Early on in this process we looked at two separate profitability killers that nearly always feed off of each other and contribute to just about every metric a company tracks; the cost of high turnover and the cost of constant recruiting. In far too many cases, the responsibility for each of these la...
Once we’ve been intentional about creating a culture of top-down leadership that provides effective communication on an ongoing basis and we’ve worked to minimize the profitability that’s killed by high voluntary turnover and ongoing recruiting, the next - but certainly no less critical - profitabil...
Even when we’re extremely proactive in our leadership roles about being engaged with our teams, there’s more we can do to develop a strong recruiting pipeline! Being directly involved in the recruiting process certainly helps, as does having a consistent presence with on our teams, but I’ve never be...
Any way we slice it, recruiting great candidates to join our team comes with a price tag! When we’re forced to recruit constantly because the business is growing, it’s hard enough - especially in a world where those great candidates are hard to come by… But if our voluntary turnover is an issue, and...
I doubt it would be very difficult to choose which management team you would have preferred working for, the one where everybody knows your name or the one where NOBODY seemed to care if you had a name, especially if all the other factors involved were about the same… Quite frankly, I’ve seen a ton ...
If you’ve ever seen the 80s TV show Cheers you’re probably hearing the theme sound in your mind right now, wrapping up with the line “where everyone knows your name…” Whether it’s a friendly neighborhood basement bar in Boston, your favorite local restaurant in your own hometown, or the place you ea...
Earlier I mentioned starting what I thought would be a job to get me through college on March 12, 1996 and referenced how much that organization invested into the process of hiring 40 of the close to one thousand candidates who applied. What I didn’t share was how much of that investment came during...
We can certainly stick with the way it’s always been in our recruiting approach if we want, but I’ve only seen that kill more and more profitability over time. With such a drastic increase in minimum wage in a relatively short time, the “skilled trades shortage” that’s been brewing since at least th...
On January 2, 1996, I had an epiphany! While scraping ice off the 2x4 purlins before nailing down roofing metal for the poultry house I was helping build, I realized that I didn’t want to make a living as a carpenter for the rest of my life. Truth be told, I didn’t really want to do it for the rest ...
Having just wrapped up our look at how high turnover kills so much of an organization’s profitability, it just makes sense to shift our focus to the costs of recruiting. If we are indeed able to provide our best team members with a solid reason to stay, the pressure to add anyone with a pulse to the...
If we’re serious about giving our best team members a solid reason to stay by providing them with purpose and we’ve invested the energy into understanding the reasons that drive their behavior, we should certainly have a solid foundation. But when we can connect all of that to how each task they eng...
Last time I shared the snarky response I gave a friend when they said there wasn’t any money in their company’s budget for developing the people in roles with leadership responsibility, saying he seemed to have plenty in the budget for turnover… Truth be told, I’ve rarely seen companies actually tra...