Employee Churn - Finding the Curve

How relationships can help you find the curve drivers for employee churn

The old saying “employee's leave a bad manager, not a bad company” may have allot of truth to it but it’s not the full story.  A leave decision by an employee is often made after considering a wider set of criteria internal and external to the company including points of a more personal nature.

Did you ever note that exit interviews often provide a “nice” picture of the company by the exiting employee with a less flattering account on Glassdoor? This begs the question, what drives an employee to leave the company? Bad Manager? Sure.. this is a regular reason but not the only one… What about role, environment, organisational structure, peers, subordinates, other “silos” in the organisation, customers, 3rd parties, under use of talent, over use of talent and of course compatibility with company culture??? Do they factor in the decision to leave?

Forbes ran an article producing employee survey results where 31% of chronically overworked employees thought of leaving the company for another job and 15% of employees who ranked company culture poorly were of the same mindset. So, spinning up the correlation engine, what element has a strong correlation with everything else in the decision for an employee to leave? “Relationships” is the answer. How they are structured is critical to understanding and addressing the reasons for employees leaving, which range from small issues to structural issues within the organisation.

Does the fix sounds like a big task? It sure does but if you approach it from an angle of starting with the end in mind, you will see how your organisational structure, management style, business process management infrastructure, leadership styles, environmental management (Facilities & HR) and resulting company culture impact the employee’s ability to conduct and maintain relationships in the workplace. Contrary to popular belief, a normal person does not want to be a millionaire at all costs, they want to be happy by making a positive impact on their company and society in general. In order to be happy, an employee needs to be reasonably able to maintain relationships in support of this overall disposition within their company’s paradigm of existence. This is where relationships come in with peers creating a good atmosphere and managers/leaders supporting this through consultative leadership. This includes tactical delegation of the appropriate amount of tasks that are framed in a genuine manner as meaningful and important to the company. Many overlook this due to “been busy”, which is counter productive as a valuable employee moving on will make the leader even more busy coping with the loss of the employee and filling their shoes in an unplanned manner! Good leaders count as does a good company.

In my quest for understanding in new leadership roles over the years, my high level approach implementing the above in a functional role has been the following:

• Know Your Team -   Know your team, what frustrates them, what makes them happy and what creates obstacles in getting the job done (start with the end in mind)
• Know Who Interacts with your Team - Introduce yourself to management and leadership peers, find out what makes them happy, excited, frustrated and sad. Find out how they interact with your team
• Understand the process - understanding the business processes around what your team does and how it interacts with the company internal and external to customers and 3rd parties noting bottlenecks, inefficiencies and pain points for your team
• Research the Company culture and organisational structure - from experience there is no real point in creating an adhocracy sub culture in a company that has a dominant dictatorial culture. You will only be targeted at best by other “silos” if you succeed and it could send your team into even more disarray if you fail. Loosely align best practice to culture before you start to make changes as this factors into the happiness (& productivity) of your employees.
• Be a genuine leader - I have met many pretend leaders who care only for their own interests and come across as fake leaders out for themselves. Don’t be that guy, your employees cannot have a genuine relationship with a fake leader!
• Build together - as a believer in consultative leadership, I can tell you from experience that sustainable processes which work are built when collaboration (versus coercion) happens within a team in developing a process from the ground up. Its acceptance and deployment are far more successful then when a process is designed and deployed by force upon a team. We need to feel important in our roles and employees feel the same way, which is why inclusion not imposition needs to underpin any new team venture. After all, we need to know that what we do matters!

It’s a hard sell to some and an easy sell to others based on belief and leadership orientation. Even if you reject the above approach, just be consistent with your approach knowing that relationships are key to employee retention. If you do, you become more effective from the get-go leaving rest up to you…

About the author: John Mulhall is a Community Manager and newly Minted Software Developer. John is also a committed blogger and from February 2016 onwards, will be publishing blogs every second week on topics around Technology, Leadership and Sustainable Capitalism.

Sources/Credits:

Pics;

www.insperity.com

www.blog.hubspot.com

Credits;

http://www.forbes.com/sites/victorlipman/2015/10/10/why-do-employees-leave-their-jobs-new-survey-offers-answers/#66ed2d0956a9

Asset or Liability? The power of employee potential!

At the helm or out to sea??... How companies value and utilise their employees..

We have all heard the horror stories, the angry elves complaining about the boss and the company, which are the lead weight on their very souls! We cannot say all complaining is whining but when one complains incessantly, we often think of the quote from William Arthur Ward when he said, "The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails." So we tend to discount the content of the complaint by the employee and move on with a lower opinion of the employee in reality and maybe an undiscovered source of discontent.

It’s all well and dandy if there is no substance to the complaint or a real will to get the best out of one’s team members. However, as leaders, we are obliged to achieve performance levels with our team(s), which is no easy feat if the winds of discontent and subsequent disengagement sweep silently through our team(s). Not only should we address such issues in private with our team members, we should be mindful for such discontent in our teams through close relationship ties with our people whom often offer up information on such issues that we might not otherwise have known about.

When thinking about our team issues, we should widen our thought process and honestly self reflect; thinking about our leadership impact, corporate leadership styles and guidelines (formal/informal), the department workloads and process requirements, company culture and most importantly, how all this merges with how employees are perceived by the company… are they treated as an asset or a liability?

Business case studies.co.uk have a posted article that suggests employees consider their leaders/manager to have a style that is not engaging. A survey analysis concluded that 21% of managers are perceived as autocratic by their employees, 16% are bureaucratic, 7% are innovative, 9% are trusting, and 7% are empowering. These numbers in my opinion contextualise the low level of leadership efficacy out there in the marketplace in terms of employee engagement, which brings us back to the kernel question, does our company value employees as an asset or a liability?

To answer this question, we must think of what role the employee is in the organisation. Is it a value creator role or a fulfilment role? This is a start in assessing what kind of organisation we are leading in and if it’s the right one for us. Referring to my prior article on company culture, we should not underestimate it in determining our leadership efficacy and how we can adjust to increase it whilst retaining our ‘core inner selves’. Bearing the above in mind, we should then ask the following questions:

• ü  What kind of company culture does our organisation have, does it support our leadership style and how does it treat employees (value creator or fulfilment role)?
• ü  Does the company have a prescribed leadership style? If so, are all leaders above and below us practising it or has a sub culture(s) evolved where different leadership styles prevail altering the company culture and operating environment?
• ü  What kind of prevailing practises are affecting one’s leadership ability and are they predominantly positive or negative? Can they be adjusted to allow one room to operate more effectively in engaging with one’s team(s)?
• ü  What actual company culture exists, leadership practice predominates and business practice runs our life as a leader? Is it consistent and does it help engage or disengage our team members with the organisation and with us as their leader?
• ü  What kind of improvements in employee engagement could one make if we altered our approach? Would we compromise core values to be “more effective”?

When thinking about this, one arrives at a picture that defines the organisation and contextualises the value proposition the organisation places on its employees.

In general, one should note that companies, whom are more autocratic by nature and hierarchical in structure, tend to value employees in terms of “doers” and “fulfillers” of roles.  This ‘command and control’ structure leaves little room for two-way communication and other leadership attributes that engages and empowers employees. Successful leaders in such companies inadvertently devalue employees whom are not peers, superiors or revenue generating in sales seeing them as “cost centers” especially at budget time. This “liability” view of employees empowers the few and dis empowers the many especially in large organisation’s where the cumulative effect of employee potential is material when one considers the disengagement of employees from companies whom by design tend to devalue their perceived inputs to that of prescribed service providers.  

Companies with strong hierarchical structures don’t have to be like that. With a little focus and allot of commitment from the top down on cultural and leadership change, autocratic leadership can be augmented with more consultative leadership traits such as mentorship, approachability and controlled two way communication where the rules of upwards communication are seamlessly sewn into a changing company culture and a leadership change management plan. One could with the right plan, support and commitment tap into the unexplored employee potential that is within one’s walls reaping untold rewards for successfully engaging a wider segment of employees whom feed into the operations strategy and direction of the company.

Companies whom value their employees as “assets” by design tend to have thought long and hard about areas like company culture, leadership and business practice as their business is very dependant on engaged and empowered employees thinking like owners in their daily work lives adding value in service quality, new ideas and commitment to the companies vision, work practices and inherent company culture solidifying the company’s sustainable future. The rewards at times can be hard to quantify but are evident in many successful companies in the technology, social media and aviation industries.

Determining a position on what role the employee takes in one’s company is a chance to build something great in a company whom becomes great by the people within its walls each and every day working to a common goal that can be as sustainable as the company wishes it to be. I return to Lao Tzu’s quote where “a journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step”. If everybody takes that first step together, a new journey of creation begins arriving at great stations of success along a long and sustainable path a company can proudly call its history.