VANNOY:
Retention and post-employment tips. Okay, this is number four out of a four-part series where we are unpacking the results from our small business HR survey. In spoiler alert, those companies who are the fastest growing companies in America have the best HR practices and lean forward into finding, developing, retaining talent. So I want to unpack the specific questions so you can have some clear takeaways today, helping me to unpack the topics. If you’re a regular watcher of the show, Mary Simmons Mary is our own vice president of HR Consulting. She’s a S H R M certified professional. And for the last year, eight years, Mary has also been an adjunct professor at the New York Institute of Technology. Prior to Assure, Mary was the director of HR consulting for a 58 year old HR consulting firm in New York. Welcome, mayor. Thanks, Mike. Okay, so if you missed the first three, here’s what we did.
We ran a survey where we asked questions, five questions times, eight topics from recruiting to hiring, onboarding, compliance development, performance management, retention, and post-employment. So five HR best practices for each of those eight areas. After those 40 questions, we asked one really important question, which is, what best describes you last year? Was it a fast growing year for you? Did you grow? Was it a flat year or was it a down year for your business? And so we had over 2000, 2065 people from small businesses respond to the survey. And now we are unpacking and comparing what are the fastest growing companies in America doing versus people who had a flat or down year. And we acknowledge that sometimes you’re just in a hot market and you might have great HR practices, you might not have some great HR practices and still grow just like you could be a great company, really well run. And because of unfortunate market conditions, you could have a down year. But when you average across 2065 businesses, the data is crystal clear and I think normalizes for all that. And I think there are some really, really clear takeaways. So today we’re unpacking the last two out of eight topics, retention and post-employment. Are you ready to go, mayor?
SIMMONS:
I’m ready. This is one of my favorites. So let’s go.
VANNOY:
Yeah. Retention. Yeah, clearly this is an important one. And maybe start with a quote. So Tony Shea, if you’ve ever followed him, read his book, I think Creating Happiness, I think is the name of it. He’s founded Zappos, what started out his shoes, then clothing, and then got bought by Amazon. Great culture guy. He said businesses often forget about the culture and ultimately they suffer for it because you can’t deliver good service from unhappy employees. Couldn’t be more accurate. So one of the key tactics, I think, best practices in HR is to survey your own employees to test and assess their level of enthusiasm and engagement for the job. So we asked that question, and it turns out that eight in 10 fast growth companies have surveyed their workforce to assess employee engagement. So eight out of 10, 80%, but only 50% of non-growing companies that we surveyed reach out to their workforce for the same purpose. So we’re talking a 30 point spread from the fastest growth companies to people who are flat or headed down year. What do you think the reasons behind that are, Mary?
SIMMONS:
Well, I think that the fast growing companies are interested in and paying attention to culture, and they are focusing on the fact that they want their employees to be engaged. You’re not going to be engaged unless you’re happy. And oh, by the way, what makes you happy? And so the data is extremely important, right? Because you can’t guess at whether your employees are happy or not. And sometimes when I’m helping an employer, the first thing that I’ll say is, well, can you tell me what your culture is? And sometimes they look to the sky and they’re like, I don’t know. It’s good. I’m like, okay, can you give me a little more detail? And do you feel like your employees are happy? And most of the time, Mike, they’re going to say yes. Yes, they’re happy. And then my next question is obviously a pointed one.
How do you know they’re happy? And a lot of times they’re going to say, well, they look happy. And I’m like, well, have you surveyed them? Have you spoken to them? And so a lot goes into this data. It’s not simply surveying them. When we do employee surveys with the employers that we support, I’m making sure that the questions are hard ones. They’re not easy ones. So some of the information as an employer that you receive from these surveys may not be good. You may think your employees are happy and find out that they’re not. I am here to tell you based on what’s
VANNOY:
An example of a hard question you would put into a survey for an employer?
SIMMONS:
It’s always going to come to salary. Are you happy with your salary? And total comp goes into that, right? So you’re going to say, what do you think about the benefits? How do you like your manager? Is your salary what you want it to be? And thanks for asking that, Mike. The reason those are tough questions is you can’t just ask these questions and then do nothing about it. So I want everybody to understand the first step is taking the survey, giving the survey to your employees, but doing it with intention and asking those tough questions. And then what are you doing with the data? You have to be transparent and show your team, these are the answers people gave us, and this is what we’re going to do about some of these things. Can’t probably, as an employer, let’s say that everybody says a hundred percent of ’em are like, no, I’m not happy with the salary. You probably can’t move on that for everybody. Maybe you can, but the questions are important. What you do with the answers that you get is more important.
VANNOY:
Marion, this is one of those areas. So if you’ve watched the last three parts of this series here, I keep coming back to this concept of chicken or egg. Take a topic like job descriptions. Clearly the fastest growing companies have written job descriptions, and I kind of think just intuitively, I feel like there’s this chicken of the egg. Obviously, if you have a job description, you can set expectation with the employee for what their duties are, hold them accountable to it. There’s no surprises at performance reviews. There’s a lot of good stuff that comes from it. But I also think there’s a lot of good, it’s almost like even if you do a job description and do it poorly, the fact that you did it indicates that you’re thinking about it. So your brain’s headed in the right direction. This is one of those areas that I’m not, I’m with you. I don’t know if that that’s true. If you do a survey and ask employees about their level of engagement, their level of satisfaction, what do they like, what do they don’t like? And you don’t act on it. This could blow up on you and be worse. It’s worse, right?
SIMMONS:
Why’d ask,
VANNOY:
Right? Yeah. So now, oh, I thought you were just unaware of how you made me miserable. Now that I know that, you know, right?
SIMMONS:
Yeah, please do something about it.
VANNOY:
Right? So I think there’s an awful lot of these things, whether it’s job descriptions, job postings, stretch assignments, all kinds of concepts that we’ve been talking about for the last three weeks here. This one is different. The fastest growing companies do it. They survey their employees, they ask for level of engagement and level of satisfaction, but you must act on it when you have that information.
SIMMONS:
Absolutely.
VANNOY:
Okay, next one. 75% of fast growth companies provide career path coaching for employees. Only 44% of down year companies provide career path coaching. So maybe first help everybody understand what is career path coaching? I suspect for the people that down here or the people who are not doing it, they don’t even necessarily, they’re at a small firm, and what the hell is career path coaching? There’s seven of us. What does that even mean?
SIMMONS:
Right? Right. Exactly. And listen, it’s important for a small employer and a big employer. Career pathing is showing employees. And when I help employers with it, we create a schematic that shows here’s the entry level position. From that position, you can either, it’s usually different paths you can take. So you can stay in HR, for example, or you could go to training or you could even go to sales. So it’s important to show different paths. And even let’s just take a small company. I’m thinking of this bagel store. It’s actually two bagel stores here on New York that I supported. And I created this for him because his retention was so high. And I said, why are they leaving? Do you know why they’re leaving? And he said, A lot of them honestly just get bored. And I’m like, well, tell me about the way your bagel store is set up.
Even though he’s small, Mike, he only has 10 employees about in each location, and he has part-timers too. It was important for him to define, you go from cashier to team lead where you train the cashiers, and it might only be one cashier. You’re training, but it’s still movement and it doesn’t always have to have money. There can be lateral moves to the manager of the store or to a baker, which you would need some additional training, et cetera. But even that little bit kind of made his interviews a little bit smoother. You want to be transparent as soon as you bring people in, but it also made the people that were there, well, I have a purpose. Well, there’s other things that I can do here. It’s important. It’s really important. So that’s career pathing.
VANNOY:
And this is one of the topics that if you read the Gallup polls or any number of sources, especially employees just entering the workforce, that growth and development, this is something that they crave, that they want. And of course, everyone wants more money, but the people just entering the workforce, they want life experiences and they want development and forego. They will forego money, at least to a certain extent in exchange for, oh, this is going to catapult me to where I want to be five years from now or 10 years from now, right?
SIMMONS:
Yeah. I mean, I’ll just give you a quick example. I was interviewing somebody yesterday who worked at a best in class. I won’t use the name, but best in class healthcare organization. I mean world renowned. And I saw the resume and I was like, great skills. Would love them on my team. Why are they leaving this mega firm? And do you know what she said, Mike? I didn’t know where I was going there. And I said, oh, I have career pathing. Let me share on my screen the schematic of the career pathing that I have on my team. And oh, by the way, it has you possibly going outside of the team because my intent is to keep the employees in our organization, and that’s the way we instruct our employers. You want them to stay in your organization even if they don’t stay in the same department and the smile. And she honestly said, I was looking for X dollars, but I’ll take less because I love what you just said about career pathing. That’s exactly what I want.
VANNOY:
Wow. I also think there’s a missed opportunity sometimes. So let’s say you are forward leading and you’ve got, here’s my entry level position. I’ve got a level, I’ve got a trainee, then a level one, then a level two, then a level three, and then I can move to this job. And you have all this wonderful padding, stratification and learning and development and promotions, and I love micro promotions. So you’re getting promoted every six months, and it doesn’t always have to be pay, but it’s a new accomplishment. It’s a new certification, even if you don’t have that stuff in place yet at leads to talk about the path and trajectory of your business. So you know what? I’m a small business. There’s four of us here. So you’re going to wear many hats, and I don’t have a specific career path, but let me tell you where this business is going. This is my vision. And so I assume that if you want to be an individual contributor and be the most respected and higher level, we’re going to have a job like that probably someday. If you want to be number two and be my C o o, if you rise to the challenge and have those skills, you might have that job someday and just paint a picture for the business and including the uncertainty that comes along with that, right?
SIMMONS:
Yeah, transparency.
VANNOY:
Yeah. And I think you can get, I know I’ve done it personally. You interview people, Hey, what’s your career path? You know what? This is a newly creative position. Here’s what I think it’s going to look like, but here’s where our business is going. So even if that doesn’t play out, where do you see yourself fitting in a company that’s growing like that? And they’ll just tell you, right? Yeah,
SIMMONS:
Yeah, it’s great. Let’s all good
VANNOY:
Stuff. Next topic, what separates fast growing businesses from all other businesses surveyed? We found the fastest growing businesses are nearly 20% more likely to have an employee recognition program compared with other companies. So a 20 point spread by having employee recognition programs. What’s your experience in helping? Because this is what you do every day. You help small businesses implement programs like that.
SIMMONS:
And let me give you another example. So we had a manufacturer and the owner was kind of, I don’t know, production is down. There’s a little bit of infighting, and we dealt with those issues. You’re not going to gloss over those issues if people are arguing. We’re on it in a different way. But one of the things that we started was a recognition program, and as soon as the words were out of my mouth, Mike, he was like, I don’t have any more money. And I was like, okay, how about this? Can we go to Costco or whatever, a big box store and just buy a bunch of treats? And we did two things. So one thing was we put him on one of the rolly carts that he already had in the warehouse, and every department took turns and one person from the department volunteered and walked around at two o’clock, right when you start to get a little tired at two o’clock and gave out treats. So that was the first thing. The second thing that we did was he did, when he had an all staff meeting, he asked for the managers to recognize somebody in their department who did something extraordinary. Again, we just bought a little ribbon first in class. I mean, it really wasn’t a big cost, but I’m here to tell you that I got excited by the smiles on these people’s faces. People need to be told they’re doing a good job. Yes,
VANNOY:
Amen.
SIMMONS:
One is great, don’t get me wrong, but I do a superstar of the week for my staff meetings and I suggest that to my employers, and that’s all I do. I say that they’re a superstar, obviously I have a story behind it. What did they do that week to deliver excellence to our clients? And the smiles, the team gets to know each other better. The team gets ideas. Oh wait, you can do that to deliver excellence to a client. Oh, I’m going to do that next time. I have a client to work with. So all round recognition is good. It’s good for engagement, it’s good for retention. It just helps the company be more successful and reach their goals. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money. Mike.
VANNOY:
Amen. I, I’m so glad you started there. It doesn’t have to cost a dime or maybe a few bucks. I mean, I remember similar stories. I think people think the employee of the month plaque is some worn out thing that won’t add value. Well do employee the month or employee of the week, but don’t call an employee of the week. Like you said, it’s my superstar of the week. So you’re getting recognition, best practice sharing all at the same time. I remember leading a large sales organization at one time and we rolled out some new trainings, these concepts, and we bought these crushed purple velvet hats like a queen or a queen would wear. And whoever had the best, I’ll say it, the best letter that demonstrated that they understood the concepts of the training that we did. They were the king or queen of that topic for the month. And so every month there was a queen or a king in the crushed velvet hat sat on top of the shelf in their cube, right? Love. It was fun. It was cheesy. It cost like next to nothing, but it was recognition and it was training because now everybody else, okay, that’s what they did. I’m going to go ask them how they did it. So the feedback isn’t just supervisor to employee, it’s peers. How did you do that? How can I do that? Maybe?
SIMMONS:
Yeah, I love it.
VANNOY:
Let’s share some ideas. So employee recognition is not the cheesy wood plaque with the bronze. That’s not what you can do that, but there’s lots of ways to make this live. Okay, anything else on employee recognition, Mary?
SIMMONS:
Just do it. Just please do it.
VANNOY:
Yeah, just do it. Alright, next one. This is one that I really wonder, do people even know what it is? But I think the spread says enough, right? So it’s a 34% spread between your growth companies and people with the down years. So it’s a big spread. 64% of fast growth companies say they conduct stay interviews. 30% of down year companies, first of all, I’m just going to assume of 2065 people, maybe not everybody even understood what it is. And certainly they might not have had the exact same perception of what it is, but 34% spread is still huge. What’s maybe more of a textbook definition of what a stay interview is?
SIMMONS:
So this is having an intentional conversation with an employee to understand again, what do they like about the organization? What would they change if they could change? We try not to say, what do you like and what don’t you like? What would you suggest we change and giving them the opportunity to tell you about those things and affect some change, right? That’s a great suggestion, Mike. Let’s go ahead and do that. But it’s also having the conversation with that individual. What do you think your career path is? We shared your career path. Where do you see yourself going next and how can we help you get there? And by the way, if you want to stay in the role you’re in, that’s okay as well. But let’s have that conversation. And what you’re trying to do is stop retention. You want to hear if the person is miserable,
VANNOY:
Right?
SIMMONS:
You need to know that.
VANNOY:
I talked about my chicken egg earlier. Just simply having job descriptions demonstrates that even if your job descriptions suck, the fact that you’re thinking about how do I communicate with my employees about job expectations probably is a big part of success for the growth companies. And then how employee satisfaction and engagement surveys are kind of the opposite. You have to act on those. Almost feel like this is a little bit in between, right? It’s like an employee might, maybe you’ve got a high performer, they’ve been in the job for quite a while and maybe they’ve plateaued because maybe the plateau is legitimate. Maybe there is a ceiling for them
SIMMONS:
Or they love what they’re doing.
VANNOY:
And I think there’s just tremendous. So I’m not saying you don’t have to act on the feedback. You need to act to the best of your ability, but if the feedback is, Hey, I’m not thrilled, I feel kind of plateaued, and maybe that’s true, maybe they are plateaued. There’s tremendous value in simply asking, Hey Mary, I think you’re amazing. I would never ever want to lose you. Tell me what’s going through your head? What motivates you to stay? What motivates you to do better? What are the obstacles? And if you ever did decide to leave, God forbid, what would be the reasons why? And so I can do my very best to retain you. You’re amazing, right? Simply
SIMMONS:
Yes, just asking. But again, I want everybody to pay attention to what we’re saying because you can’t just do these things and expect them to cause change. It’s how you do them. Are you intentional? What do you do with the data? How do you wrap up that stay interview? What questions are you asking on the stay interview? So just remember that like you say, the chicken and the egg. Well, I’m an HR geek, so I’m going to go with these HR practices, help companies be more successful because that’s my vantage point. But how you do all of the things we’re talking about is very important. Just doing it is not going to evoke change. It’s how you do it, what you do with the data you collect.
VANNOY:
And I think to be honest, why I probably keep going back to that same theme of chicken, clearly a good job description, a good interview process, good competency development, good retention programs, and employee recognition. Obviously good of all those things is better than bad of those things. I just don’t want anybody to think, I don’t want perfection to be the enemy of good here. If you don’t have an employee recognition program, gosh, I mean we’d love to help you and Mary’s team would be great at it. But if that’s not going to happen, don’t think you have to hire a professional. Go do something tomorrow and get your crushed velvet hats and start recognizing people as king or queen of whatever, or start naming your superstar of the week. So I think that’s really all my intent. I don’t want to suggest that you shouldn’t strive to be great at these things. You should. Yes, absolutely. And if you can’t, we’ll help you. But I think as much as equally important is if you’re not doing these things, start, start. And there’s value in just that last one here on retention. Fast growing businesses are 20% more likely to conduct company-wide meetings, to communicate changes and recognize high performers as compared to non-growing businesses. That one sounds probably kind of obvious, but what are your thoughts on these public company-wide meetings to communicate changes and perform recognition?
SIMMONS:
So everything that we’ve been talking about on this survey, the HR pieces are all interlinked. So communicating changes and helping your employees, small business, we’re going to start selling. I don’t know, honey bagels communicating to the team is very important because when we talked about interviews, we said, why should they want to work for your organization? Make them feel like they understand and you are in it together to reach the business goals. And it could be as simple as having a new bagel that you’re selling. That communication is the key to growth. And I’m going to say the key to a lot of the HR functions that we’re talking about, you never want the employees to go, well, I didn’t know we did that, or I didn’t know we had a benefit like that. There’s no such thing when it comes to HR of over communicating and before we leave retention, remember doing all of these things, retaining staff saves organizations money. Time is money, right? Because you’ve trained the person, but when somebody leaves, it costs an organization two and a half times their salary. So retaining employees helps productivity, it helps your culture because when people start leaving, other people start leaving. It’s kind of like a herd mentality a lot of times. Like, wait, why are they leaving? Maybe I should leave. Also, they survived. I’ll survive.
VANNOY:
It’s a social contagion that happens, right? Yes,
SIMMONS:
Yes. So we need to put a stop, stop gap that and be intentional, be proactive, not reactive, like, oh, they’re all leaving and putting your hands up like this. That’s not going to work. It’s too late. Mike, you need to put all of these things in place on a consistent basis. Don’t go, oh, I had high retention. I’m going to start doing stay interviews, or I’m going to do a survey or have a town hall. These should be things that you are doing all the time.
VANNOY:
Yeah, I’m glad you went to the recap because, so I’m looking at my notes here of the eight categories, recruiting, hiring, onboarding and compliance development, performance management, retention, and post-employment compliance is something you just have to do. It’s not an option. So maybe that’s the most important. But from a productivity, how to grow your business, I think retention is the most important one because even if you’re not great at some of the other ones, so obviously recruiting great talent and hiring and onboarding great talent is super important. But if you don’t retain them, what good is it? And even if you aren’t great at recruiting the best, if you’re great at retaining the best, it might take you longer to develop a great team. But that’s how you get a great team is by retaining your best. So man, employee recognition, engagement surveys, asking them private recognition and career pathing, public recognition and communication, you can’t hardly do enough in the area of retention. I just think it’s probably the most important thing that you can do. Anything you’d want to close on for retention?
SIMMONS:
No, I mean, just remember two and a half times your employee salary, that’ll drive behavior, I hope.
VANNOY:
Yeah, no
SIMMONS:
Doubt. To do some of these things,
VANNOY:
No doubt. Okay. This is an area that I think might surprise some folks. It’s like, okay, they’re gone. Either I fired ’em and I don’t want to talk to ’em again, or they left on their own and screw you. Either you’re with or me or against me. How could my post-employment practices possibly impact my growth? So I think this might be an interesting conversation. So we asked, have you developed a succession plan to anticipate turnover? Fast growing companies are 31% more likely to have a succession plan to anticipate turnover as compared to businesses who suffered a down year, 31%. That’s a big spread. Now, we may not, Ted, this might be broaching the post-employment, but it is anticipating that there will be post-employment for whatever reason people are going to leave. What’s your insights here of why the succession planning is so important?
SIMMONS:
So succession planning is important for a lot of reasons. Number one, you have to be set up to be able to fill your key positions internally if you can, because of all the institutional knowledge that it takes to move up into those key positions. You might be able to bring them from the outside, but it’s probably a lot easier for the organization. Again, institutional knowledge is hard to replace with internal people. It also will help you keep key employees because you’re going to be honest and you’re going to say, Scott, when Mike leaves, the succession plan is for you to move into his position. Let’s talk about the training, the knowledge, any certifications that you need, and let’s get those in place so that when the day comes that mike leaves moves to another position, whatever it is that you’re ready, that the possibility don’t make promises of you moving into that position is real. Number one, Scott’s going to be excited. We created a career path, but it’s much more intentional. Career path is just that. There’s a few different paths the person can take. Succession planning is here’s my key positions, who is slotted that can take those positions? Where’s the skill gap? Competency gap, let’s get those done. You don’t want to be caught by surprise,
VANNOY:
And
SIMMONS:
That would be bad for business.
VANNOY:
There’s an obvious tieback to the retention topic, right? Around career paths, of course, but beyond just a path, that actual succession plan, it leaves you at the ready. Interesting on that topic. So it’s a 31% spread between the fast growing companies and people who had a down year. It’s more than half, it’s 53% of the people who had the down year don’t have the succession plan. So lots of reasons for having down year, but not being able to anticipate what’s coming around the corner clearly is a big part of that. Alright, next one. Fast growing companies, they’re 20% more likely to provide existing, excuse me, exiting fast growing companies are 20% more likely to provide exiting employees with a termination letter as compared to businesses that had a down year. This one seems crazy. Why is it that something as simple as a termination letter could? What is the correlation to have a 20% spread on high performing versus low performing companies?
SIMMONS:
Well, first of all, all of your employees, whether they’re working with you now or they’re no longer working with you, you want them to be good ambassadors of your business. So that’s the first thing, right? Somebody might be leaving because of family reasons they might be leaving moving or you could be terminating them, right? So from a, I’m going to say marketing because that’s who you are. So you want them to be good ambassadors of the organization. You want to be professional until the very last minute. So they remain good ambassadors for the organization. Yeah, I left there. Yeah, I got terminated. But they’re pretty good people if that’s possible to happen. And I believe it is. Now, if I put my compliance hat on, that’s the other reason that a termination letter is very important. Number one, there’s quite a few states that mandate a termination letter, whether the person resides or you terminate them.
The California’s, the New York’s, the Colorado, very important that compliance wise, you give a termination letter and it meets the requirements of those states. But when we do that, Mike, for other employees, it’s very important as well. On the compliance side, are they getting Cobra? What’s happening to their 4 0 1 k if they had it? How will they find out about Cobra? When is their last paycheck check? And I would propose because the mandated states mandate that you say you can apply for unemployment, we don’t decide who gets unemployment. Mike, you and I as employers, we don’t decide the D O L does, but we should tell employees they are eligible to apply if in fact they are. So compliance, goodwill, professionalism, I think it’s all very important. And in the end, it’s going to save you time because the person’s not, where’s my 4 0 1 k? When am I getting my Cobra and bothering your HR department or your managers to that information?
VANNOY:
Man, I think you nailed it on the head for both those topics. And you’re right, I’m a marketing guy. So I think brand, right? And when you think of an employee leaving, whether it’s you terminating them or it’s a voluntary turnover, frequently, it’s not because they loved you so much or you love them so much, and so maybe you’re not creating an ambassador, but you might be tamping down an otherwise disgruntled person. And so if you can just be as factual and clear and respectful as possible, maybe they don’t trash you in social media, maybe they don’t tell their friends what a horrible boss you are or employer you are, no matter how upset they really were. But if they’re leaving because they’re not happy and they feel equally disrespected on the way out, it’s just far more likely that they’re going be a negative ambassador, right?
Oh, definitely. And then I think about small businesses, big companies can absorb legal costs and you might be completely compliant and have done nothing wrong and terminate an employee by the letter of the law. And so it’s not like the law. Well take that back. You said some states do require termination letters. Let’s say you’re in a state that doesn’t, it’s still a best practice. What if that employee sues you? You didn’t do anything wrong, you win, but it costs you 50 grand in legal fees, right? And you can hit 50 grand in legal fees like that. Well, if you’re a small business and you have a million dollars in revenue and 10% profit margin, that’s a hundred thousand dollars profit. Half of it just went to legal fees. That might’ve been the $50,000 that was going to hire a new sales rep or was going to fund your marketing or was going to improve your customer service that was going to help you grow. And maybe that’s the reason you don’t grow because you’re siphoning too much cash to defend things unnecessarily. That’s good documentation of best practices could have avoided.
SIMMONS:
Absolutely.
VANNOY:
Alright, the last one, and I think this is, everybody’s got to do this, but it’s again, it’s another 20% spread between the fast growth businesses in people with a down year. So shrunk 20% difference whether they do or don’t conduct exit interviews. So help everybody understand what is an exit interview and why is that data so important?
SIMMONS:
So it goes back to what we talked about for the survey. Why are people happy? If you don’t know why people are leaving, Mike, you can’t fix it. So I’ve suggested exit interviews. It’s something that we do extensively with our clients. There’s two different ways that you can do it. And remember, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. So just doing it, Mike, why you’re leaving? That’s not going to help too much. You want to really dig in and ask some very intentional questions. So we create a customized exit interview depending on the employer, and you can do that either through just sending them the exit interview and letting them do it online. Maybe they’ll be a little bit more honest if they’re not doing it with the HR person who maybe they kind of like or they’re embarrassed to say some of the things that they really want to be honest about. So maybe the link is better.
We find this is one of the reasons that outsourced HR is so powerful. They’ll tell me everything because they don’t care. I’m outsourced, they’re not going to hurt my feelings and they are brutally honest. And I dig in, I really dig in and my team digs in to say, well, what do you mean you didn’t like the manager? What does that mean? Give me examples, et cetera. Because my intent is to fix why the person is leaving. I can’t always do that, Mike, right? They may be leaving, like I said before, family reasons, but we do both. We have them fill it all out online so that I can use my software to correlate a report for the employer that says 20% of people are leaving for money, 20% are leaving bad management, 20% are leaving because of your benefits. Okay, employer, what are we going to do to fix these reasons?
VANNOY:
No longer
SIMMONS:
Anecdotal, very intentional.
And use the data to fix the turnover. Again, some of it you can’t fix people moving, but actually as I say that, can you have some remote employees and what does that look like? So could you keep a key employee and let them be remote? Depending on the business, you may or may not be able to do that. So having an exit, I’ve saved people. I’ve had people remain at an organization by doing an exit interview and listening to them and saying the manager did what? And we had already known there was problems with the manager. We said, we just stay if you reported to somebody else. Absolutely. And again, you could have stopped that if you had a stay interview with that employee.
VANNOY:
And you know what? Thinking about,
SIMMONS:
It’s all tied together.
VANNOY:
Thinking about the chicken versus the egg. I don’t think there’s a big chicken impact here. The simply doing it isn’t going to matter because these people aren’t with your organization anymore. But how you act and if you act in the right way fast enough, you could actually prevent the exit in that case, or at least get turn what is otherwise anecdotal. Oh yeah, they were just bad apples anyway. They were gossipy, they were this, they were that. Oh no, well maybe those things are true, but they also said this, this, this, and this. And now you have quantifiable information, not anecdotal story to say, okay, whether I like this person or not, this is what the data is telling us of why people are leaving us. And maybe it’s something you can’t act on. And it’s like, okay, well at least now I know, but more than likely there’s going to be things that are actionable,
SIMMONS:
Especially when you see patterns, which most likely you’ll patterns. That’s exactly right. That’s what I find with the employers that we help. They see patterns, right? It’s not 10 people leaving for 10 different reasons. There’s usually a pattern.
VANNOY:
Alright? So I have to say, of all of the shows that Mary and I do in my other guests, this has probably been my favorite series four shows. Unpacking it’s the recruiting to hiring, onboarding, compliance development, performance management, retention and post-employment, all really important stuff. We talk payroll and HR and tax type topics every single week. But the fact that this one correlates to growth and helping small businesses grow and have actionable insight for companies who are flat or not growing, things that they can implement right away. So I’m thrilled to present the benchmark survey in the corresponding ebook and publish all those results for everybody and really excited and thanks to Mary for helping me to unpack these topics on this four part webinar series. Until next week, everyone look forward to talking to you about another topic, but in the meantime, download the ebook. Listen to this four part series in lots of actions that all of us can take to grow our businesses. Thanks so much.