👋 You’ll hear from me on the first day of the month, sharing new insights or value, to help release the power of your people. This newsletter is provided exclusively for past and current clients of Leanne Hughes. This list and your name will never be made available to anyone else, not even to others on the list.
It’s an employees market, with record unemployment rates in Australia. The Great Resignation (and Quiet Quitting) are still hot topics for my clients across many industries and locations right now.
Employees hold the power.
Not only can they decide to jump ship and join your competitor but if they’re enterprising, they can also pick up their phone and start a business in the time it takes you to read this article!
I wanted to share a simple tool I created that I use with clients to help focus their people efforts, to attract and retain great people.
Have a look at this 2x2 matrix:
There are two factors here:
Attraction (y-axis): High or low. When you advertise a position, how many role-qualified people are applying for roles?
Retention (x-axis): How long are your employees sticking around? Your metric depends on the industry and market conditions. However, don’t let that dictate what your business needs. For example, Hospitality is typically an industry with high turnover. However, there are bars, restaurants and hotels that despite market conditions, are excellent at keeping their best performers. Why is that?
As you read these descriptions, plot where you think your business currently sits.
Now, let’s focus on each quadrant and what you can do:
(Side note: I’m thrilled I got all these quadrant names to rhyme!)
Top left: Churn
Context: You're attracting people to your business and filling roles quite quickly. However, almost as quickly as you fill a role, someone else is exiting your business. You’re haemorrhaging cash through recruitment ads, cost of training and onboarding, even providing PPE.
Focus on: Leadership and culture work, and optimising the Manager + Employee relationship.
You might have a great structured program to ease someone into your business but after 90 days, when they’re left to their own devices, the biggest factor of engagement is that employee’s relationship with their direct leader.
This churn happens frequently in graduate programs, where graduates feel supported for the first two years, and once they’re off the program and dealing directly with their manager, without additional support, they start looking for other options.
Identify if there are certain parts of your business with higher attrition than others. If there is one team or department with significantly higher level turnover stats, you may need to make a call on whether that leader should stick around (or not).
No matter how wonderful your organisational culture is, the relationship between line leader and employee is the biggest predictor of whether someone will stay, or leave your business.
Top right: Learn
Context: This is the gold star quadrant. You're getting a lot of really great candidates apply for roles and you're retaining them. We can all learn from what you’re doing!
Focus on: Capturing and amplifying the magic of what’s happening in your business, so that you can scale this employee experience. Interview employees, run stay interviews, and continue to double-down on what your employees love about their roles, the team, the company.
Bottom Left: Concern
Context: You’re neither attracting great people, or retaining the people you already have.
There's a market or a skill shortage, perhaps particularly in trade areas. I've heard that electricians in Australia, even their apprentices when it comes to fourth year are just dropping off. And for the amount of work in electrical, it's, it's a real concern.
Focus on: You need to take a multi-prong approach. Firstly, start engaging your employees, they’re having a tough time. They’re having to keep the business performing amid staff shortages (think of the airline industry). This accelerates their propensity for burnout, and looking for options outside of your business. Recognising their efforts and be visible: Thank them, visit them, listen to their ideas and suggestions. They might even hand you the idea you need to retain the right people.
While you’re doing this, investigate the market to identify whether your retention concerns appear because of hygiene factors (salary, work conditions, the physical workplace, policy, supervisor), or motivators (recognition, job status, responsibility, a chance to advance)?
There is no icing without a cake. Don’t focus on improving the motivators until the hygiene factors are satisfactory.
If you're in a competitive industry, your salary doesn’t need to exceed the market rate, it just needs to be on par. To compete with other businesses though, you must offer something unique or attractive at the motivator level, such as development opportunities, or more flexibility.
Bottom Right: Return
Context: You’re getting a great return on the people that you employ. You’re inducting them into the culture and they're deciding to stay for a variety of reasons (watch my walk-through on reasons someone might stay/go in this 2x2), it could include many things, including flexible work, development opportunities, recognition, connections, playing to their strengths every day.
Focus on: Employee evangelism, arm your people up to evangelise on your behalf. . Set your employees up to start spreading the word about how great your place is to work.
Redirect $$ from job ads into evangelism tactics, like creating an employee referral program.
Create triggers to allow your employees to start spreading the word, not only about your business (“it’s a great place to work!”) but also, to attract people to your services.
It’s incredible how many people working in support/functional roles for businesses, have no idea what your business services or offerings. It’s such a missed opportunity to market what you do!
Arm them up so they can create positive word of mouth. I’ve been working with clients specifically on these Employee Evangelism tactics (it’s like marketing in disguise!).
Let me know your thoughts. What’s been working for your business?
Here are some of my most-clicked resources from the last 30 days:
CEOWorld recently published my article on Quiet Quitting
If you have employees that are subject/technical experts and you want them to share their expertise (through workshops, lunch and learns, training sessions), they will LOVE this. I’ve recently created Leanne Hughes’ 2-Hour Workshop Blueprint. It’s a plug and play guide that you/they can use anytime to deliver an engaging session. I’m sharing the blueprint in my masterclass on Thursday 27 October. Jump in for early-bird access over here.
After turning 39 in September, I pulled together my Top 39 most-clicked resources.
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Best,
Leanne