How do you know if your employees are satisfied?
There is a lot of buzz about the Great Resignation or the Resignation Tsunami.
More recently, however, the conversation among Leaders has shifted toward Retention. Leaders are recognizing that they are not able to hire talent quickly, and turnover is expensive and can cause delays in value production for customers.
So how can you as a Leader have confidence that you know if your employees will stay?
The best way to feel confident in Retention is through meaningful communication with your employees.
What does that mean, exactly?
Watch the first portion of this blog!
Let’s go through 10 Yes or No questions to learn if you are communicating well with your employees.
Have you conducted a meaningful engagement survey in the last 6 months?
Have you thoroughly evaluated the results of the last engagement survey you conducted?
Have you communicated the results to everyone who took the survey?
Did you do anything differently because of the results of the survey?
Did communicate what you did differently because of those results?
Do you have an organizational Communications Plan that reaches from the Leadership team to every employee and back?
Are you consistently executing to this Communications Plan?
Do your managers get talking points about critical decisions or important information to share consistent messages with their direct reports?
Do your managers meet with their direct reports at least bi-monthly to discuss their employees’ well-being and whether they are satisfied working for you?
Do your managers have an established forum to communicate about any employee retention concerns to their managers and all the way up to the leadership team?
If your answer to most of these questions is YES – then you are communicating well with your employees and you probably know whether your employees are satisfied working for you.
If you are unsure or many answers are no, follow these basic steps:
Prepare & conduct a meaningful employee engagement survey asking about job satisfaction.
In parallel, bring all people managers together for a focused conversation on the importance of their role in helping with job satisfaction, and ask for their help.
Refer to this article on How do Great Managers Retain Employees for more on how direct supervisors are the most important influence on employee satisfaction, and for ideas on the Agenda and talking points for that conversation.
Develop and Deploy an organization-wide Strategic Communications Plan that reaches all levels of the organization, inclusive of feedback loops, and begin to execute it consistently.
This will include how consistent talking points are provided to and used by managers
Once employee engagement survey results are in, analyze and report out on them within one month. Include specific actions that will be taken or changes considered based on the results.
The channels and timing for reporting out on survey results should be in your Communications Plan
Create Action Plans for the longer-term changes that will be made based on survey results, or at least include them in your Leadership Team’s project “backlog” for consideration in the future.
Remember that cost of turnover is higher than you may think, you cannot afford to delay.
Undertaking these steps may seem daunting. How do they stack up, however, against the cost of employee turnover? Consider the alternative:
Employee leaves
Scramble to cover work while employee is gone (others work more, hire temp support, or opportunity cost of the employee’s work *not* being done while you’re hiring a backfill)
Prepare for and launch hiring plan
Interview and negotiate job offer
Onboard new employee, integrate into culture, time for HR, manager, disruption to team
Train new employee, time for manager and other employees who help with training
Opportunity cost of managers and other trainers while they delay other areas to bring the new employee up to speed
Remember that cost of turnover is higher than you may think, you cannot afford to delay.
We are here to help, contact us at AJC today.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES related to this topic can also be found on our Change Management or Organizational Development pages.
