?It’s no surprise that retention has been a major issue for employers in the past couple of years: In a hot job market, scores of employees have left their companies for other opportunities in what has been dubbed the Great Resignation.
To help combat the phenomenon, employers have turned to competitive pay, increasing salaries in some of the largest hikes in recent years.
But is pay really why employees are quitting? And is higher pay enough to keep employees? To an extent, sure, but it’s not the primary reason, said Richard Finnegan, chief executive officer of C-Suite Analytics, a Longwood, Fla.-based consulting firm.
“You can raise pay all you want; it’s not a bad thing. But it’s not enough,” Finnegan said June 11 at the SHRM Annual Conference & Expo 2023 in Las Vegas. “People don’t go for a little bit of money unless they want to go.”
Although employees may cite salary as a factor—especially in an exit interview—”most people are going to quit because they feel disrespected,” he said.
For instance, a 2021 Massachusetts Institute of Technology survey, which analyzed 34 million online profiles to identify employees who recently left their employer for any reason, found that toxic culture is the top reason why workers leave their job.
It really comes down to how employees feel about their direct supervisors, as well as other company leaders, Finnegan said, explaining that the greatest reason why employees quit is what they talk about with friends and family over dinner. “Managers are on the menu every night,” he said. “[Employees] aren’t having dinner with their spouse [and] talking about pay or their health insurance. They’re talking about their boss.”
The more employees like their boss, the more they will like other factors like pay, benefits and career advancement opportunities, he said.
So what can HR leaders do to address turnover? Rather than broad approaches like conducting exit interviews or sending out benefits or engagement surveys to employees, HR leaders should empower supervisors to talk to their employees and conduct stay interviews, Finnegan said.
“You design one-size-fits-all programs thinking they might cut turnover,” he said. “But you can’t win with one-size-fits-all—and pay is just another one-size-fits-all. What will work is an interactive way to learn what’s important to employees.”
Stay interviews—a structured discussion a supervisor conducts with each individual employee to learn specific actions that can be taken to strengthen that employee’s engagement and retention with the organization—can bring information that can be used immediately.
There are five questions supervisors should ask their reports when conducting stay interviews that will help with turnover, Finnegan said:
- When you travel to work each day, what things do you look forward to? It moves the mind to day-to-day work and starts the conversation with positive thinking, rather than negative, he said.
- What are you learning here? “This isn’t questioning them on what their career goals are, but it is low-hanging fruit about how to identify something employees can work on,” he said.
- Why do you stay here? Asking employees this ensures that managers know what makes each individual employee happy, Finnegan said.
- When was the last time you thought about leaving our team? What prompted it? “It’s not ‘have you thought about leaving’—it’s when because everyone has thought about leaving,”
he said. “Make them identify what makes them stay.” - What can I do to make your experience at work better for you? “You have to train supervisors to listen, to take notes, to probe,” he said.
Ensuring that supervisors have these regular discussions with their employees is the best way to keep employees happy in their work—and help keep them with the organization, Finnegan said.
“Your supervisors have much more authority than they think they have to fix this problem of turnover,” he said.