Strategic Discipline Blog

If you’ve ever faced a difficult challenge, you know the skills and resources required, rarely fall into place for you to solve it immediately.

Such is the case now with the employee acquisition and turnover problem many businesses find themselves facing.

In Stop Calling it a Labor Shortage—It is a Turnover Crisis, John DiJulius shares these alarming statistics:

• A record-setting 1 million job openings in the US
• 5 million workers quit just in quarter 2 of this year
• 41% of the global workforce would consider leaving their current employer within the next year
• 54% of Gen Z’s are considering quitting

DiJulius is an expert on Customer Experience. He’s spoken at Scale Up Summits offering valuable ideas on how to improve your customer satisfaction ratings. His most insightful observation is you can’t achieve high customer satisfaction levels without high employee satisfaction.

If you’re going to raise your customer satisfaction score (NPS) first, you need to have superior employee satisfaction (eNPS).

The Biggest Mistake Companies are Making Right Now

“You can’t hire your way out of a bad culture.” ~ John DiJulius

DiJulius offers, “Too many companies are trying to solve this staff shortage issue by hiring people as fast as they can just to fill positions and keeping employees with bad attitudes. Both are huge mistakes. “A” players hate working with “B & C” players. Unengaged employees are like squatters taking up space and sucking the energy out of your organization.

The #1 priority for businesses today needs to be focusing on keeping their top talent by improving their internal culture. Stop trying to find great employees, instead focus on becoming the type of business great employees find.”

What DiJulius offers is what I’ve discovered with my customers. Those who have a good culture, are not having issues hiring or retaining their teams. DiJulius offers a similar explanation, “I have seen first-hand, companies with the strongest company culture, long before the pandemic, are significantly less affected by the so-called labor shortage…… organizations that churned and burned their team members, where a great workplace culture was only lip service, are the ones being hit the hardest by the employee turnover.”

DiJulius compares the pandemic to people who survived a near-death experience. It’s caused employees to reevaluate their professional careers, not only what they want, but also what they aren’t willing to tolerate anymore. It’s caught a lot of leaders and companies flatfooted.

He feels too many leaders are using The Great Resignation Era as a crutch. A significant percentage of people who have quit over the last 15 months is a result of poor company culture. These are leaders who focused almost exclusively on productivity and bottom-line profits.

Attract A players

A recent article on ScaleUps.com This restaurant company positioned its eateries for fast growth despite the pandemic, offers several actions Pittsburgh-based Wholesome International undertook to attract and retain staff despite the traditional high restaurant turnover rate.

Co-CEOs Raji Sankar and Randhir Sethi, embraced Topgrading, a system for hiring, coaching, and retaining top talent recommended in Scaling Up.

Most hires come through referrals from employees—which Wholesome International rewards with a $500 referral bonus. “We made it very aggressive, especially as the market gets tight,” says Sankar. 

To attract talented managing partners, they introduced a compensation system, like ‘Outback Steakhouses’, in which these leaders receive a base salary plus a share of the bottom line based on the performance of their restaurant; they don’t have to put money down to participate. Currently, there are six managing partners in the program.

Creating a worker-friendly culture

Like Chick-fil-A, which is closed on Sundays, restaurants all close at 8 p.m., rather than 9 p.m., to allow employees to enjoy evenings at home with their families. When Sankar and Sethi decided to make the change, they were concerned with the financial impact, yet thought, “By the time other people will be closing down, our team will be home–they’ll love it,” recalls Sankar. Customers, they discovered, began showing up at the restaurants earlier to order.

The company also closes restaurants on all major holidays. “This allows them some time with their families,” says Sankar.

These practices echo the theme of Verne Harnish’s Scaling Up Compensation: how you compensate your team can be a strategic lever to differentiate you from your competition.

To solve your business employment issues, recognize two important considerations.

1. You can’t achieve this overnight, and…
2. You must begin now to change your culture to focus on becoming the type of business great employees find.

“Days of lighting fires under people are over. Days of lighting fires inside people are here.” ~ John DiJulius

This Simon Sinek 9 Minute video provides clues to how to create a company people want to work for.

To create an environment where everyone is inspired to give their best, contact Positioning Systems today to schedule a free exploratory meeting.

Growth demands Strategic Discipline.

Building an enduring great organization requires disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action, superior results, producing a distinctive impact in the world.

Discipline sustains momentum, over a long period of time, laying the foundations for lasting endurance.

A winning habit starts with 3 Strategic Disciplines: Priority, Metrics, and Meeting Rhythms.   Forecasting, accountability, individual, and team performance improve dramatically.

Meeting Rhythms achieve a disciplined focus on performance metrics to drive growth.

Let Positioning Systems help your business achieve these outcomes on the Four most Important Decisions your business faces:

Positioning Systems helps mid-sized ($5M - $250M) business Scale-UP. We align your business to focus on Your One Thing! Contact dwick@positioningsystems.com to Scale Up your business! Take our Four Decisions Needs Assessment to discover how your business measures against other Scaled Up companies. We’ll contact you.

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