 2 surgeries to fix it. Several months into post-surgery rehab, the therapist advised me to never have such complex surgery performed by those who do it infrequently. His advice was clear: ski resort surgeons fix knees every day and I should have gone there rather than have local doctors perform the surgeries.

This brings to mind a sure-fire laugh line when speaking to groups, that “50% of all doctors graduated in the bottom half of their classes”. The point is that the worst graduate is still called “doctor”, and this leads to a discussion about how easy it is to assume that all who do the same profession do it equally well.

We know this is true about supervisors based on team performance, turnover rates, grapevine talk, and other criteria. Yet few companies put extra support plans in place for supervisors who are not as talented as their peers. Clearly there are a bottom 20% or so who need structured coaching, team sharing sessions with peers, additional support when hiring, and other interventions that will help them perform better in the short term and build their skills over time…or identify them as supervisors who shouldn’t be supervising.

The primary obstacle to such a plan is that managers are reluctant to tell supervisors they need help. It’s easy to say new supervisors get different treatment because being new doesn’t imply being ineffective. But some supervisors are ineffective and they need structured help to improve.

Where the Jobs Are

Time Magazine’s recent cover story on finding jobs contained the results of a study from the University of Maryland on just which companies are creating jobs. The study ranged over the past 25 years and the following pattern has held true: young companies add jobs faster and a third of all new jobs come from start-ups. John Haltiwanger, the study’s author, concluded that “These are the rocket ships of the economy”.

One way to apply this data is to consider the potential landing spots for your top performers, the ones you cannot afford to lose. Typically we benchmark pay against established companies and think more about base than incentives or especially stock. Based on this study, it appears top performers have small companies to consider, too, and might look forward to less complexity and having a straight line to the top which small companies provide. As the number of jobs grows, post-recession economies invite employees to refresh themselves from the layoffs and pressure they faced when times were tough with their current employers. Small companies and start-ups offer alternative workstyles for fresh starts.

The Red-Headed Step-child Named Retention

Employee Retention Strategy Can Save Companies Millions

In a recent post on the Risk Management for the 21st Century blog at AllBusiness.com Nancy Germond and I discuss a retention strategy that businesses can employ to minimize risk and help their bottom line by decreasing costs.

With unemployment at one of its highest rates many organizations have let their focus on employee retention slip - with the untapped pool that is consistently being flooded with talent old and new, this action puts your organization at risk and it’s costly. The majority of your current employees look for work elsewhere as economy improves - and even during the turmoil, and the attitude in many organizations is employees are easily replaced, but the costs (and hidden costs) associated with replacing talented employees lead to further problems down the road - risky thinking indeed.

Obviously this can be said with any organization, but the more experienced an employee is the less risky they are and the less risk there is for your organization which makes retention an important step in any organization.

The unique model, which I call The Rethinking Retention Model, bases the retention process on the belief that it should be managed like any other practice: sales, service, quality or safety.

These are some of my recommendations:

• Calculate the cost of turnover to determine how much it hurts your company's bottom line.

• Hold supervisors accountable for retention and teach them the importance of and how to build trust.

• "Narrow the front door to close the back door.”

• Carefully script the employee's first 90 days on the job.

• Develop a “Stay Plan”

• Build tools to connect with employees.

• Allow Candidates to Screen Themselves Out

• Hold employment vendors to retention standards.

• Hire Older Workers

• Use a referral system - current employees refer candidates for three reasons.

In today's economic climate, organizations can no longer ignore retention strategies if they want to retain their top talent, and retention is critical to any company's bottom line - and retaining talent is even harder. With the use of my strategy I was able to help one hospital cut nurse turnover by 34%, effectively them millions.

You can read the entire posting by clicking here.

For more information on my work, visit www.TheRetentionFirm.com or http://www.retentioninstitute.com/.

A New Twist on the Cost of Turnover

We featured in a previous entry a very effective model for costing employee turnover, although every model will have holes and omit important considerations. Here’s one great example.
We recently began work with a hospital to cut their turnover and the CEO there was immediately open about why he hired us. He told us he had signed a contract to bring in a noted consulting company to increase efficiencies by shaving times off of waiting periods, surgeries, and the like…and he knew that improving efficiencies included improving individuals’ job performances. So logically he said “Why would I want to spend all of that money to make my people better and then not do everything I can to keep them?”

So let’s take this logic a step further and ask: Should you be concerned about turnover if your people don’t perform well? I guess the answer is no, and also that your problems are far bigger than employee retention. But the logical counter-question is about how important is it to retain employees if you’ve heavily invested in them, as this hospital has. The CEO’s position was that the more he improved efficiencies, the more he increased the cost of new-hire training to ensure new hires fully understood and followed the shiny new processes. Therefore, the cost of turnover had just gone up.

Can the Nursing Shortage Get Worse?

In the March 22nd, 2010 issue of Time, Michael Lind penned a column called “The Boring Age” to illustrate how much of our society stays the same. The column was interesting yet irrelevant to our topics here until then end when he predicted that the largest single occupation in 2050 will be, to quote Mr. Lind: “drumroll, please – nursing!”
Much data is tossed around about the current nursing shortage, usually in the categories of the number of open nursing positions, the long-in-tooth average age of current nurses, and how healthcare jobs lead the list of those that will increase the most due to our citizens living longer. All of that is old news, just not good news to those who hire and try to retain nurses. But this is a new category – largest single occupation – and takes our current nurse-shortage problem to an entirely higher level.

We’ve worked with healthcare companies and have had great success with improving nurse turnover. Ultimately, though, the composition of the nurse job merits our scrutiny. It’s hard to do all this is asked, especially when nurses join the profession to provide the best possible care which is often times negatively reinforced by insurance companies. By 2050, those of you who are left to address what will be by then an even more extreme need might consider adding nurse positions and designing a true nurses’ aid job that evens out the work and the stress.

How Much Does Turnover Go Up?

Many employers are concerned that turnover will go up as the economy improves, and PWC Saratoga has provided a benchmark for predicting this. According to their analyses, voluntary turnover increased significantly in the years that immediately followed the end of recessions in 1993 and in 2004. In each case they researched turnover for the two years that followed, and in ’93 the rate increased by 15% and in ’04 the rate increased by 11%.

What factors will drive how much the rate increases after this recession? Here are two considerations. On the one hand, we are told that jobs will be added more slowly, so it is logical to assume that fewer workers will quit if they have nowhere to go. On the other hand, this recession was longer and deeper than the other two and caused organizations to make more drastic changes. So employees might be more bitter and more driven to look and leave.

Most importantly, those with the best opportunities to leave will be the best workers, the ones you need the most. So meet with them and ask them why they stay…then make sure you accommodate their needs as best you can.

A Friend Changes Jobs

I live in an Orlando, Florida suburb and know many of the local HR professionals because of various connections over the years. Orlando is a mid-level city, with far-fewer management jobs than Atlanta or Chicago, and those in HR here know that getting a top-level job is hard because there are few corporate headquarters nearby. If you are looking for an HR job that pays below six-figures, you might find one. Above six-figures, plan on a long search. And this is likely true in many other cities that lack a significant corporate headquarters base.

Of course, the economy has shrunk the number of most openings, too, so finding a top-level HR job in Orlando is harder than ever. But a close friend just climbed this mountain in less than a month and did so without a big-secret plan. She just got the word out, took calls from hiring companies and head-hunters, and selected a #2 level HR job to mentor with the soon-to-be-retiring top HR executive…for a healthy six-figure deal.

My friend’s name is Donna, and she got a great job in a hurry because she’s good. She doesn’t network much because she works long hours, and she is better at coaching managers than preparing her own resume. But she shines in interviews and answers questions based on what is best for the business rather than what is best for HR. She sees legal advice as just that rather as mandates that must be obeyed to avoid jail. Her best skill is that she listens, realizes what is in the company’s best interests, and then finds ways to say “yes”.

Most importantly for us, Donna has proven what most of us intuitively know…that good workers can find jobs in any economy. Her now-former employer expressed angst at her leaving and has probably by now identified ways they could have kept her. More money, of course, wouldn’t have fixed her problem.