Why Employees Quit (Part 3) Final

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In this issue of the Manager Lab, we are going to finish our review of the Harvard Business Review article, Why Employees Quit, New Research Points to Some Surprising Answers. It's by Ethan Bernstein, Michael Horn, and Bob Moesta from the November-December print edition of Harvard Business Review 2024. So in the first cast, we talked about the pushes and pulls of why employees quit.

So there was a really deep dive there into what pushes employees out of organizations and what pulls employees out of organizations. And there was a lot of different examples that I went through in quite some detail. So go back and listen to that one first. The second cast was about the quests that employees are on these days, whether it's to.

You know, to regain control, whether it's to get out of an organization, whether it's to sort of realign themselves with their skill sets, or if they just need to take another step in their career and they don't see it within their organization.

In this particular cast, we're going to look at three strategies that the article recommends that managers can take to really head this kind of situation off before it gets to a point where an employee really wants to leave. So number one is interview them early on. So, you know, this is kind of a strategy where let's not wait till it's too late. Let's start talking and having these really strong, meaningful conversations with employees from the get-go.

And so the article talks about Now, by closely examining the pushes and pulls that compelled each person's most recent job move, we can better understand what might motivate your employees to make another change soon. And conversely, what might make them stick around. So, for instance, questions like this, you know, again, during your one-on-ones, during your performance reviews, questions like this can help you unlock these types of situations.

What was happening in your life when you first thought about switching jobs? You know, so maybe that gives you some insight into their personal situation. What propelled you from passive to active looking? So what was going on that was causing you to just kind of be, well, I'm open to another job. And then all of a sudden you switched to I'm really actively looking for another job. What was going on there? Throughout the process, what conversations did you have with people close to you?

What worries and hopes did you discuss with them? So the article also recommends, and this is good practice for any time, is to always take good notes. Make sure you take really, really good notes, especially during performance reviews. But I recommend taking notes really after every conversation you have with an employee because, again, we forget much, much more than we retain.

So take good notes. But let's say, for example, a person was making way too many sacrifices at home to get things done at work and really didn't see a clear path for growth inside your company. Maybe the employee was drawn to a new role by the freedom and flexibility it affords. So what if you started talking about some of the freedom and flexibility that their current job has?

So if freedom and flexibility was an issue in the last job, then obviously you want to explore ways that you can help them become as free, as flexible as possible within their role. Therefore, you're heading off that same situation from coming up again. Also, you know, just really doing a deep dive into what skills an employee really wants to invest in.

I mean, being really candid and upfront about that, how might those skills be developed on the job to avoid sacrificing family time or this personal issue that they had with their previous job move? How might these opportunities be folded into projects or stretch assignments or things like that? In this way, you can work together on a career plan that serves both the employees' interests and those of the organization. So that's the first anecdote to this problem, right?

Interview them early on. Second is to develop shadow job descriptions. Now, job descriptions have come under real fire over the last five to ten years. You know, a lot of companies have gone away from job descriptions to some degree, thinking that they're really not useful because they don't describe everything that someone does. They really can't. There's the clause at the end, you know, and whatever else is needed by the organization.

So I understand kind of the pushback against job descriptions, but, you know, legally they're required in many cases and we can't get away from them. So how do we change them? How do we develop a job description, maybe 2.0, that looks at. Really experiences, rather than this list of skills, qualifications, and platitudes about work style and culture. So it's usually so broad that sometimes it tends to be meaningless. Now, for the HR people on this call, you might be interested.

The job description really dates back more than 100 years ago. Frederick Taylor, he was known as the father of modern management. He decided that he would use scientific management theory to really measure very precisely what people did on the job. And so he wrote job descriptions that were extraordinarily precise about what people did. And, you know, usually this was factory situations, things like that.

Well, because they posted jobs in newspapers and because newspapers charged by the line to run their ads, they kept them really, really short. So job description started out very, very short, very precise, but very short. And then when job boards went online and started charging flat fees, then job descriptions really blew up. They swelled and became what they are kind of, you know, what they've morphed into today. So anyway, just FYI, if you're interested in the history of job descriptions.

But of course, you know, we know we have to use them. There's legal reasons why we use job descriptions. But. The idea here is to create a shadow description that really supplements the official one to clarify what the person you hire will actually do in the role. And it's really more about outlining the experiences, not the features, right? So think about, well, think about like a real estate posting, right? Right.

Real estate postings don't really care much about the specifics more than they talk about the features of a home or of a location. Right. And when you walk through a real estate listing, you're basically walking through and the people are pointing out all of the features, not necessarily the details, but what those details allow you to do, really the experiences that you have. And so basically this whole idea is taking that approach to job descriptions and really outlining the experiences.

So instead of like, for just one example, excellent writing skills needed, you know, let's just say that that's on the job description. Well, the experience there would be frequent exposure to communicating with senior leaders, right? That's an experience that really kind of accentuates what excellent writing is really all about.

So by working with employees to incorporate the experiences they value most in their development materials, then you can create very clear paths to those experiences and make good on your agreements. That's a much more meaningful way to keep people engaged than throwing in just random opportunities.

And then finally, the third of the three ideas in this article is to really partner with human resources. During onboarding, you might familiarize people with the concepts of how they fit into the organizational talent processes. Employees are encouraged to talk about what motivates them and what might cause them to leave so that their personal goals can be better reflected in their job goals.

Another idea is to transparently and collaboratively examine the task within a set of jobs and maybe identify where they can be divided and reassigned cleanly and mix and match them to create new roles that play to people's strengths and desires. So they talk about Zappos, the online shoe and clothing retailer, how they've taken all the list of all the duties that everyone has, and they just kind of mix and match now, and then, you know, come up with a game plan.

They execute the game plan, and then they kind of start all over again, and they start on a new project. Now, of course, this is not practical for a lot of organizations, but in business. In thinking about a specific job creatively, right? I think these types of ideas can help us just tweak a job description or a shadow job description and make the employee experience a lot better. We just have to be a little bit creative.

The more we can kind of mix up roles and tasks, the more opportunity we'll have to design jobs that find the sweet spot between what the organization needs, and what the employee needs. Some organizations have talent marketplaces to facilitate internal mobility. And so by making such opportunities possible, an employer can continue to reap returns on its talent investments while supporting employees in their individual quests.

So as career paths become less linear and roles become more disaggregated, managers and their organizations can acquire even more tools to engage and develop people through work design, whether their efforts are viewed as job enrichment. Job crafting, I like that word, or simply helping employees make progress in their personal and professional lives. So, in summary, the adage, work smarter, not harder, really applies.

Too many retention and development efforts are one-offs, taxing for managers, less than fruitful for employees. And so by embedding quests for progress into your talent processes, you can systematically make more targeted investments in people. And that's progress that we all want to make.

All right. So thanks for hanging with me on this article. It's a long one, but I think a great one to think about as managers. And until we meet next time in the Manager Lab, do good work. Music.