systematicHR

— You must have a manager training program
— You must have education on employee engagement
— Metric on first year employee turnover, how much of hires were an employee brand mismatch versus manager skill?

Are your managers accountable for turnover? Do you chalk that 20% turnover to the state of your business, company or industry? Often organizations sit around and talk about their turnover rate and their efforts to increase engagement to decrease turnover. We talk about our rewards packages and wonder how competitive they are with the local market and national competitors. We talk about training and talent opportunities internal to our companies and wonder how we can use them to force employees to see the opportunities within the organization.

Ultimately however, there are a couple of things that we need to realize. Most employees that leave the organization actually leave for a single reason – their direct manager. Sure, some leave or greater opportunities for growth positions elsewhere. But we’re talking about most, as in over 50%, not some, or another large “chunk” of the turnover statistic. At some point, we realize that all the other things we focus on like rewards, development opportunities, and anything else are just not at the core of the real turnover problem. At the core is the manager and only the manager.

First of all, have you correlated employee engagement to individual manager turnover rate? Most of you will actually provide your employee engagement survey vendor with the organizational hierarchy so that they can provide cuts of engagement by business, division and even department. Most of your employee engagement surveys have questions around how much your employees like or trust their manager. Simply running a report and putting this engagement list right next to the turnover statistic organizationally would give you a quick correlation of turnover to management skill.

I once had a VP (2^nd level manager for me) who consistently outperformed business results. This was of course in a bull market when everything was wonderful all around anyway, but it was widely known that this person was rather hated. He was a micro manager who also kept tabs on his people to make sure they were actually at work (for example) at 4:50pm on Friday afternoon. I’m pretty sure that almost the entire population that reported up to him turned over more than once in the 2-3 years he was in the position. It’s nice that he outperformed business results, but at what cost? The severe exit of talent (it took me longer, but I’d say that I was one of them) that this person caused, and the cost of recruiting that must have been incurred would probably have offset much of the positive business results.

That brings me to the second point. Are you even educating managers on what engagement means and how they create an atmosphere of engagement? How are managers trained? How are they measured? And can they see those measurements on their dashboard?