So what can we do to retain people? Let's start by thinking about learning about fit with jobs. So I suggested one reason why people often leave organizations is they thought this was going to be a good job for them, but when they show up, they realize actually they hate it or they're no good at it. What can we do about that? Three things. So the first is something we've already talked about, which has improved selection, the challenges that we're bringing in people who aren't a good fit for the job. Let's stop doing that, and so we've seen how getting serious about our hiring and using our hiring to pick people who would be good at the job, but also who will enjoy it can drive down our attrition. So that's step one. One of the challenges with hiring is we need to get good at evaluating people, but we don't always know exactly what they're thinking. And so in addition to us getting better at selecting another thing that we can do to improve people's fit with the job is try and get them better at selecting. Try and get them better at figuring out whether this is a job that they really want. And this is the idea behind the realistic job preview. So, if you think about hiring, hiring is hard, you're in a competitive labor market. So often a lot of what we're trying to do is trying to attract people to our job. We're trying to persuade them. You want to take this job? No, you don't want to go out with my competitive no, they're terrible. You come work here? Well, it'll be amazing. You'll be happy because we need to do some of the selling in order to get people in the door in order to fill up the jobs. But the challenge is that when we're selling, there's always the temptation to tell everybody all of the great things about the job. These are all of the things you're going to love about it. And we kind of forget some of the things that people don't like so much. We forget the bits that are boring, we kind of minimize the bits that are stressful. So the risk is we sell people on this amazing job and they show up and yeah, it's not quite like, it's like that can be good for getting people in. It's less good for managing attrition. And if we're going to spend money training our new hires high attrition is back. And so, an alternative approaches. Yes, we want to tell people what's good about the job, but we also want to tell them what's bad about the job, right? We want them to understand, these things you like. But if you're going to have a problem with the hours, if you don't think you can handle irate customers, if a piece of work is going to be too high for you don't take this job, right? And so you want them to understand enough about the job to make an informed decision. If you can get people who aren't going to fit to opt out before you train them, then you're going to save an awful lot of money. So various different organizations try and find ways to help people really understand for themselves. This is a job for them. I talked I think when we were discussing hiring about, as part of a work sample Preterm Orange. Again, the company with a great sandwiches pretty morning will get people to spend a day working in the store. Now that helps the store to evaluate them because we can see how will they operate. But probably almost as valuable. It helps those people themselves to get a sense for the job. So at the end of the day, they can make an informed decision. Is this something I can see myself showing up to do every day? Or maybe it isn't for me. So that realistic job preview helping people make the right decisions. I think it's very valuable now. Obviously, another thing to think about it yet if people are showing up and after a while they're saying, this isn't the job that I thought it was before. Yeah, maybe that's about we're not doing a good job of helping people understand. We're not select the right people, but we have to be honest with ourselves. Maybe it's just a terrible job, right? I mean, maybe this is just a miserable job and nobody wants, they really know about it is going to stay in the job if they're in their right minds. So, another thing we may want to think about, are there ways that we can make this job better job design? I'm actually going to talk about it in the next module, but this is obviously a kind of a very clear thing for making sure people actually fit. So that's learning about fit with jobs. What about this negative feedback? So there are various things we can do to try and reduce this kind of negative feedback, make sure that people aren't getting shocks and unpleasant surprises on the job. One of the most important ones that I've come across that I find very interesting, it's about getting onboarding right? Where we're likely to first start hearing bad news, where we're going to first start having false promises when we just get into the organization. And if the company doesn't do a good job of training us and preparing for us for what's going on. There's a real risk that we kind of get into this negative cycle where people are telling us we're not doing well, we lose confidence and we start to do even worse. So there's been a really interesting set of studies in recent years that have looked how companies do that on boarding, how they do that initial training. And one of the big things to come out of them is that really how well they do, that has a direct Impact on how long people stay. And so one I study along these lines, looked at a call center. She, in India, basically used to study where newcomers were given training that really just focused on understanding the newcomers themselves. What made them happiest, what made them work best at work and help what they did best. And the idea that was that by having people think about these things reflect on that, it helps them fit into the culture better. Because they understand what is it that I'm bringing to work and how does that then affect the way that I can add to the team and integrate with it. They found that when people had this intervention started to be made feel more comfortable, just when they began at work, their rate of turnover fell by almost half relative traditional on boarding. There was another study looking at garment factories. Again in India, a lot of the workers there, this was their very first job. And so training was really important, partly for helping people understand how to use the machines and all those sort of things. But also training was very important for helping people and saying, what's it like to be in a professional workplace, when we have lunch, would you get for large? How do you manage kind of, your work life and your home life at the same time? Well, the study found was that how well trainers really help people think about that was critical to retention. And so when people had experienced trainers who understood the problems, understood how to help people manage them, the rates of retention were about 50% higher than when people were inexperienced. And so really paying attention to this onboarding, helping people to understand how the organization works, giving them the tools to succeed, helping them to feel comfortable in that culture. Turns out to be really important to making sure that people do have good experiences early on and don't have the kind of negative events that are likely to help them to leave or likely to persuade them to leave. So one other lever that you can pull to address these issues of, having negative experiences in the workplace is obviously manager training. I talked about how satisfaction with manager and with your leadership is one of the important things that correlates with whether people stay or whether they leave. That means having managers who understand how to lead people effectively, how to manage performance appraisals. Maybe even how to help people deal with some of the challenges that might come from reorganizations, seeing their peer leaves, peers leave and so on is going to be very important. So you don't want to play down manager training as a lever for driving attrition either. What else is that? So I talked about sometimes we leave as a natural part of our career. I've been in the job for a while, I've got better at it as I have these new skills, I feel I'm worth more. I want to be doing more important job. What do we do about that? The obvious one is internal career part. And so one organization which I've talked about a bunch during this module, Chipotle, they really stress this. And so the idea is if you get good at one job, you can move into the next job. We don't see people live in the organization. We do need to continue hiring new people at the bottom. But if we have those kind of career piles, it means that attrition, on the one hand, a problem for the job being left, but also provides a good source of workers coming in at the next level. Rather than seeing those skills leave the organization altogether. Finally, we have the availability of alternatives as another source of attrition. And, what this really emphasizes to us is at the end of the day, we need a good reason for people to stay. They could work for us, they could work for other people. So you do want a plausible story about why it is people choose to work for your organization. So just as you do marketing for your goods and services, what's special about our company, so unique sales proposition? Why are some people better off coming to us than elsewhere? You want to do that for your employees as well? What is your offering? What is it they get from you that they wouldn't get elsewhere? And why, for at least some subset of employees is that going to be a reasonably compelling offering? And if you can't make that, you probably do want to rethink what it is you offer people if you're going to manage attrition. Another way to do that obviously is back loaded compensation. And so one of the appeal of kind of having pay that goes up the longer people have been at the organization is it does give people a reason to stay. So if I feel that if I stay longer, my pay is going to go up in a way that I lose those seniority benefits elsewhere, that's a reason to stay. It's kind of a version of the golden handcuffs. And I think some of these long range training programs as well, if I know that if I stay here for five years, I'm going to get a degree out of it. That's another good reason to stay. So ultimately, with attrition, it's not just about the competition from other employers, but that matters as well. And finding some reason why once people at your organization, they are better off staying than leaving elsewhere is important if you want to make sure that they do stay. So in this module, I've tried to give you some perspectives on really how we develop and maintain organizational capacity. So once we've brought the right people into the organization, what are some of the things that we can do to make sure we genuinely do have a skilled workforce? So we've talked about different pros and cons of training that might shape how much training you choose to invest in. On the one hand, the capacity to really develop the skills that you need. On the other hand, obviously, the costs that go into it and the worries about what that might mean for attention. And then we've talked about, the way that attrition really erodes that skill space. And so if we want to maintain a high performing workforce, having a clear strategy for reducing attrition. In part by making sure that once people have joined our organization, things don't change in a way that makes them want to leave. If we can do that, we can really ensure that we have the kind of very skilled workforce that is going to drive excellent performance. Obviously, even if they're skilled, they still want to perform in excellent manners and that's what I want to talk about in the final module.
