Quits at a 7-year high. Is it time for an Employee Survey?

Organizations seemed to survey their employees regularly during the 1990s and early 2000s. The war for talent was in full force and they felt it was important to keep their finger on the pulse of their workforce. Then the recession hit. And with it came difficult management decisions - cost-cutting, restructuring and layoffs.

Management in many organizations understandably shifted from a collaborative, participative style prior to the crisis, to a command-and-control style during it. And in many cases the employee survey disappeared with this shift.

Unfortunately, many organizations re-discovered that there is nothing more efficient than a dictatorship, so they have been hesitant or slow to move back to more collaborative cultures. But this statistic might change their minds: 2.8 million Americans voluntarily quit their jobs in March 2015.  According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this number has been rising since September 2014, but March marks the first month quits have reached that level since April 2008. 

This means the war for talent is heating up again. Employees feel they have more options than they've had in recent years and many are looking for a healthier, more pleasant work environment. So it may be time to initiate planned organizational changes to make sure your organization is a ship people want to board rather than one from which they can't wait to disembark.

A great way to gauge whether employees may be actively looking for new opportunities, passively open to new opportunities, or happy, engaged and entrenched is to dust off the old employee survey and simply ask them. 

Administering a survey can be easy using an instrument like SurveyMonkey or Zoomerang. However, if you suspect the trust gap between workers and management in your organization has grown from a crack to a gorge over the past few years, you might benefit from engaging an outside organization to conduct the survey for you. Employees are much more likely to provide honest feedback if they trust that their responses are truly confidential. The return-on-investment could be huge, especially if some of those 2.8 million employees who voluntarily quit their jobs were yours.

The hard part comes after you collect the results - demonstrating to your employee base that you are actually listening. This is the phase where you communicate the results along with action plans designed to address their concerns. 

Of course you're always going to have the vocal disgruntled minority who gripe about virtually everything. The challenge is recognizing when it's more than that - especially when it's feedback you don't really want to hear.  A reputable consulting firm can assist not only in the design and the administration of the survey, but in the interpretation of the results, the communication, and the implementation of strategies that evolve from the analysis. 

Indispensable Employees and The Lottery Principle

Employers generally make one of two mistakes when firing someone - they either do it too quickly or too slowly. Too quickly happens when they terminate an employee who might have been salvageable with a little time and good management practices. Instead of spending a little money to rehabilitate, they often decide to spend a lot of money to simply start over.

On the flip side, too slowly sometimes happens when an owner or manager has the illusion that a problem employee is indispensable. This may be rooted in one of three issues:

1. The owner/manager knows that he/she will be inconvenienced by addressing the problem and is willing to tolerate a lot more than they should in order to avoid any conflict.
2. The owner/manager is worried about the problem employee's relationship with a key client. 
3. The owner/manager overvalues the problem employee's individual production, but undervalues how the trouble-maker limits the productivity of the rest of the team.  

I worked with a CEO who needed to make a personnel change in a critical, non-executive role. He requested that I run blind ads, network confidentially, or anything else I could think of to find a replacement before taking action against the poor performing employee. Since I'm not a fan of blind ads in any circumstance, I reminded him of The Lottery Principle. 

The Powerball prize reached an unusually high number one week, which generated some buzz around the office. I asked one of our top sales people if he would be coming into work tomorrow if his numbers were picked. He said, "Yes, but I'll be wearing flip flops!" 

The Lottery Principle teaches us that if an employee wins the lottery tonight and flies to Key West tomorrow, the organization will find a way to work through the unplanned loss, no matter what role the employee filled. If that's true then why do so many organizations feel powerless to act on poor performance, even when they know they need to? 

I found myself in similar situation to that CEO a few years back. I had a poor performer who happened to be loved by my largest client. The frustrating part was that he didn't even do a very good job for the client, but was revered by the client nonetheless. In both my case and in the case of the CEO, above, the problem employee eventually did something that forced our hands. And in both cases we realized that the sky didn't fall and we wish we had acted sooner. In fact, that's the comment you'll most frequently hear from other employees in those cases, "What took you so long?"

So, how do you know when it's time? It's time when you can clearly define what the performance deficiencies are, you have communicated your expectations to the employee such that they know what success looks like, and you've determined that the employee is either unable or unwilling to meet those expectations. At that point it is time severe the relationship and deal with the ramifications, just as you would if the employee won the lottery and disappeared to a Caribbean island.