WhatHaveWeLearned

Lets do a quick test. Everyone who thinks turnover in your business is good raise your hand. SMH. Yeah see I shouldn’t have seen any hands.

Just to clarify we’re talking about turnover in the sense of employees exiting and entering your company. Once again, show of hands, who thinks turnover is good. Still a lot of hands…

Why is it bad?

First and foremost turnover is bad because you will never have solid experienced employees if they keep leaving.

Second, it’s expensive. All that exit paperwork, potentially unemployment, entry paperwork and (if you have any sense) hours and hours of paid training.

Debatably more important is that turnover is a symptom. If you have constant high turnover you very likely have a systemic issue with your company. If you didn’t know you have an issue you have an even bigger problem.

The Basics

Lets cover a few basics. If these conditions are satisfied your issue isn’t one of the simple and/or obvious problems. Just some food for thought for this section, no one wants to work at your company, or any other, people work to put food on the table. They may care about the quality of the work they deliver but they don’t give a damn about your company. They’re there for a paycheck, don’t delude yourself. This is fine. You both have something to offer each other. Offering a job at your company in and of itself is not a benefit. Working sucks, very few people would do it if they didn’t have to. It’s why in the utopian future of Star Trek the bathrooms are disgusting.

Firstly, do you pay decently? If we’re not looking at minimum wage retail or food service then the pay better be appropriate. Federal minimum wage is $7.25 or in my specific terms, why bother even showing up to work. Your entry positions (really anything beyond data entry) should be paying at least 2.5 times that and go up exponentially from there. Glassdoor is really useful for getting a grasp on what the industry overall pays the position your staffing. If you’re on the bottom end of the spectrum your people are using you as a stopgap while they find a better job.

Second, how many hours are your people expected to work? If you created a situation where people are expected to work 40 hours on paper and have to work 50-60 to actually get their work done, congrats, all your people are looking for the door.

And lastly, are you firing a large portion of them? If you’re having to fire 2-4% of your staff annually your staff is not the problem. Congratulations, you’ve created a shitty work environment. Whatever metric you’re using to determine these people need to go is WRONG. Most people (99.9%) need their job and will do it as well as they can if it’s not bullshit.

This Sucks

Why are none of my people any good? Because you’re not investing the time and resources necessary to make them effective.

1. Responsibility without authority – CEO to Salesmanager, “I want sales up by 5% this quarter”. Salesmanager, “Can I hire some staff or run some ads? Fire your sister-in-law who hasn’t made a sale this year?”. “Absolutely not, with sales down we don’t have the budget, sister-in-law is getting a raise too, she’s great”.
   • If you put people in a no win situation, they will fail, shocking huh.
2. Lack of training – Department manager (3 tiers down from CEO) to new hire, “Can you cover this meeting I was supposed to lead in 5 minutes? I have a headache.” New hire “Uh yeah I guess, I’ve never attended a client facing meeting let alone lead one are there any notes or instruction?”. Dept mgr “You’ll do fine, it’s easy!”. New hire inner-monologue “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, what am I going to do, I just started here 5 days ago, I don’t know the client’s name, I don’t even know what the meeting was about”.
   • This little drama is not a fabrication, I had this exact thing happen to me at a new job some years ago. I was eventually let go from that job when I uncovered an pseudo-embezzlement plot being run by the company partners. To this day it was the worst, most toxic environment I have ever worked in. That person eventually was moved to head of the majority of the company and promptly ran it into the ground. We’ll get to how this happens a while later.
   • The point of this story is if you don’t give your people the proper training and coaching and direction they cannot succeed no matter how smart they are and when you lose them, through your own fault, you will damage their lives and you will lose out on any potential they had.
3. Your metrics are bullshit – “Alright team we’ve created a new system based on metrics.” CEO announces in quarterly meeting. “Everyone will be expected to hit these specific work product and revenue goals” and whispers through her teeth “or they’ll be fired” or was that message just conveyed by the way the company is run. Customer service team lead chimes in “but we have no control over the incoming work load, only sales can impact these numbers and hand the work to us. In less harsh terms the CEO explains “well then, I guess you’re SOL, hehehe, just kidding, but not really”.
   • This is similar to responsibility without authority. If you are measuring staff productivity based on numbers they don’t control all you’re going to do is piss off your staff, convince yourself they’re terrible, and probably end up replacing a bunch of perfectly effective people and again damage both your company and their lives.
4. Right fit over good employee
   • This is a new trend with all these “culture based organization” (we’ll get to culture…). If this person isn’t a “right fit” for this company then they need to go away. How is “right fit” defined? Well do they fit in, do people like them, do they avoid negativity or dissenting opinions? Do they ask difficult questions? Etcetera. If your staff is all “right fit” based on these traits congrats, you’ve turned your company into a popularity contest and surrounded yourself with followers and sycophants.
   • Think back to the glory days of high school your are undoubtedly pining for. Were the smart kids in the popular crowd? Were the head cheerleader and the football captain studying up on their economics in the library after school? Hanging out with the chess club? No, they were dipshits and they probably still are and they’re drawn to this exact sort of thing. Do you want to run a business and make money or do you want to pretend like you’re popular because everyone has to pretend like they like you if they work for you.
   • If you’ve fired anyone because “they just didn’t fit in” you need to re-examine your life.

Avoiding Disaster

So how do you avoid all this stuff? Well thankfully it’s actually not that hard. All you need to do is stop and think for a bit. I know that may be a lot to ask for some of you, especially the ones who raised their hands above, sitting alone, reading on your phone. You can put your hand down now btw.

If you’re seeing any of the issues above and you are the CEO, you are responsible for them and it’s easy to fix. Here’s the steps to success:

1. Learn how your company actually runs. Get in there, find out what the day to day life of an average office worker actually looks like. If you did that job 10 years ago when the company had 3 employees and now you have 100 employees that job is nothing like it was when you did it. You’re clueless. Admittedly there is a point when this becomes infeasible. Probably somewhere around the 3-400 employee mark. Most places just aren’t that diversified. Do every job in your company, know how it works, KNOW YOUR COMPANY. Hell maybe even take a turn cleaning the bathroom, you could probably use a dose of real life. And do a refresher every few years.
2. Metrics are stupid and NEVER work. If you haven’t done step one your metrics are meaningless. You are gaging things that don’t matter and don’t indicate what you believe they indicate and you’re people are struggling to find ways to fulfill your useless metrics that don’t hamper their actual job too much.
   • I worked at a place that was very reliant on tickets for workflow management. Every task was client facing so client engagement time and acknowledgement times and all that were very critical. The company decided to implement a new metric system to gauge these things and identify trouble spots. And raises and that sort of thing would be based on these numbers going forward.
   • It took just a couple of days for the helpdesk staff to work out a system to open every ticket immediately, despite doing nothing to the ticket, it was “acknowledged”. Then a timer started for engagement. 15 minutes maximum to in progress. 30 minute timer to “work”. Once 30 minutes was up, escalation, not in a client issue sense but in a escalate to higher tier staff. I happened to be the highest tier senior engineer at this particular hell hole. Within a couple weeks my ticket backlog swelled into the triple digits. But damn did everyone else’s metrics look fantastic. Clients were furious, many never heard from anyone for days, but by golly their ticket had been manipulated. I was let go from this place as well. A client had their core production server go down and couldn’t do business so I worked on it for 32 hours straight (I had cited this for replacement some time prior but the CTO shot that down). My manager was generally unreachable so I dropped him an email stating I was bushed and needed sleep so I would be in late, if at all, the following day (this was maybe 4am). Client emails confirming all this and the timeline readily available. That Friday I was out on my ass because my attendance had become spotty. Glad to be of service. I pulled many all-nighters at that place covering for poor planning and poorer workmanship from the old CTO. They paid well though.
   • What were we talking about?
   • Oh, right, metrics. If your company is under 100 employees, most companies are, you have no need for metrics. You don’t need metrics until it is impossible to manually assess the efficacy of individual employees. When you reach critical mass metrics should be a last resort. Metrics create hiding places for employees you should be removing. Everything has pros and cons but metrics are all con for small business, nothing but cop-out for those who are unwilling to put in the necessary time.
   • This one is really tough to unearth but it can have a huge impact on your company and your staff. Find out if your managers are worth a damn. I’ve held a number of relatively high level positions over the years but many of them didn’t have staff reporting directly to me. What I did have was indirectly subordinate staff with their own manager who constantly ended up coming to me (the staff not the manager) for direction and assistance because their manager was off golfing or hitting on underage girls in the parking lot or doing who knows what so no one can find them. Or the staff got fed up with whatever pedantic imbecile supervisor they were supposed to look to for help so again they came to me because I wouldn’t treat them like dirt because they haven’t learned the same things as me. I can’t even count the number of managers I’ve had that I couldn’t get ahold of when I needed them or outright ducked me because my questions were too difficult and they didn’t actually know anything.
3. Respect. Your employees expect respect and they probably won’t voice it if they aren’t getting it, at least not prior to their exit interview, which you probably won’t get when they walk out without notice. I don’t care if you’re the CEO, owner, president of the USA, you are no better than me. I guarantee the majority, if not all, of your staff believes that statement.
   • Are you disrespectful to your staff? Here’s a quick quiz to find out. (substitute your leadership team for you in each question)
     • Do you interrupt them when they are speaking?
     • Do you shootdown their ideas without a moment of consideration (or even a pause to imply consideration)?
     • Are you unnecessarily pedantic when there’s no point? (you’d probably be embarrassed if you knew how often you were the one who was wrong)
     • Do you take time from staff without warning outside of normal business hours? (yes lunch counts as outside of normal business hours, providing lunch when you do this goes a long way)
     • Do you public recognize your favorites while ignoring those you care less for?
     • Do you do anything that could be perceived as changing rules post quota/goal/budget/bonus period/etc?.(restructuring bonus calculations after bonusing factors have already been determined for example)
     • Do you snap at employees, raise your voice, condescend to, berate (especially in front of other staff), etc.?
4. Office politics. Every business has a large group that actually bring in the revenue that funds the company. If your company does sales it’s your sales department (if you’re any other kind of company it’s not your sales department), if you’re in retail it’s a lot of groups of people, if you’re in accounting it’s your bookkeepers, if you’re a mechanic shop it’s your mechanics, etc. Sometimes in a really toxic company certain groups can start to believe they are the most valuable group and start to treat everyone else, especially your so-called breadwinners, like they work for whichever group this is.
   • IT is one of the most common to do this. They start to believe that everyone works for them because they handle the infrastructure and usually work at “corporate”. They tend to forget their department only costs money and they never bring in a dime and actually they work for everyone else. (from personal experience in this industry if you have an IT staff member behaving like this you should take a close look at their work overall. This sort of entitlement often leads to other more dangerous or destructive types of entitlement. As always I recommend 3rd party security scrutiny for every business, it’ll save you money in the long run)
     • Sales in a non-sales driven company is another department that can easily go rogue. They believe since all the work comes in through them they hold the keys to the kingdom often forgetting they don’t actually do any work themselves and are often little more than a gatekeeper for the workhorses who also earn their paycheck.
   • These behaviors need to be slapped down in a hurry. They are demoralizing and often the victims (your workhorses) are powerless to do anything about this treatment.

Every one of these behaviors is disrespectful and I 100% guarantee you does not go unnoticed by your staff and all of them I have personally experienced. They probably wouldn’t spit on you if you were on fire. Their paycheck is the only thing financing your pretend popularity.

Bring it all back around

All this stuff results in high turnover. Whether you’re firing a lot of staff or have a lot of staff leaving the cause is the same. An angry employee is going to do a bad job until they quit. There is no circumstance in which a high turnover rate indicates anything other than serious problems in your organization. If you’re specialized enough eventually you will run out of staff and you can only hide behind your “no negative public reviews or we’ll sue” in your employee handbook for so long before you develop a reputation. Not to mention your business is just going to suffer as a result of an all new staff every month. Clients will wonder why they’ve never talked to the same person twice and lose trust. All the new people will make constant mistakes.

Final Word

I hoped this helped someone out there. If you found that it offended you, you probably have bigger problems, which I’d be happy to help you with in the comments.

If you’re reading this and you use EOS please let me know. I have a bridge in NYC for sale. If you have a paid EOS consultant please let me know immediately, I have several bridges available for you.