Solving the Voluntary Turnover Problem - Part 1

In my previous post in this series, I did a deeper dive into the costs of voluntary employee turnover. I showed how reducing your annual turnover rate by 3% could save you between $135,000 and $540,000 EVERY YEAR, depending on the size of your association.

In this and the next several posts, I’ll show you how to achieve those savings.

The goal here is to create a workplace that people don’t want to leave. I know that sounds daunting, but it’s not as hard as you think. Think of it as three finish lines you must get across:

·?????? Average

·?????? Above Average

·?????? Exceptional

These are sequential, so you must do them in order. If you feel like you’ve already crossed the “average” finish line, that’s great: now set your sights on above average (rather than exceptional). It’s one at a time. Today’s post will focus on how to get to the average finish line.

The Road to Average: Salaries, Technology, and Conflict

These are the basics, because if you don’t do these things right, it won’t really matter what else you’re doing—too many of your people will leave. You must pay your people competitively, provide them with technology that works, and make sure conflict doesn’t fester and create a toxic environment.

I call these the “yeah but” factors. Does your workplace offer great benefits? “Yeah, but they pay at the low end of the scale.” Does your organization have a mission and purpose you connect with? “Yeah, but they make us work on 10-year-old laptops that have tons of glitches.” Does your manager give you consistent and helpful feedback? “Yeah, but there’s so much cross-departmental drama and complaining, that I’m grateful to go home at the end of the day.”

Those other factors mentioned above (benefits, mission, feedback) are often cited as ways to reduce turnover and increase retention—and they are—but as you can see, if you don’t have the basics in place, those won’t move the needle. Get the three basics right, and you’ll likely be at or slightly better than the median turnover rate. Here are some ways to get started.

Salaries. Do you your research and make sure you are paying people as high up on the scale for your industry and those positions as you can. It doesn’t have to be the very highest, but it should be above the median. And if you don’t do this research, your employees will, so they’ll know. Or, worse, they’ll do bad research and conclude that they are being paid below average when they’re not. The more transparent you can be about the numbers and averages, the better.

There are lots of sources for getting this information. ASAE does an annual Association compensation and benefits study that is part of their “AssociaMetrics” subscription. Like most of the tools out there, it lets you filter by multiple factors such as budget, staff size, geographic location, and scope, so you can compare against organizations like yours. There are also consultants out there that will run you through a comprehensive benchmarking process, which obviously costs you money, but could save you time and add some objectivity points.

There’s a new tool in this space that you might want to look into, called Green Gopher . It’s an AI-powered tool coming out of Blue Cypress (our parent company) that gives you continuously updated salary benchmarks by position and by organization, focusing specifically on nonprofits and associations. That way you don’t necessarily have to rely on data that was collected months and months ago.

Whatever resources you use, just make sure that you are confident that you are paying people fairly and, if possible, above the average for their positions. Don’t let money be the reason people leave; it’s the one thing over which you have the most control.

Technology. The second part of getting to “average” is making sure your technology is up-to-date. Of course “up-to-date” can be a relative term, but let’s be brutally honest: the association world is known for woefully underspending on technology. Race for Relevance, nearly 15 years ago, chastised associations for spending only 4.1% of their annual budget on technology, and I’m not sure they have improved much since then.

So if you’re the place that gives the newest employee the laptop that’s missing two of the arrow keys, you definitely need to up your game. But it will take more than that. You need to make sure that your people have the tools they need to be successful, otherwise you’ll be generating frustration that will drive them out.

The trick here is to align your technology spend with your organizational strategy. It’s not about having the latest and greatest tech—it’s about making sure your technology is effectively supporting you in delivering your specific strategy. If your strategy is hyper focused on member service or customer service, and those people interact with you mostly online, then probably need to be making serious investments in your website. PROPEL’s website, on the other hand, is not attempting to serve thousands of customers performing tasks on the site, so we can get by with a simple Wordpress site. Form follows function here.

Cimatri is a technology consulting firm (also part of the Blue Cypress family like us) that has a whole battery of technology assessments that you can use to get a handle on whether or not your organization is at the right level of maturity in terms of technology. Don’t guess on this one. Get some real data.

Conflict. The final “yeah but” factor you must put in place just to achieve average status with turnover is the ability to handle conflict internally. I got my master’s degree in conflict analysis and resolution more than 30 years ago, and conflict has always been a part of my consulting work. More recently, I have been doing culture change projects with associations, and I have noticed that nearly every client is including conflict resolution training as part of their culture change efforts.

Why? Because ongoing, unresolved conflict makes people not want to show up at work. Conflict across department lines often leads to people doing end-runs to avoid specific individuals, and that leads to mis-cues and missed opportunities down the line as people are operating with incomplete information. Unresolved conflict erodes trust, because by avoiding the tough conversations, people make up stories in their heads about others’ intentions and goals, and the stories are always worse than the truth.

Perhaps the most important reason that conflict leads to turnover, though, is that conflict and change are correlated. Out of all of the 64 building blocks of culture that we measure, “managing conflict” and “managing change” have the strongest statistical correlation, meaning the people that said their organizations didn’t manage conflict well, were the likely to also say they didn’t manage change very well, and if you can’t manage change in today’s environment, you’re going to frustrate your employees. For example, as organizations are starting to experiment with AI, different departments have different needs or expectations, and when those conflicts get avoided, the implementation of AI projects is either delayed or derailed entirely, and that is super frustrating for employees.

The good news is, the conflict problem is relatively easy to fix through training in conflict resolution or difficult conversations. You will never be perfect at conflict, but if the staff share basic skills around negotiation and navigating difficult, emotional conversations, you’ll be less likely to suffer the negative effects of avoided conflict. Simply having a shared definition of key conflict resolution terms, like the difference between interest and positions, or how to give feedback based on observable behaviors, can speed up your conflict conversations, enabling you to handle change and keep your best people.

We think this is so important that we’ve lowered the cost of our online conflict resolution training . Organizations can now send their entire staff through the training for only $750 (individuals can take it for $49). You can find more information on our online training site .

Up Next: Moving to Above Average

So if you don’t have the basics in place, get started on that right away. If you feel like you have already crossed the average finish line, then it’s time to focus on becoming above average (i.e., getting into the top 25% in terms of turnover rates), which will be the focus of my next post.