Talent Keepers

How Top Leaders Engage and Retain Their Best Performers

Christopher Mulligan, Craig Taylor

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119558255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Achieve higher levels of workforce engagement and retain more employees

A strong U.S. economy with record-low unemployment rates and the shift to Millennials—now the largest generation in the workforce—are driving specific challenges for organizations to engage and retain employees. Engaged employees don't just happen, they are nurtured by organizations with great cultures and strong leadership.

Talent Keepers puts a new spin on a systematic approach to employee engagement and retention with precise tactics that have achieved proven results. This book includes research-based methods of engaging employees, beginning the moment they are hired. With six client case studies that focus on how the organization put an engagement plan into practice and achieved success, readers will come away with specific, actionable strategies they can begin implementing immediately in their organization.

• Put an engagement plan into action
• Find actionable strategies
• Implement ways to retain your best employees
• Achieve success starting today

If you're a top leader looking to engage and retain your best performers, Talent Keepers has you covered.

Chapter 1
Engaging Your Talent Is a Business Imperative

Kristen was running early. She felt upbeat, and not just from the skinny latte warming her cup holder. Until recently, her job had been a dull, unsatisfying slog. But today, not even the traffic clogging her commute on this cloudy and chilly morning could break her excitement about getting to work.

It had been ten months since she first made the decision to pursue that new position, and even though it was a lateral move with no pay increase, she found that it invigorated her in ways she never could have expected. At first she figured it was just the newness of the role that had her so energized. But the more time passed, the more she realized that she owed much of it to her new supervisor.

He was so different from anyone who had ever managed her before. He listened. He got to know her. He seemed to take a genuine interest in her success. When coaching her, he used specific examples that helped her envision what skilled performance looked like. In so doing, he earned her trust, which helped diminish the anxiety of learning a new job, asking for help, or voicing her opinion. She no longer feared being criticized or demeaned if she didn’t immediately grasp a new task. It all felt so much more constructive. She was optimistic about her future, and it showed in her effort and enthusiasm.

Of course it’s not exactly revolutionary to say that leaders play a pivotal role in energizing and keeping valued workers like Kristen. That’s why it’s so strange to learn that most organizations aren’t doing enough to leverage the influence their leaders have on their employees. We will get to the data in a moment, but for now, let’s put it this way: Where you work, how many engaged and energized people like Kristen are there? Equally important, what would it mean to your organization if more leaders were like Kristen’s supervisor? What would that do for morale? For productivity? For your ability to meet defined outcomes? For your chances to innovate? For your bottom line?

When it comes to keeping and engaging high-performing employees, it’s no longer enough to leave the responsibility in the hands of the HR department, as well-intended as they may be. The misconception is that employee engagement is a human resources “thing.” But in truth, retention and engagement are business strategies with clear business outcomes. Of course, engagement and retention are supported by HR in many and varied ways, but ultimately these strategies and outcomes must be owned by the operations leaders in your organization. An engaged workforce positively impacts the customer experience, which improves employee/customer relationships, and, in turn, generates more revenue.

It runs deeper than that, as well. According to Debbie Weaver, a human resources representative from Stillwater Mining Company based in Billings, Montana, engaged employees are also safer employees. Stillwater mines palladium as their primary product, with platinum running in second place. With hundreds of employees working irregular shifts inside hundreds of miles of subterranean tunnels, the company tends to see its share of employee turnover. Part of that owes to the notion that it’s difficult enough finding people willing to work 11.5-hour days for four consecutive days before four days off. Then throw in the idea that these same people must next take a shift where it’s five nights on, followed by five nights off. Rotating hours aren’t for everybody, and the pliable sleep schedule tends to bring engagement issues bubbling to the surface.

“Engaged employees are more productive,” she said. “The higher our levels of engagement, the better our production numbers. But for us, the biggest thing we have seen is that there is a direct correlation between engaged employees and how they view safety.” Every metric made available to Stillwater showed that their more engaged employees believed safety was a priority for the company, and for their leaders. That top-down view of the importance of safety has driven home a safer and more engaged environment, which has, in turn, allowed the company to take steps toward decreasing turnover rates.

Imagine a truck set to drive down into a palladium mine. That truck has a brake light out. While driving the roads above the surface, that might seem like a minor issue, but if you have an accident inside a mine, the stakes tend to rise considerably. An engaged employee is more likely to recognize that brake light issue and immediately report it to the driver and to a supervisor who can do something about it. Meanwhile, someone who simply shows up to “do his job” might not care enough to help avert potential disaster. The business difference between the two can be immeasurable—it’s the difference between all the lost productivity during an accident, plus the cost of repairing the truck and replacing the damaged load versus avoiding the disaster before it even happens.

The same holds true for everything a company can value. Engaged employees deliver better business results across the board. Think about the last time you walked into a retail store that was full of employees who didn’t seem to have any real interest in helping you learn about the product and answer your questions. Did you buy that day or just head out and order on Amazon instead? Conversely, how much more willing have you been in the past to buy from an employee who is genuinely engaged with her job and intent on answering your questions? John F. Kennedy once said that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” As you increase engagement, every business measure rises with it.

“When your staff feels engaged, they take ownership for the organization,” says Donna Fayko, director of the department of social services in North Carolina’s Rowan County. “That ownership shows up in the quality of service they provide to customers, which obviously is a huge part of any organization’s success.”

By now, it should be no secret: We believe that the effort to engage and retain talent must move out to the front lines. It must rest squarely in the hands of leaders like you. We have seen it time and time again: When leaders hold themselves accountable for energizing their most talented employees, every aspect of the organization improves. Great leaders are, beyond a doubt, the most effective strategy for enhancing organizational success. The more talent you keep and engage, the better you perform across the board.

So how do you keep and engage your best workers? Some might suggest competitive pay, comprehensive benefits, flexible work schedules, and even team-building programs. While these measures are indeed helpful, they are not enough on their own. The effort takes great leaders. It takes leaders with a well-honed skill in building a climate of engagement and retention—a climate that speaks to employees in a way that encourages them to get connected and do their best. These leaders are an organization’s best defense against turnover, poor performance, and a host of other workplace ills. They are the not-so-secret weapons in keeping valued contributors actively engaged and in hanging on to them longer.

For all these reasons, we posit a simple premise for this book: If you want to improve your organization, the process starts and ends with your leaders. Again, this stance is not necessarily revolutionary. Many books extol the impact of leaders. What makes the strategies we offer in the coming pages different is that they stand on sixteen years of data compiled from thousands of companies of all backgrounds and goals and in any industry you can think of. Thanks to this data, we have assembled a strategy for shaping people in management positions into leaders that have the exact same kind of impact on their employees’ careers, as Kristen’s did on hers. The results speak for themselves. Every organization that has embraced and executed these strategies has seen significant improvement in all measures. We look forward to unlocking this same potential for yours.

The True Cost of Turnover

Keeping and engaging talent is such a valuable organizational tool for many reasons, but one of the most often overlooked is that staff turnover is so costly. Not only does keeping your best employees ensure that your teams are more productive, innovative, engaged, and just plain good at what they do, it also improves the bottom line dramatically. Cutting the cost of turnover puts more dollars back into the budget, improves return on investment, and allows you to focus more energy and capital on more productive interventions.

Your organization likely already expends time and resources on determining where it can control and minimize cost in an effort to increase profits. Thus, the fact that so few organizations make this same effort to identify and minimize the cost of employee turnover is surprising. In fact, many major industries such as retail, fast-food restaurants, call centers, and construction simply assume high turnover is an inevitable part of the business. Maybe the reason is because so many leaders have come to accept the unfortunate idea that high turnover is something they can’t control. They accept that, when the market is loose, finding and training employees is less expensive, and that in competitive markets, skilled and talented job seekers are scarcer, which often raises costs. That does not have to be the case. An organization that commits to keeping and engaging more of their talent can avoid fishing in these turbulent waters, and more importantly, cut the huge costs associated with replacing key employees.

Of course the points we mention above don’t apply to everyone. Many organizations do take the steps necessary. They compile the data on the direct costs of turnover and use it to their advantage. In their view, the effort is so simple and straightforward that it doesn’t make sense to ignore it. So they identify and calculate the expenses associated with recruiting; interviewing; training; purchasing new equipment, tools, and uniforms; and so on. Well-run organizations also identify the costs of efforts like exit interviews, expenses like separation pay, and increases in unemployment tax, the payroll that must be allocated to temporary help or overtime, the time and money that goes into orientation processes, and more. But what too many organizations fail to account for are the (often hidden) indirect costs as well.

Think about the last time a valued member of your team retired or left for another job. What happened in the aftermath? The short answer is that you lost productivity, time, and a great deal more money than you may realize. When a key member of your staff leaves, productivity almost always suffers as you try to transition from a talented and knowledgeable employee to one who is still learning the ropes. Then you have the financial impact of lost revenue from lower sales when a seasoned salesperson resigns. Your organization also experiences the inevitable drop in customer service and overall customer experience, which threatens loyalty and a customer’s willingness to recommend the business to friends and family.

Usually, morale takes a hit, too. A working relationship shares at least that one key similarity to any other personal relationship: When someone you care about and/or count on leaves, you tend to miss them. That is true of the departed employee’s coworkers and any customer he may have interacted with as well. According to our research, stress levels rise, team performance declines, service quality suffers, and everyone finds themselves having to spend at least some measure of time picking up the pieces of team morale and organizational culture.

When assessing indirect costs of employee turnover, also consider the lost revenue from the open position. We must think about the total number of workdays the new hire will need before she reaches total effectiveness. That ramp-up time, commonly known as time-to-productivity, can be remarkably costly. Then, attrition of other jobs might result from that frontline employee’s departure. You can see the ripple effect at play here.

All this takes a toll on the bottom line, a toll that most organizations f...