November 2, 2021
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Description
In this episode, Chris discusses the high rates of employee turnover with Danny Nelms. Topics include employee engagement, retention, and management
As President at The Work Institute, co-author of the bestseller Employer Engagement: the Fresh and Dissenting Voice on the Employment Relationship, and a sought-after public speaker, Danny Nelms is an agent of change, a thought leader, and an expert in helping companies forge new directions that improve business results.
His insight into human capital dynamics of organizations based on sound data-driven research uniquely positions Nelms to provide valuable recommendations for the challenges that organizations face and allows him to provide companies with the tools they need to successfully manage organizational improvement.
Nelms received a Bachelor of Business Administration from Georgia State University and a Master of Business Administration from the Massey School at Belmont University.
Transcript
Danny:
retirements continue to be a little bit higher, which is concerning, especially in your industry, Chris, because our workforce is just shrinking.
Chris:
So there’s this mass exodus of skilled, skilled people, right? This is not this, this workforce shrinkage is not just, there’s a number of people that aren’t doing the blue collar job, which is what you see.
Danny:
Everybody believes that employees are looking for pay. Pay is the reason they’re leaving. And I have said this, I don’t know countless times. When you really talk to employees, what they’re going to say is you don’t pay me enough to put up with and then you can fill in the blank.
Chris:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the talent tide podcast the show that ensures you have the information you need to adapt and evolve your workplace culture as you ride the wave of change in Talent Management. I’m your host Chris Nichols and today we’ll be chatting with Danny ELMS of the Work Institute. The talent tide podcast is sponsored by endevis. endevis is a full service recruiting firm, offering a broad range of solutions from professional contracting to retained and contingency search to recruitment outsourcing endevis prides itself on its core values of being bold, accountable, help first passionate and results driven to ensure the talent we bring to our partners matches their core values and overall mission. For more information, please visit endevis.com that is e-n-d-e-v-i-s.com. I’m excited to have Danny on he’s a local Nashville native, as well. He’s here in the 615 area with me, Danny is the president of the Work Institute. He’s a co author of the best seller Employer Engagement, the fresh and dissenting voice on the employment relationship. And he’s a sought after public speaker. Danny is an agent of change thought leader and expert in helping companies forge new directions that improve business results. His insights into human capital dynamics and organizations based on sound data driven research uniquely positions Danny and the Work Institute to provide valuable recommendations for the challenges that organizations face and allows him to provide companies with the tools they need to successfully manage organizational improvement. Welcome to the Talent Tide Podcast. Danny, how are you today?
Danny:
I’m doing great. I’m glad you finished for that long introduction. That was too much.
Chris:
I even shortened it a little bit but I understand I feel the same way. Oftentimes when somebody is reading my bio or or they’re going to read my bios whoa, hold on a second. How much are you reading here? Let me let me shorten this. But I I’m excited to have you on because it’s October 11 2021. And every company that I seemingly have talked to over the last three months has a major problem with retention, which is something that the Work Institute measures and helps companies quantify why people are leaving and so I can’t think of a better time to be having this conversation with I don’t know are we calling it the great resignation the great rehire, I guess it’s whatever positive spin you all
Unknown:
All I can tell you is that it’s real what or whether you want to call it the turnover, tsunami or the great resignation or the rehire. It doesn’t matter what word you want to use. It is real. And it is the biggest challenge I believe companies are facing right now. could not be more accurate it is very real. And the one of the reasons why I’m excited to have you on is because we’re getting a lot of inbound activity Danny endevis, as as an organization, we have companies reaching out to us. We are our SDRs are taking on more calls than ever before. They’re getting more responses to their emails, because it seems like I would say roughly, at least 75% of companies right now need help hiring. And that’s not just in healthcare, which is a major group that we major industry that we work with, but across blue collar and even white collar level roles. Organizations, for the first time, are really understanding that you can’t just recruit, you have to you have to retain people, and they don’t, I don’t know that many of them know how to so I’m hoping today we can talk a little bit about your retention report, which I believe you had a mid year retention report. I’m assuming you’ll probably be doing another one next year. If you’ve never found one of those retention report for the for the listeners. Just go Google the Work Institute, follow them on LinkedIn, it seems like I get I get peppered with that information when they come out. And it’s really valuable in my mind to take to the C suite to say, hey, here’s where we need to make changes, right? Because operationally, most organizations go right to dollars and cents and that there is $1 and cents component to this, but it’s not the way that you think. So Danny, would you provide a little bit of an overview from your mid year report and what data points you had taken in, maybe through the first part of the year, and then we can transition to where we are today, Sure, just to give you a little bit of backdrop there, Chris, we this is the fifth year that we’ve done a what we call our annual retention report. So it was the 2021, the COVID edition, it came out in late March, early April. In some respects, it’s a retrospective of the previous year. So work Institute conducts exit interviews for well over 100 organizations. And we conduct about 35 to 40,000 exit interviews annually. So and a really good sort of mix of industries mix of different types of roles within organizations. So we take all that normative data, if you will, and package it up and report out the things that are the reasons why people left and then we look for some other interesting hypotheses to explore. What we found really interesting last year was certainly that the pandemic impacted significantly the reasons why people left so you saw things like health and family reasons increased significantly. You saw retirements increased significantly, we saw a little bit downward trend in things like work life balance and some downward trends in career reasons. And what we, you know, kind of hypothesized in the early summer was that with the beginnings of this turnover tsunami, that we’ll how is that impacting the reasons why people leave. And so because we have such a large data base, we felt like it was completely appropriate to look at what happened in the first half of 2021. And so we took, I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of around 11,000 exit interviews, which is a really great sample size, by the way, and looked at those reasons. And what we found is that work life balance reasons continued to decline. And I think this is really reflective of the fact that many employers are discovering that flexibility is just a real key that employees need and want. We have seen retirements continue to be a little bit higher, which is concerning, especially in your industry, Chris, because our workforce is just shrinking, you know, we’ve just got a smaller workforce. So it makes it all the more difficult to recruit. But all the more important to retain the employees that we have is because we just in almost all cases have a smaller pool to try and generate candidates from we also have seen that pay reasons went up in the first half of the year. And I know that’s everybody’s going to react to that and say see it’s pay, it’s pay well, it only rose to the level that was pre pandemic. And and that is still less than one in 10 employees leave their job for the root cause of pay. And so, you know, I think this is you know, if no one takes anything away from this podcast. Other than that, it’s the thing that we preach over and over and over again, is that everybody believes that employees are looking for pay that it pay is the reason they’re leaving. And I have said this I don’t know countless times when you really talk to employees, what they’re going to say is you don’t pay me enough to put up with and then you can fill in the blank. You can fill in the blank for a bad manager you can fill in the blank for you don’t develop me as an employee, you don’t give me career opportunities. You give me a bad manager. I mean, the list can go on and on. Paying is just the substitute for that and and what our data continues to prove is pay is not the biggest reason why people leave their job.
Chris:
Absolutely, and I’m glad that you mentioned there was an interesting piece you mentioned about retirees a moment ago, and this past weekend, Southwest air airline had to cancel 1800 flights completely disrupted a ton of people’s flight plans and patterns. I’ll be honest, I’m a I’m a devout southwest flyer myself being here in Nashville it’s a huge hub for them. But this year alone I have flown 10 plus times and 80% of my flights have been delayed cancelled rerouted reschedule etc. And what I what I read in this this morning’s little piece was that last year southwest had so many requests for early retirement, they had 2200 pilots request an early retirement because they were offered the opportunity. I know because we have an organization that we have previously worked with in the past that was in the the helicopter and air life evacuation medical space to the shortage of pilots. That was two plus years ago. Now we have companies like a Southwest that have opted individuals into an early retirement. And so there’s this mass exodus of skilled skilled people, right? This is not this, this workforce shrinkage is not just, there’s a number of people that aren’t doing the blue collar job, which is what you see. But they’re, they’re skilled individuals. It feels like on the bottom side of the workforce spectrum too Danny, we’re seeing less this is purely speculation, but we’re seeing less teenage and college aged kids in the workforce, at least that’s my perspective, considering that all the retail and hospitality type jobs are not being filled up, you know, food, food, etc, restaurants, things of that nature. Do you have any any thoughts that you can you can share on that space, and what we’re seeing just from the workforce,
Unknown:
there’s a great book out there that if any of your listeners are interested, I think it’s worthy of reading, it’s pretty easy read, it’s called the age curve. And it’s by Grom Bach, I think grom bach, I think is his name. And the premise of the book, and this was written several years ago, but I think it’s relevant today is that one of the things that we don’t look at is, we always talk about the generations, right? You got the Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, you know, we talk about all these differences in the generations in terms of how they behave in the workplace. And that’s a whole other podcast, by the way, because we we do way too much stereotyping when it comes to that. But what we don’t look at is what is the size of that generation? So a lot of what happened in the previous verse, not the 2000. In the 2009 recession was you had, you know, major issues in cars and housing, right? Well, it turns out that the Gen X generation was like 10 to 11%, smaller than the baby boomers. So when we got to the car buying and home buying age, there were 10%, fewer of us. And so you know, Now there were some other underlying issues in that recession, obviously, but we don’t look at some of those demographics. And what we’re finding is that there’s lower birth rates now. And so they’re just fewer people in this age range and US workforce. And so it is getting more difficult. And, and again, it just places such emphasis on recruiting. Now there there was another dynamic, certainly a play. And I think if we didn’t talk about it just for a minute, Chris, we’d be mistaken is that, you know, there was the unemployment supplements that were being provided by, you know, the federal government. And, you know, there was a lot of talk about, you know, you couldn’t attract people back into the workforce, because they were making more money, potentially on unemployment. And I think there’s some truth in that, I think, to think that that didn’t exist, it would be naive. But that’s ended for almost every state. And now you are seeing some of those people absolutely enter the workforce. But now the real work, begins and now that we’re getting them back into our payroll, how are we going to keep them? And that is going to be the difficult part? Because if you think getting them is the hard part, keeping them is even harder.
Chris:
Absolutely, I think, well, the September, I guess it was the October jobs report. Last week was visible right for the month of September, in the number of jobs hired and filled, etc. So we’re coming off of that, which is kind of a strange phenomenon, right? Like the those payments have ended in yet. There. We had a very slow hiring month, last month. I think there’s a number of reasons for that. The most, the most valuable to me being that. People are finding different ways to make money. I mean, yes, the gig economy is a real thing as well. We have some best practices that we have manufacturing clients relying on right now Danny are more flexible, shift scheduling. Going back to your earlier comment about employees desire flexibility, especially right now if you have kids, and they’re in school systems. It’s a it’s a mess. During the month of September, my kids, I have three kids, all three of them were out at different times because they were exposed to COVID This and that. Luckily I work from home. I Can’t imagine families that have kids in school and have had to deal with this for the last six months. I think that’s one of the reasons why we’ve seen a lot of women leave the workforce is or your or your reports and your data points showing that you’re seeing more women leaving? And for what reason?
Danny:
Yes, um, I mean, there’s no doubt that the, the pandemic affected female workers a little more substantially when it came to the health and family issues. And so we saw an uptick in that, but it also affected, you know, other ethnic groups more significantly, you know, African American groups, Asian American groups, as well. So, there were a lot of interesting dynamics at play in the, you know, kind of that pandemic, and let’s face it, we’re still in the middle of it. I mean, it just doesn’t want to go away. You’re in? And yes, the childcare issue played a significant role as to eldercare to some degree, because, you know, in many cases, we have, you know, I personally, you know, I’ve my wife’s parents happen to we happen to have a, an apartment in our home, and they, they live with us so, and we were taking special care to make sure that they weren’t, you know, going out and exposing. So, yes, they went to the grocery store. But if we could make a little extra trip along the way to keep them from having to go out, we would so, you know, and luckily, they don’t need a lot of specific care. But there’s a lot of instances where there were those circumstances where you had to care for an elderly or quite frankly, someone that had experienced COVID. And, you know, they’re how many stories have we heard where a loved one has been in the hospital for 39 days? Well, you know, someone’s got to be available during that time period, as well. So we’ve just had so many difficult circumstances throughout our workforce, and it just continues to put so much stress on this massive system that we call the workforce.
Chris:
I don’t want to continue to beat the dead horse. I don’t want to transition. But I think we can agree that the COVID 19 pandemic has rapidly evolved the workplace, it has changed the way that we have to think about employee engagement. But one thing has remained, we still have bad managers, Danny, throughout, throughout organizations, there were bad managers before the pandemic, there’s bad managers today. And from my from my experience, it seems that bad management, direct management is a very significant indicator of poor retention rates. So Chris, what? Oh, I’m
Danny:
sorry, go ahead.
Unknown:
can we do. Can you talk about that? No, no, no, go ahead and talk about it. And actually, we didn’t even talk about it before this folk podcast, but I have a little additional research that I’m willing to share. So we have been gathering manager ratings in exit interviews for a number of years. And but we wanted to make sure that when we started to look into the area of predictive analytics, that we had a really solid base of data, it’s one of the things that’s always important to Work Institute is we want to make sure that if anybody ever looks under the hood, of the research that we’re doing that it is scientifically and statistically sound. And so we wanted to look at how manager ratings affected categories, for reasons for leaving. So in our retention report that you mentioned earlier, we look at reasons for leaving in two ways. We look at categories for leaving, meaning things like career reasons, environment, reasons, work life balance reasons. And then within each of those categories, there are some things. So within career, for example, there’s promotion, there’s different type of work, there’s development, there’s job security. So all of those things sort of roll up into a category. And so we wanted to look at how manager ratings impact the categories for leaving. And it turns out that manager ratings directly predict six different categories for leaving, and those include career environment, involuntary the job itself, the manager and work life balance. So six of the 10 categories are all directly predicted by manager ratings. Now, here’s the tricky part. Because I think there there’s typically two narratives when it comes to retention. So we talked about the first one pay, people leave for pay. And then the second one is they leave because of their manager. Well, I think we’re overstating that, or misstating that to a certain degree because the manager influences all of these reasons but isn’t really responsible for them, and quite frankly, isn’t very well developed around them. So one of the things that I’ve been talking a lot about Chris is, for example, around career, how often do we actually develop our managers to be career coaches? We don’t, we don’t teach them how to help managers, or excuse me, help their employees to navigate their career within the company. And quite frankly, in some cases, we actually penalize managers for helping to do that. I was talking to a colleague of mine just a few weeks ago, and he said that in their company, and I’m not going to mention the company, that if a person transfers to another role, be it a lateral move or promotion that that turnover counts against that manager. So they’re actually helping to develop someone to stay with the company move into another role often being promoted. And they actually get dinged for the turnover in their department. I just I, I can’t imagine that scenario, they should be getting bonus. That’s exactly right. That should be a celebration, right. So we’ve got to be careful in thinking about how managers impact. But one of the things that we do see is that manager behavior itself is a big factor in why ratings are going up or down. And we kind of give this a I don’t love the term, but manager professionalism, if you will. And those are things like communication availability, they’re just overall demeanor, their management skills. And one of the things that we found interesting in 2020, was that the ratings of managers actually went up, I would have bet you lots of pocket change, because I don’t have a lot of money, that during the pandemic era of 2020, that managers would ratings would have gone down, because I felt like managers probably weren’t doing very well. Well, it turns out, they did better than expected. Sure. And the reason they did better than expected is because their professionalism actually improved. And think about it, their availability improved, people perceived that they were more available. And that sort of is counterintuitive, because you’re saying, Well, how did that happen when we weren’t in the office together? But how many zoom calls did you participate on on a weekly basis where your manager was actually there? Did you see your manager more during 2020? Than you do regularly? I bet you did.
Chris:
Absolutely. So personal experience, same thing as somebody working from home in 2018. So in 2018, I began working from home Danny, and endevis, I’ll be honest, we were a bit archaic, we didn’t have great processes to manage virtual employees. We’re getting better at it today. But having the pandemic forced our hand to be virtual, and learn how to be virtual, right, learn how to use teams calls, learn how to communicate differently, it improved our overall employee experience, in my opinion, tenfold. And again, that’s just an opinion. But I know as a remote employee, that it was a lot harder pre pandemic, to have everybody centered, like we could even do a group call effectively, pre pre pandemic, it was like, Okay, well, you gotta call into this number, and you gotta call in, and we’re gonna do this, and we’re gonna have a mic here. And you can hear over here, we fixed all of that. Right. And that, to me, was so valuable. And I was actually at the Tennessee State Sherm conference in August, and there was Gallagher had an employee engagement survey, and I thought these were interesting numbers. So they had four engagement, diagnostics, Danny, loyalty, job satisfaction, promoter behaviors, so that Net Promoter type type thing, and discretionary effort, which that was an interesting one, willing to put an extra effort to help the organization succeed. So pre pandemic, people were happy with their jobs, they were willing to promote their jobs, and they were willing to put in extra effort, but they had no loyalty. In the pandemic, their loyalty skyrocketed, because they didn’t want to lose that job. But they were they were unwilling to put in discretionary effort, a significant down down trot, they didn’t want to put an extra effort, their promoter behavior went down and so did Job satisfaction. And now in the pandemic transition, which you probably are in the same period that your report was, loyalty went bright red the other direction. Job satisfaction went down again, promoter behavior went down significantly and Discretionary Effort continued to go down further. So Can you kind of speak to that employee motivation, I guess, and where they are in this post pandemic, kind of still pandemic environment?
Danny:
Yeah, the managers are having a significant impact. And what we found, again, is that as that professionalism improves, then so do those overall ratings, and then that, in turn, obviously is impacting our reasons for leaving. And so I believe that what we got to do is to start to look at not just the manager professionalism is something that we got to improve in organizations, but then we got to start to add to their toolkit. And so we’ve got to look at things like, how are they helping employees manage their careers within the organization? How are they being stewards of the culture? How are they working through these work life balance issues, and I think this one’s going to be huge, Chris, because I was reading an article earlier, and I couldn’t agree with it more is that by in large, we’re trying to solve work life balance issues, and especially remote work issues, through policy. And it made the point that no policy is going to be perfect for each department, each company, each individual, we’re gonna have to go at this from an individual standpoint, and what that’s going to happen is it’s going to create conflict, and it’s going to create conflict that we have not prepared managers to deal with. Because they like to fall back on Well, there’s the company policy, and as long as we’re adhering to the company policy, everything will be okay, and I’m gonna be okay. And we’re gonna have to get away from that, because it’s just not going to be a one size fits all.
Chris:
I couldn’t agree more. We live in a an environment today that we’re moving from customized solutions in the workforce to personalized solutions. And each and every employee, because of the nature of our lives today require some amount of personalization, if you want to retain that individual, you can’t expect a blanket to cover each and every one of them. And that changes how we engage. And so the last topic I did want to hit on Danny was employee engagement. And where do we go from here? Because I think that we’ve been seeing, it seems that we’ve kind of been doing the same thing for the last two decades and varying degrees of, hey, you know, we’re gonna do we’re gonna do X, Y, and Z, and it’s gonna net this. But is that really the right way forward? Like, what what do we do? What do we what are we doing? How can we improve things?
Danny:
Wow, we could spend days on this, Chris. But um, so I’m going to try and make this really quick and easy. So you mentioned earlier in the introduction, that we wrote a book called employer engagement. So I’m not trying to plug the book. But I wanted to mention that the working title of that book prior to actually putting it out and publishing it was not employer engagement, it actually was called the engagement of one. Because at the, at the end of the day, we have this belief system that engagement becomes a very individual phenomenon, right? It’s it’s about Chris being engaged, it’s about Danny being engaged, it’s about William or Kelly or Anne or Glenn. And it’s, it’s about what engages them in the organization. And and I’ve used this example, for years that for me, when I was early in my career, everything was about career progression. That’s all I cared about, if you could show me the next rung, I was going to work myself as hard as I could and be as loyal and engaged and involved as I could to get to that next level. My wife, on the other hand, has no interest in being promoted ever. And so she wanted, you know, we have one son, she wanted to be able to be a little flexible with, you know, going picking him up at school at times or being in at the school event and those types of things. So that flexibility was critical for us. What we’ve tried to do is to narrow employee engagement to a set of questions, you know, 12 16 35 questions that measure engagement. Well, how can you figure out the right set of questions to figure out if those two disparate attitudes are actually engaged in their work? I don’t think it can happen. And so I think we have part of why I think we failed is that we’ve spent entirely too much time trying to put a single number on engagement for an entire population. And what we are doing and then on didn’t come on here to promote Work Institute, but I think it’s so relevant is that we look at employee engagement very differently. So you’ve got two schools one we’re trying to measure engagement, too. Were taking a library of questions. And we’re developing our engagement survey based on what we want to know. And when I say we, I’m saying we, the employer want to know, we’ve actually developed a survey, from the half million interviews we’ve done with employees that tell us what’s important to employees. And that’s what I think is missing Chris. I think employee engagement is about what’s important to employees. And I think we continue to ignore that fact. I think we we measure things that are either important to this faulty measurement of engagement or the things that we think are important to us. And the concept behind employer engagement is we have to figure out how to engage employees, it’s our responsibility to create the conditions. Well, if we’re going to create those conditions, we better know what’s important to them. And I think we’re, we’re missing that mark. That’s what I think is wrong in the employee engagement world. That sadly, I love that statement.
Chris:
No, stand on that soapbox as much as possible, because we’ve got to get companies thinking differently. We need we need CEOs, we need CFOs, we need COOs to understand that employee engagement is a significant metric that they need to be tracking for the success of their companies, right? Unhappy employees, create unhappy customers and unhappy customers means that your business might cease to exist, right. And so we live in a the workforce now is much more transient than it’s ever been. The number of opportunities that individuals have within a two to three hour radius of where they live, even in rural areas has been exponentially magnified. Right. So you know, take take Nashville, for example, one of the reasons that people are moving here so rapidly is because there’s an abundance of opportunities and that those number of opportunities don’t sound like they’re going to be shrinking anytime soon. And individuals aren’t tied to their hometowns as much as they once were, I grew up on a farm, there’s plenty of people back home to take care of that farm, they don’t need me. So I can I can come to Nashville and chase my dreams, right, I can do different things I can, I can go live in a different in a different environment, cuz I’ve been exposed to what it’s like to live in a city or be in a city, whereas like, my parents weren’t, right. Like they only knew their their little world that they grew up in and in rural southern Illinois. And, you know, it’s a little scary to to get out from there. And so companies have to realize that, that we as people don’t need you as much as they need us. Right? Companies need us a lot more than we as individuals need them. There’s too many opportunities that exist. And when we think about the employee engagement, Danny and how we measure it, do you find that companies are too often measuring it on a broad spectrum and understanding like from a company wide area, what that looks like versus maybe a different perspective on it?
Danny:
Well, again, what we find is that they’re trying to place a single number on it, and they do look at it by departments. And some will look at the manager level, but what we look at are what we call the four core drivers. And there’s it’s really no a lot a lot of argument about the drivers, a lot of other engagement survey type companies would agree with us and may have the same exact ones. And it really boils down to four things. The job itself, the manager, the team I work with, and and the organization as an employer, those four things really are at the core of both retention and engagement. But what we do is we just look at how people are perceiving those four core drivers. And those core drivers, the things that are important within each of those have come from our interviews with employees. So again, we’ve done half a million stay interviews and exit interviews over the course of our 20 plus year history. So we’ve got a pretty good idea about why employees feel the way they do about their job, the reasons they feel the way they do about their manager. And so we’ve taken those and built that as the foundation for our employee engagement measurement system, not trying to measure engagement, but just simply by measuring the core drivers and knowing that we learned from employees what’s important to them about it. So you know, this whole issue around manager availability, for example, it’s really important to employees that your manager is available, that they’re accessible. And I don’t know that I’ve ever seen that question presented in a traditional engagement survey. Maybe it has and you know, there’s literally 1000s of them out there, but I’ve never seen it. And so I think it’s those little tweaks, again, that is turning the perception from this as an employer responsibility to create the conditions, not the employees responsibility to just simply be engaged. And if we can flip that mindset ever so slightly, I think that’s where the real difference is going to be made. And by the way, that’s going to fix a ton of your retention issues as well. It I mean, they go hand in hand
Chris:
absolutely. So moral. The story here is, before you call endevis, called Danny, let Danny measure your the effectiveness of your retention efforts and your employee engagement. And then we’ll come in and help you hire all the people. How’s that sound? Danny?
Danny:
Well, and and, Chris, I think that it’s so important. And I think maybe one of the things that are, I don’t use this term a lot, because I think it gets confusing, but our founder, Dr. Tom Mehan, who founded the company, he always talks about, we’re an attraction and retention company. And I tell him all the time, well, the problem is when we call ourselves an attraction company then they think we’re recruiters, they think we’re RPOs, like endevis. But that’s not actually what he say. What he’s saying is that you have to constantly be attracting and re attracting the people that are there. And so it is a constant ongoing attraction effort to keep the people that you already have. And And interestingly enough, if you’re doing that, well, it will help you to attract people from the outside to come to work for you. We talked about that a little earlier, Chris, is that you know, if you get that negative reputation in the marketplace, good luck trying to hire people. But if you’ve got the the most positive reputation in the marketplace, then generally people are going to be lined up at your door.
Chris:
I love what Dr. Tom says there he, he, it applies to when I do speaking presentations, I have a piece in there about how employee retention is a lot like marriage. And that talent acquisition is a lot like dating. Right? When you’re when you’re trying to attract those candidates, everybody seeing the best side of both sides, maybe there’s a few white lies that are thrown in there. Once you’re married to each other, you know, where all of the landmines are, you know, what the what bad parts about the company, you know, what you like what you don’t like, but you have to continue to date, right? No different than a marriage in order to keep it together, you’ve got to continue to be working together.
Danny:
And that’s where you brought up the managers earlier. And the manager is such a key part of that relationship, right? The because retention engagement is also local. If we think we can have enough town hall meetings that are hosted by the CEO to create retention engagement we are we’re kidding ourselves. It happens at a local level. And by local I mean, at the manager level at the supervisor level. That’s where the best environment is created. And that’s where we’re actually going to create engagement, retention.
Chris:
Love it Danny, that’s a wrap on another episode of the talent tide podcast. But Danny, how can people find you find the your retention reports etc?
Danny:
Yeah, it’s really easy. We’re at WorkInstitute.com. So you can simply come to our website, there’s a Resources tab. So there you will find not only our retention reports, but case studies, we have a really interesting content called Essential Gods that talks about things like exit interviews, and stay interviews and engagement surveys. And we really try and create them as sort of on unbiased learning documents that people can I think learn from in terms of what they’re trying to accomplish. Certainly, you can follow me on LinkedIn, you can connect with me on LinkedIn, I should say follow me on Twitter and Facebook. So there’s all those avenues. And I will say that we put out I think some of the best content in the country on retention. And so connecting with us following Work Institute on LinkedIn, you’ll be able to get access to that content.
Chris:
I second that you should definitely do that. So again, thanks for being on the on the podcast today. Danny, we appreciate it. Maybe it sounds like we need to have you back again for for some different conversations. But please be sure to subscribe, like rate the podcast wherever you listen. And remember, success is on the other side of fear. Thank you and have a great day.