Dear CEO or Business Owner,

Do you take the time to help your managers understand what you expect from them and what they can expect from you? If not, keep reading…

Answer these eight questions to start understanding employee turnover.

Do you:

1. Have a strong relationship with each of your managers?
2. Know if your employees respect their manager?
3. Understand how well your managers connect with their staff?
4. Know if managers are getting the best out of each person?
5. Track your manager’s performance?
6. Have managers who are working with direct reports set clear expectations, establish key indicators and then manage to those expectations?
7. Have a leadership development program in place? If the answer is yes, is it effective?

If the answers you get back from these questions aren’t YES, you might have a high employee turnover rate, or you could have under performers who are slowly sucking the life out of the business.

Each of these questions should force you to think about the reasons great people stay with their company. If you aren’t connected with each manager, how can you know how well that manager is connecting to his/her direct reports? The short answer is you can’t.

Employee turnover begins when a CEO or Business Owner is out of touch with his/her managers.

When company’s find great employees, it’s the job of leaders and managers to keep them. The disturbing reality, according to Jeffrey Pfeffer’s book, Leadership BS, “The vast majority of employees are unhappy with their work, disengaged and hoping for a different job. And more to the point, employees are unhappy with their leaders. Very, very unhappy.” The challenge of employee turnover has many underlying issues.

To get on top of employee turnover, CEOs and Business Owners need to know:

1. What positions the business needs to move the company forward to ensure that they know what to look for when hiring people
2. Which skills and talents you need today and for future growth, and map those skills to positions so the people you hire can perform the work needed
3. How to set clear expectations for all employees and then manage to those expectations, which requires performance management systems that instill standards and measurements

Managing people is hard work. In fact, there is nothing harder. Managing and developing employees is a critical aspect of running a company and demands a leaders attention.

We help organizations with employee challenges every day. We’ve been doing this type of work for twenty-five plus years – we know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two. Contact Strategic Human Insights, we’d be delighted to work with you.