High turnover blocks your ability to consistently deliver your intended customer, client, or patient, experience and turn a profit. Whether in retail, business services, healthcare, or hospitality – it’s easy to feel that turnover is unavoidable.
However, in this whitepaper, you’ll learn how high turnover and low retention are not the same thing – and your biggest opportunities to earn commitment and loyalty.
Photo by Heidi Fin on Unsplash
The U.S. economy is booming, retail sales for the 2018 holiday season set an all-time record, unemployment is at a sixty-year low, wages are on the rise – and employees in the service sector are quitting their jobs in record numbers. If you work in a service industry, whether retail, food service, healthcare, or airlines, you’re likely experiencing turnover for hourly or front-line roles from 50 to 250%. These are big numbers that cause managers maddening frustration and customers to question your competence and ability to deliver what you said you would. While high turnover makes delivering a consistently high-quality customer experience nearly impossible and profitability challenging at best, – for some reason leaders continue to tolerate it.
This passive acceptance of turnover is puzzling. Especially since much of the turnover in the service sector is due to employees playing musical chairs with employers. A sales associate at a big-box retailer quits for a ‘better’ opportunity down the street. A cook leaves one restaurant for another. By our estimation, the annual employee turnover rate in the service sector is about 20 percent of entry-level employees in the service sector who leave their industry. The rest are simply moving from you to your competition.
(Related resource: Resources for Strengthening Employee Engagement and Retention)
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Historically low unemployment makes it exceedingly easy for an employee to quit an employer and begin work at a competitor, never missing a paycheck. As long as I have been around – and that’s a long time – employers have muscled through the problems created by high turnover through the simple expedient of hiring faster than they lose employees; however, that solution won’t work any longer, as even a mediocre candidate can readily find a job.
Continue to explore new perspectives to earning employee retention in Part Two.