Employee Turnover: The 5 Best Strategies To Have You Thrive And Prosper (#110)

[00:00] Introduction Welcome to the Sell My Business Podcast. I'm your host Jeffrey Feldberg. 

This podcast is brought to you by Deep Wealth and the 90-day Deep Wealth Experience. 

Your liquidity event is the largest and most important financial transaction of your life. 

But unfortunately, up to 90% of liquidity events fail. Think about all that time, money and effort wasted. Of the "successful" liquidity events, most business owners leave anywhere from 50% to over 100% of their deal value in the buyer's pocket and don't even know it.

I should know. I said no to a seven-figure offer and yes, to mastering the art and science of a liquidity event. Two years later, I said yes to a different buyer with a nine-figure offer. 

Are you thinking about an exit or liquidity event? 

If you believe that you either don't have the time or you'll prepare closer to your liquidity event, think again. 

Don't become a statistic and make the fatal mistake of believing that the skills that built your business are the same ones for your liquidity event. 

After all, how can you master something you've never done before? 

Let the 90-day Deep Wealth Experience and our nine-step roadmap of preparation help you capture the maximum value for your liquidity event. 

At the end of this episode, take a moment to hear from business owners, just like you, who went through the Deep Wealth Experience. 

[00:01:44] Jeffrey Feldberg: Welcome to the Sell My Business Podcast. This episode will be a solo one where we do a deep dive on employee turnover the five best strategies to have you thrive and prosper. And a day doesn't go by where you don't hear or read about The Great Resignation and how employees are leaving their companies in droves.

Let's take a step back. What happened? How did we get to where we are today? Well, two things happen when the Corona virus pandemic came onto the scene. In the early days of the pandemic, you'll remember we had all that downtime. Nobody was working. And when people had downtime, they began to think about what do they want and what they don't want in life.

And employees began to realize that they don't want terrible bosses and a long commute. And then the second thing happened as a result of the pandemic. Remote work came onto the scene. So it now became possible for employees to leave a terrible boss and a very long commute and find another company where they can just stay from home and work.

And have a terrific boss, terrific leadership. And the studies say it all. Up to 65% of employees are thinking about leaving their job. And some of these employees will leave the job, even if they don't have one lined up. So when you consider what that means in terms of the costs of having to hire somebody.

The costs of not having that productivity and that growth until you hire somebody and then the cost of training, your new people. It's just tremendous. And so if we can take some steps and follow some powerful and proven strategies, to keep people in the seats we're so much further ahead.

And at the same time, if you're thinking about a liquidity event, and after all, that's what we're here with Deep Wealth and the Deep Wealth Experience. It's all about the liquidity event. When you have high employee turnover you better believe that your future buyer is not only going to know all about it, but it can either have that buyer walk away from the deal or significantly penalize your enterprise value.

And neither of those scenarios is where you want to be. So let's talk about what you can do right here now, and today to reduce the employee turnover so that you can really thrive and prosper.

So area number one, high employee turnover comes from a toxic culture. What are some strategies that we can do if you find that you have a toxic culture?

The first thing that you can do is recognize the hard work of your employees and the birthdays of your employees. Now in another strategy, I'll talk all about recognition. But big picture-wise, are you recognizing your employees' hard work?

Or instead, are you ignoring what they're doing right. And only focusing on what they're doing wrong?

When you don't have recognition of employees for the right things, and you're focusing on the wrong things, it's creating every incentive for employees to leave. And at the same time, when it comes to culture, what are you doing to celebrate the people who make up your culture, your employees?

As I talk about this, I'm thinking about Embanet. When Embanet began. And we had a small number of employees when it came to birthdays, it was really a festive occasion in the company. So during work hours, we would stop what we were doing. Recognize that employee, give the employee a card, have a cake, and everyone would celebrate.

As Embanet grew, what we would do is in that particular department the leader of that department would take time out, celebrate the individual's birthday. We would still have the entire company sign a card and give it to the employee and the entire company would enjoy cake in honor of the employee.

And when we got really large we would still celebrate the employee's birthdays individually. But once a week, we would have a birthday cake that went around to the entire company and give cards out in honor of the employees who had birthdays during that week.

Now with remote work, it changes some of the dynamics when it comes to celebrating birthdays, but not a lot has to change. If you have remote workers, perhaps you can send a birthday cake to the birthday. Person's home. You can still have everyone sign a virtual card. You know, if you get creative, you can find ways to celebrate the birthdays of your employees.

The second thing that you can do when it comes to a toxic culture is to have regular team-building exercises. And while you're having team-building exercises, you also want to ensure that you're doing anonymous surveys. And I'm going to circle back to the surveys in another strategy.

But when you combine team-building exercises and anonymous surveys You begin the process of turning a toxic culture into a rich, thriving, and vibrant culture. And then the third thing that you can do is invest in professional development to show that you actually care.

You can start with your leadership and then take it out to the employees in general. And through that professional development, you're equipping all of your team members with new skills, and I'm going to say a new mindset that really plays into the toxic culture. To eliminate that and replace it with a rich and thriving culture.

So that's area number one, let's talk about area number two. And the strategies that go along with that. So if area number two, it's putting the balance back into work-life balance.

In most businesses today, particularly in North America. Employees feel overworked and all the pressure and Brunello that comes along with that. So why don't you stop for a moment and do something different? Now in the previous strategy, I spoke about doing an anonymous survey. Let's talk a little bit more about that.

To get the balance back into the work-life balance. You can utilize anonymous surveys and you're going to really focus in on the following areas. You want to get a temperature read on, do people feel overloaded? How do they feel in terms of control or lack of control? Do you have enough rewards within the workplace? Or do you have an insufficient reward?

And rewards can mean anything. And we're going to talk about some of these things from recognition to pay to everything else in between. Do your employees through the survey, are they telling you that you have a toxic workplace? And how do your employees feel about fairness? Is the workplace fair? Is it not fair?

And should conflicts arise what kind of values does your company have to address those conflicts? So an anonymous survey becomes a very powerful enrich tool to give a temperature, read of what your employees are, both feeling and thinking. But as important with putting the balance into the work-life balance is to change your culture immediately.

That you frowned upon work, taking place after work hours. Now let's be honest here for just a moment as business owners. I'm sure we didn't mind. When people worked after hours, they didn't get paid for it to get the job done. Yes, it can help the bottom line and yes, it can help get things done quicker.

 But it's a short win for a long-term loss. Study after study continues to demonstrate how, when employees are burnt out, the quality goes down and we're going to be in this for the long game. We're not in it for the short game. We want employees who are giving their best work. And the only way that they can give their best work is when they've had time to relax and recharge.

After-hours is truly after hours for family time and personal time. And this leads into the third area, which for some business owners, even today is somewhat controversial, but it really shouldn't be.

Your ability to put balance back into the work-life balance means to be open to two areas. Number one is remote work. And number two is hiring freelancers. Yes, when you offer remote work. You may lose some of your employees who traditionally came into the office.

Who now wants to work from home? But let me ask you a question. Wouldn't it be so much worse in terms of the time and money and productivity loss? If that person quit because they couldn't do remote work. Now you have to go out and find somebody to replace that person. And chances are you're going to pay more money because of The Great Resignation for the same work that's being done.

And then think of all that training you have to do, and the downtime that your company is going to suffer until that person gets up to speed. Wouldn't it be so much better off to keep that top talent who has the knowledge? Of your business and your best practices and your systems to keep them in the seat?

And yes, you may also lose some of your full-time employees who want to become part-time employees through freelancing.

But again, let me ask you a question. Wouldn't it be worth it to you to keep that knowledge and that skillset in the company, even though it's fewer hours? Hey, this is a new day when it comes to the workplace and we have to adapt to what's happening out there. So I would really encourage you to think about offering both remote work and embracing freelancers.

So let's talk about the third area and the third area is that high employee turnover results when employees don't know what their purpose is. So, let me ask a question. Do you have a mission statement? Chances are you're going to say yes, but let's dive in here a little more.

Many times when I read a company's mission statement, I walk away feeling more confused than when I began. Yes, there are awards in the mission statement, but the words are generic. They mean absolutely nothing. It doesn't really tell me what the company does. In fact, I could take the words I'm reading in that one company's mission statement and put them into another company and I'd get the same result. So take a step back and ask yourself.

What are you all about? Why are you here? Why do your customers choose you over your competitors? And we spoke in the last strategy about having a rich and thriving culture. One of the things that you can do to help build that. Is to take the challenge of a mission statement and give it to your leadership team.

Have your leadership team and the people in their department. Come up with what that mission statement is and what the purpose of the company is going to be and why you're making a difference. Everyone will then have buy-in. They'll feel part of that mission statement they'll begin to live it. And what the goal is, is from your frontline employees all the way up to the CEO of your business.

They all know what the mission is and they know what their purpose is within that mission. To make it happen. When you have a strong mission statement, you're doing the second thing here now to really reduce employee turnover. And that's when you're answering two questions, how and why? You're showing employees how their work helps with the purpose and why it's important.

When people understand what's behind the mission. How they can play into that. Why what they're doing is making all the difference. It gives them meaning it gives them fulfillment. They feel like they're on a winning team. And what they're doing is meaning something it's making a difference out there.

And that's really where we want to be. And then the third area is enriching your culture. That's going to promote the purpose. So, how do you enrich the culture? Let's go back to your leadership. Let me ask you this. There are three areas that effective leaders hit it out of the park when they work with their employees to gently push them outside of their comfort zones. Now the leader is there with that employee every step of the way. So the employee doesn't feel alone, but the employee is growing and learning.

The second thing that effective leaders do is they foster a growth mindset or employees are now looking at how they can grow themselves personally. And at the same time, transfer that over into the company of how the company can grow. And then the third thing that effective leaders do is work with their employees to take calculated risks.

And again, the employees aren't alone, they have that leader every step of the way to ensure that they're taking a calculated risk. Maybe it works. That's terrific. And if it doesn't that's okay too, because it's lessons learned. And so effective leadership really helps promote a rich culture, which in turn helps to promote a purpose.

The fourth area. Your employees are leaving because of terrible managers and a long commute. And I spoke about this at the start of this episode, but let's do a little bit more of a deep dive on this. And let's go to the root cause of why some employees are leaving. And what I would encourage you to do is take a look at all of your leadership.

On a leader-by-leader basis. Does one leader have a turnover rate? That's really unacceptable. Perhaps we can visit Pareto's Law. Some people call Pareto’s Law, the 80-20 rule. Are 80% of your employees who are leaving are they coming from 20% of your leaders? If that's the case, you have an issue. Now maybe you have a terrific leader, but that leader is not having the right skillset or the know-how. And that in turn is creating the high employee turnover. So what can you do? Well, you can invest in professional development.

In that professional development, your leaders will learn how to discover what's unique about each of their employees and how to leverage that uniqueness. Effective leaders learn how to value the quirkiness of employees. Let's face it. Do you know anyone that's normal? We all have our own quirks. We show up every day with that quirkiness.

But in the workplace and in the culture, we have a choice. We can either embrace that quirkiness to its strengths, or we can try and play to its weaknesses. And unfortunately for most leaders in the workplace, they really focus on that quirkiness in a negative way. And it takes a special type of leader to not only recognize that quirkiness but to get creative and to think about how to build that quirkiness.

In a positive way into the employee's skill set, into the employee's job of what they're doing that really makes a difference. And the third thing that great leaders do is that they focus on the strengths and not to the weaknesses. It's human nature. If an employee does nine things, right.

And one thing wrong. We tend to focus on the one thing that they did wrong. And this actually goes back to the area. Number one. Where we're not recognizing hard work and we're not giving out the positive compliments or the praise. Because we're focusing on the weakness. And so again, really effective leaders will play to the strengths. They will drop focusing on the weaknesses.

And that may mean for one employee, you're going to remove some job responsibilities because it doesn't really play to their strengths. And it may mean that you're bringing in a freelancer to take over that one area of that employee's weaknesses. But instead of that employee, who's now focusing on his or her strengths, this is where you get fulfillment. This is where you get happiness. And when you have that, that's where the growth of the company occurs and where your profits happen. And where are you going to keep that employee in the seat instead of leaving you?

And the third area that you're focusing on are key performance indicators. Do you have transparent key performance indicators for your leaders? Hopefully, you do, and that's a whole other topic. And in fact, in the 9-step roadmap in the Deep Wealth Experience, Step number two. X-Factors we talk about the four points of clarity and one of the points of clarity is having key performance indicators in every aspect of your business. But for your leaders in particular. One of your KPIs should be retention. A leader's success in the business is based on high retention rates. Again, what gets measured is what gets done.

And when you follow these three strategies, you're ensuring that you're eliminating terrible managers and the terrible managers become terrific leaders. And that really goes a long way to keeping your people in their seats and keeping them happy.

Let's talk about the fifth and final area where you have high employee turnover. And this is why lack of recognition in the workplace is the quickest path to high employee turnover. Now we spoke about recognition in area number one. And lack of recognition typically is where you have a toxic culture.

When it comes to recognition, this is such an important area that has a strategy of its own. So, let me ask you this. In your company, do people know how to give recognition in a manner that's both genuine and sincere? Let me give you an example. If someone said to me, hey Jeffrey, you did a great job.

Well, it was vague. I have no idea what they're talking about and it almost feels like they're just checking the box to say, hey, I said something nice. And this is where you have good intentions, but those good intentions lead to a bad outcome because now I feel as though you don't really care, you just threw out these general words and there was no meaning behind that.

Compare this to the following recognition. Jeffrey that report that you finished was absolutely over the top. It was terrific how you dug into the details to find the root cause of that one problem that was giving us so many issues. And because you not only found the problem, but you came up with some solutions. We're now going to look at those solutions and figure out how we can implement that in the company. Job well done. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time and the effort that you put into that.

I want you to compare that second complement to the first one. It was genuine and it was sincere because it was specific and it had details in it. And I was highlighting what was done specifically that earned that compliment. So think about that when you're doing recognition and I would encourage you to be the change that you want to see in your company.

You give the recognition to your leaders, show them how it's done happen. See it with you. Overtime. They'll take that style of recognition and they'll begin to share that with their employees. And over time, the employees will take that solid recognition and share it amongst themselves. And you have a positive feedback loop where recognition is being given that's genuine and sincere.

This plays nicely into a rich and thriving culture. The culture encourages recognition. Recognition helps make a better culture and back and forth it goes. And it really works well.

The second area when it comes to recognition. And this is where as leaders, we need to check our ego at the door. It's always giving credit where credit is due.

So, let me ask you a question. In your workplace. Are your leaders taking the credit when it's really the employees that are doing it? Worse yet. Are you taking the credit when it's really your team members that are the ones that are earning it? And if that's the case, this is one behavior that you should really think about changing.

And give credit where credit is due. Nobody likes to be the unsung hero, give the credit to the person who actually did it, and set the example for everyone else to follow. And when it comes to recognition the third area that you can focus on is provide the tools to your employees that make it very easy to give recognition. There are all kinds of tools out there. One tool off the top of my head is having video recognition. And this is where you have a tool where anybody in the company can record a video message. And that message can be sent to the individual. It can be sent to the entire company.

And the nice thing about a recording is you get to both see and hear the expression of that person. Written recognition is terrific. I'll take written recognition over nothing. But when that recognition can now go into recording, I can hear the tonality. I can see the person's face and it just brings everything to life.

And at the same time, if you're a two-finger bandit on the keyboard, well, now we've become so much easier to simply say that recognition it's much quicker for you to do and to get that out there. And that's just one tool. There are so many tools that are out there. If you went into your favorite search engine and typed in employee recognition tools.

You'll see all kinds of tools and you can pick and choose what makes the most sense for your company. And here's the thing to realize. When you invest in those tools and you notice I'm using the word invest. And I'm not talking about the cost of the tools. When you invest in those tools, you're going to get a return on investment.

And that return on investment is the ability to give recognition leads to happier employees and happier employees lead to fulfilled employees, which means that your employees are staying in their seats. They're not going to a competitor. They're not going to another company. You're not spending the time, the money, and the effort to have to recruit new employees for the ones that are leaving.

And in fact, when you have a high level of recognition in the workplace, You can use this as a tool to recruit top talent. You can show off what your culture is all about. And when you read the research reports on recognition, what's interesting is recognition is preferred over money by employees.

Recognition and top quality leadership are usually in the number one and two positions of what employees prefer. And money believe it or not, money tends to be at the bottom of the list. Yes. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. But when we know what it is, we can use that to our advantage, and let's face it the time that it takes for recognition is nothing it's minuscule. And the return on investment that we get is tremendous. So ensure that recognition is a large part of your culture. And again, you be the change that you want to see in other people.

So those are the five areas that lead to high employee turnover, less to a quick recap.

So area number one, high employee turnover comes from a toxic culture. And the strategies that we spoke about to eliminate a toxic culture is recognition of the hard work of your employees and the birthdays of your employees. It's regular team-building exercises and surveys. And it's investing in professional development to show that you care.

The second area is putting the balance back into work-life balance. And here we spoke about anonymous surveys to get a temperature read on what your employees are thinking about. We spoke about changing the culture so that it's frowned upon to be working outside of working hours. And we also spoke about embracing remote work and freelancers.

Area number three, high employee turnover comes from employees who lack a purpose. And to remedy that the strategies that we spoke about is to create a strong mission statement that has a purpose and you're demonstrating through your mission statement the how and the why. Of how the work of the employees helps them with their purpose and why it's important in what they're doing. And the third thing that we spoke about was how to enrich the culture of your company by investing in your leaders to promote the purpose within their employees.

The fourth area, your employees are leaving because of terrible managers and a long commute. And here we spoke about looking at your managers and your leaders on a case by case basis to identify any one of your leaders that has a high employee turnover rate. We spoke about investing in professional development. And we also spoke about adding a key performance indicator for your leaders that focuses on employee retention.

And the fifth and final area, why lack of recognition in the workplace is the quickest path to high employee turnover. And here we spoke about why recognition must be genuine and sincere. We should be giving credit where credit is due and we're also providing the tools to employees that make recognition easy.

So there you have it. Those are the five best strategies to have you thrive and prosper when you lower employee turnover. And as we wrap up this episode as always a heartfelt, thank you for taking time out of your day and spending it here with us on the Sell My Business Podcast.

And I have a quick question for you. Did you like what you heard today? Did you get value out of this episode? If you did, I would encourage you to think about the 90-day Deep Wealth Experience. The Deep Wealth Experience is based around the same 9-step roadmap that I created for my nine-figure liquidity event.

And here you'll be part of a mastermind group. You'll be learning the same strategies. You're going to have success coaching of what you need to do well in advance of your liquidity event to ensure that you do two things. Number one you create a very specific blueprint to increase the value of your business. And number two, you increase your enterprise value.

And you can learn more about that. You can come to the website deewealth.com and you can book your free strategy call to learn more about that. So as we wrap up this episode, once again, thank you so much for spending part of your day with us on the, Sell My Business Podcast and as always, please stay healthy and safe. 

[00:37:19] Sharon S.: The Deep Wealth Experience was definitely a game-changer for me.

Lyn M.: This course is one of the best investments you will ever make because you will get an ROI of a hundred times that. Anybody who doesn't go through it will lose millions.

Kam H.: If you don't have time for this program, you'll never have time for a successful liquidity

Sharon S.: It was the best value of any business course I've ever taken. The money was very well spent.

Lyn M.: Compared to when we first began, today I feel better prepared, but in some respects, may be less prepared, not because of the course, but because the course brought to light so many things that I thought we were on top of that we need to fix.

Kam H.: I 100% believe there's never a great time for a business owner to allocate extra hours into his or her week or day. So it's an investment that will yield results today. I thought I will reap the benefit of this program in three to five years down the road. But as soon as I stepped forward into the program, my mind changed immediately.

Sharon S.: There was so much value in the experience that the time I invested paid back so much for the energy that was expended.

Lyn M.: The Deep Wealth Experience compared to other programs is the top. What we learned is very practical. Sometimes you learn stuff that it's great to learn, but you never use it. The stuff we learned from Deep Wealth Experience, I believe it's going to benefit us a boatload.

Kam H.: I've done an executive MBA. I've worked for billion-dollar companies before. I've worked for smaller companies before I started my business. I've been running my business successfully now for getting close to a decade. We're on a growth trajectory. Reflecting back on the Deep Wealth, I knew less than 10% what I know now, maybe close to 1% even.

Sharon S.: Hands down the best program in which I've ever participated. And we've done a lot of different things over the years. We've been in other mastermind groups, gone to many seminars, workshops, conferences, retreats, read books. This was so different. I haven't had an experience that's anything close to this in all the years that we've been at this.

It's five-star, A-plus.

Kam H.: I would highly recommend it to any super busy business owner out there.

Deep Wealth is an accurate name for it. This program leads to deeper wealth and happier wealth, not just deeper wealth. I don't think there's a dollar value that could be associated with such an experience and knowledge that could be applied today and forever.

Jeffrey Feldberg: Are you leaving millions on the table?

Please visit www.deepwealth.com/success to learn more.

If you're not on my email list, you'll want to be. Sign up at www.deepwealth.com/podcast. And if you enjoyed this episode of the Sell My Business podcast, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Reviews help me reach new listeners, grow the show and continue to create content that you'll enjoy.

As we close out this episode, a heartfelt thank you for your time. And as always, please stay healthy and safe. 

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Your liquidity event is the most important financial transaction of your life. You have one chance to get it right, and you better make it count. 

But unfortunately, up to 90% of liquidity events fail. Think about all that time, money and effort wasted. Of the "successful" liquidity events, most business owners leave 50% to over 100% of their deal value in the buyer's pocket and don't even know it.

Our founders said "no" to a 7-figure offer and "yes" to a 9-figure offer less than two years later. 

Don't become a statistic and make the fatal mistake of believing that the skills that built your business are the same ones for your liquidity event. 

After all, how can you master something you've never done before? 

Are you leaving millions on the table? 

Learn how the 90-day Deep Wealth Experience and our 9-step roadmap helps you capture the maximum value for your liquidity event.  

Click here to book your free exploratory strategy session.

Enjoy the interview!