We just lost two employees last week, with another suffering a serious medical emergency. No matter how you slice it, turnover and volatility costs. It’s expensive in so many ways and certainly makes me look in the mirror. Why did they leave? What can we be doing better moving forward?
People don’t leave jobs; they tend to leave people. That’s not always a bad thing. Increased accountability from a demanding coach can drive an employee away just as easily as a toxic manager. Thankfully, our leadership team is amazing. I love coming to work every day and watching each one grow and develop. A couple of them haven’t had the opportunity to build and shape their teams the way they would have if they’d started from scratch. They inherited a group of folks and did their best to bring them along. Sometimes that doesn’t work out and it’s okay. It sucks, but it’s okay.
Also by Henry Clifford: Are You Losing Sales to Monologuing?
We have amazing online and in-person learning for most of the different areas of the company with highly capable and passionate mentors to implement that training. As we seek to backfill these roles, I’m coaching our leaders to resist the temptation to hire quickly. When we hire slowly, we take our time and build trust with the candidate. When we hire quickly, we often rue the day months down the road. Our focus is solidly rooted in values fit first; with an assumption we can train most of the technical/vocational aspects of the job. There are a few exceptions to that. As you well know, if you don’t love technology, this industry isn’t for you. If you don’t have borderline psychotic deadline motivation, the sales machine will chew you up and spit you out. If you lack profit and efficiency obsession, project management might not be a good fit.
Our approach with the team at Livewire has been to communicate openly and often about what’s going on while soliciting their help in casting the hiring net as wide as possible. We’ve encouraged them all to share our open job postings on their social media networks and offered them a spiff for doing so. Further, any referred candidate who we hire is eligible for up to $5000 in bonus money to the referrer.
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As we head into further economic uncertainty, would we rather be lean vs. rich on headcount? I’ll take lean any day, especially in this age of AI where we’re thinking long and hard before adding headcount.
How do you manage uncertainty and turnover in your own company?
Stay frosty, and see you in the field.
