How Employee Turnover Is Like Losing a Marriage

Regular readers of The Atlantic magazine would likely agree with this online quote that their readers are “serious national readers and thought leaders”. This is sometimes heavy stuff. And a recent article there jumped off the pages for me titled “The Marriage Lesson I Learned Too Late”.[i] Here’s the opening paragraph:

The things that destroy love and marriage often disguise themselves as unimportant. Many dangerous things neither appear nor feel dangerous as they’re happening. They’re not bombs and gunshots. They’re pinpricks. They’re paper cuts. And that is the danger. When we don’t recognize something as threatening, then we’re not on guard. These tiny wounds start to bleed, and the bleed-out is so gradual that many of us don’t recognize the threat until it’s too late to stop it.

The author goes on to say that he entered his marriage believing it could only end if major tragedy happened like either partner having an affair, or spousal abuse, or a destructive gambling problem. But what he learned was his persistent habit of leaving dirty dishes in the sink and then disregarding his spouse’s request to not do so was just one splinter in the fingers of their marriage…and that those dishes and several other ongoing splinters deteriorated the underpinnings of their mutual love, trust, respect, and their feeling of safety toward each other.

Wow. What a lifetime wake-up call. One other way to say this is when I ask you to do something simple and you refuse to do it, it sticks with me and carries over to other parts of our relationship. So the point is that we’re talking about more than dirty dishes in the sink.

The author says his marriage died because of one hundred paper cuts, and he goes on to say this:

If I had known that this drinking-glass situation and similar arguments would actually end my marriage—that the existence of love, trust, respect, and safety in our marriage was dependent on these moments I was writing off as petty disagreements—I would have made different choices.

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Further Reading: Do Managers Create as Much Stress as Spouses?

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And This Is Why Many Employees Quit

So let’s have a debate. The common thinking about why employees quit is usually associated with pay, benefits, career paths, and other broad one-size-fits-all expressions that by their nature present themselves as too hard to fix. The genesis of this thinking is engagement surveys, exit surveys, employee committees to fix engagement survey results, and the ongoing spinning wheel of “HR, go fix turnover” so HR has to do something. The reality though is that many if not most employees are quitting their jobs today because of those paper cuts by their direct supervisors.

When employees sit down for dinner and their partner says, “How was your day, dear?”, no one says their day was frustrating because they don’t have pet insurance. They tell freshly-recalled tales of bosses, colleagues, and duties. And no one has ever said “My boss treats me like dirt but I’m sticking around for employee appreciation week.”

Think how lame this is. Employees report on their annual engagement survey that they want more recognition…so an employee engagement committee designs programs for employee-of-the-month, employee-of-the-year, an employee-of-the-month special parking space, and for continued service you get a backpack at five years and a clock at ten.

Gallup consistently reports that employee engagement has been the same for over 20 years and the reason why is clear. Employees don’t want backpacks but instead just want their boss to tell them they did a good job. End your surveys and engagement committees because you don’t need them.

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Further Reading: Who Jeopardizes Engagement the Most? Gallup Math Says It’s Managers

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Stay Interviews Are a Far Better Idea

Please accept that the #1 reason employees stay or leave is how much they trust their boss. There are many quit reasons so this doesn’t indict bosses as the forever reason that employees quit. But it does present a bullseye for fixing turnover because any fix that doesn’t involve direct supervisors, that we would call a one-size-fits-all, is likely a waste of time and resources. No one leaves a good boss/good team/good duties for an extra dollar-an-hour…even though jerk bosses say they do.

Come on over to the Stay Interview side. Follow our lead by (1) first converting your executives to see the full cost of turnover along with the role first-line leaders play in causing employees to leave or stay, (2) then partner with your top team to develop achievable employee retention goals, followed by (3) informing your leaders on all levels that they are now accountable for achieving those retention goals, (4) then train your leaders to conduct Stay Interviews as I designed them to be done, (5) ask leaders to also forecast how long each employee will stay, and (6) hold those leaders accountable to their goals and their forecasts.

It is no coincidence that we designed our solution to measure each leader’s performance against both goals and forecasts because this is how salespeople are also measured. CEOs know these same two metrics work…and applying them here makes the transfer of retention accountability from HR to the operations team make far more sense to them.

In Conclusion, It Really Is About Paper Cuts

Employees know by their second week if their manager is willing to listen and address issues that are important to that employee. This is when the good boss/bad boss decision begins…and it’s not about pay and benefits.

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Looking for new ideas and ways to improve your new hire retention but not sure where to start or how to convince your executives? Write me: [email protected] or connect with me to have a one-on-one conversation on ways you can get started today on your journey to cut turnover.

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[i] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/04/marriage-problems-fight-dishes/629526/