Solving the Three Major Challenges of Retention

#1—HIRE GOOD EMPLOYEES

 As an employer, you have three places you can deal with lazy, unreliable, drug abusing, dishonest members of our workforce:

1.     Before you let them in your front door;

2.     While they’re in your house;

3.     As you kick them out the back door.

Unfortunately, in our current legal and social system, only one of those places is cheap. Watch our 4- minute video, “Risk Reduction in Hiring” at https://youtu.be/lAQLg3sJUlY.

By screening potential employees for past behaviors and attitudes, you can dramatically reduce the costs of hiring bad people, and make your workplace more productive, happier, safer, and more profitable. Combine an efficient prescreening assessment with an effective preemployment background check, and you can cut your risk by half or more.

The really good news is that the combination of an assessment and a background check may well cost less than your current pre-employment drug screening, and be more effective in the long run! Pre-employment drug screening has fallen victim to an amazing array of devices and practices with one purpose: to make the screening ineffective! If you have doubts, Google the search words, “beat drug test.” The 102,000,000 hits (up from 312,000 in 2003!) will make a believer of you!

Whatever combination of tools you use, your goal is to identify the best potential employees in the pool you have to work with—don’t let the bad ones in the front door!

#2—HIRE AND PROMOTE FOR JOB FIT

A well-documented study, published in Harvard Business Review, concluded that "Job Match" is by far the most reliable predictor of effectiveness on the job. The study considered many factors including the age, sex, race, education and experience of approximately 300,000 American workers, across a broad sector of the business economy. It evaluated their job performance and found no significant statistical differences, except in the area of "Job Match."

Their conclusion: "It's not experience that counts, nor college degrees, nor other widely accepted factors; success hinges on a fit with the job." Other studies have found that job fit not only predicts productivity, but it also predicts retention—if an employee fits the job, it is likely that they will stay on that job, liking it, and being rewarded in a variety of ways for doing it well.

If success is determined by job fit, our challenge is to predict that fit. This requires that we measure 3 critical dimensions: Thinking style, job-related behavioral traits, and occupational interests…and we must do so in a cost-effective, efficient way. The PXT Select assessment, with a 30-year pedigree of continuous improvement and upgrades, has been designed and validated as an efficient way to predict job fit. With this assessment, an employer can be assured of several critical outcomes: People hired will fit their new jobs; people promoted can succeed in the new position; employees can identify a career path likely to work for them; and newly opened jobs can be filled from within, with a high probability of success. These assurances add up to better productivity and improved retention!

In America, we traditionally hire people for their skills…and then lose them, for lack of job fit!

#3—IMPROVE MANAGERS, KEEP YOUR BEST PEOPLE

Paraphrasing Marcus Buckingham, “People quit people, they don’t quit jobs.”

Guess which people they are most likely to quit?

Hint: Managers have the most significant impact on a worker’s daily activities, the mood of the work setting, and the reward structure on the job. Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of your managers, and improving their most critical skills, is a key component of keeping your best people. In this economy, budgets for training have been curtailed, making it difficult to find the money to improve management skills. Many companies are concerned that they will invest money in training, then lose the people and their investment. As Zig Ziegler famously said, though, “If you think it’s expensive to train people and lose them, try not training them and keeping them!”

Invest in a cycle of assessment and training! First, assess their fit for your specific management role; answer the question, “Do they have ‘the right stuff’ to succeed as a manager in our business?” If the answer is “yes”, assess their skills in the areas critical to successful management, and tailor development efforts to the results.

You’ll find your managers get better. Better managers will improve retention.