Sobering Polling Data That Warns Employer’s to Take Worker Development Seriously
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
FinanceOnline.com published a great compilation of polling results and statistics, along with their source, in “112 Employee Turnover Statistics: 2024 Causes, Cost and Prevention Data” that lists the results of a large number of worker turnover, development and retention polling outcomes – 112 to be exact – to allow the reader to form their own opinion. I have highlighted a few of the points verbatim in this article, but I encourage you to review the complete list. The one common factor is that the employer has not done a good job developing and managing their workers for the outcomes they say they expect and are losing massive amounts of money and opportunity as a result. For die-hard short-term planners, these are short-term challenges with real, significant short-term consequences that compound year after year to become the long-term collective challenges that may become insurmountable.
While we are bombarded by polling statistics today, here is some information to help you decide the relevancy and accuracy of the explanations resultant from polling. What used to be useful guidance explaining current trends or predicting future movements in the economy or society, polls seem to have devolved into a hyper-version of marketing often confusing us with data that conflicts with the reality we experience – leading us to reject data that is relevant and to unwittingly accept data that is engineered.
There are many types of polling. The accuracy is usually determined by the poll size (number of respondents), poll stratification (are all variants of polling targets considered. Example: “Are you better off today than 4 years ago” – answer depends on which end of the economic spectrum the respondent lives, what exactly the question refers to and if seems relevant), the question validity (how well the question was designed. Example: the previous question contains a lot of ambiguity and opens the door for the respondent’s interpretation) and pollster’s bias (is the pollster unbiased in their expectations of the results or looking for results that support a previous held opinion).
“Each resignation can cost a company up to a third of the worker’s annual salary. 67% of which often come from soft costs like reduced productivity but 33% come from hard costs like recruiting, hiring temp workers, and the like.”(SHRM)
click here to expandOne of the more nefarious methods is “push-polling,” which is used to steer a respondent toward a particular opinion, not solicit it. The questions are structured as such to subliminally convert the respondent to a certain side or view. Push polls have been used for political campaigns for some time, but are ubiquitous today in world of influencers with hidden agendas. They can help to engineer “trends” that shape well-funded investment market positions or bring dictators to power by congealing disgruntled groups into an influential voting block.
“A trillion dollars. That’s what U.S. businesses are losing every year due to voluntary turnover. And the most astounding part is that most of this damage is self-inflicted. (American Machinist)”
The key to extracting relevancy from polling results is to be open minded. Interpret them for believability by looking at the source; do they have a credible track record. If you can, determine the question format, polling sample size and margin of error in the results. When possible, compare polling results from several sources in search of a common thread. This can help you determine the veracity of polling results. Read More
Challenges Presented by the Widening Skill Gap
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
There are at least five growing, major challenges to maintaining a skilled national labor force. These forces are causing those organizations who could help to, instead, spend tremendous sums of money on “whack-a-mole” type efforts. Sure, this approach sustains all of the profit and non-profit organizations that sprung up to take advantage of the chaos, but if we are serious about solving this issue that has undermined economic recoveries and stifled economic growth for over 30 years, we need to get serious.
It starts by critically evaluating the challenges that have plagued the U.S. labor force and have been barriers to an employer’s commitment to American labor. Like nearly all challenges, one can choose to target the underlying cause, treat the symptoms, mask the symptoms, define an alternative – but not necessarily relevant – cause and focus on that, or ignore symptoms and cause and hope for divine intervention.
Choice of action matters. Take, for example, the choice to take a prescribed “cholesterol lowering” statin that inhibits the body’s production of lipids – fats and fatty substances, producing a cholesterol number within an acceptable range but at a cost of blocking or impairing other vital body functions and often producing “side-effects.” Your doctor may have good news about your cholesterol level during this visit but soon he might be discussing other, more serious issues with you such as, according to the Mayo Clinic, your muscle pain and damage, liver damage, increased blood sugar and type 2 diabetes, neurological side effects… Choosing to treat a symptom without determining why your body is producing excess lipids in the first place may leave the underlying cause unaffected.
click here to expandSimilarly, focusing resources on symptoms and ignoring the underlying cause of a non-systems approach to worker development may lead (and one could say may have already lead) to depleted resources and lost opportunity. Read More
Cross-Training Workers After Lean Efforts Builds Capacity Using Existing Staff
by Stacey Lett, Director of Operations – Eastern U.S. – Proactive Technologies, Inc.
Lean activities to redesign processes for better efficiency in a department, or between departments, sometimes result in “surplus” workers – partially or in whole units. It is the subjective priority of Lean practitioners since it is a tangible illustration of a successful Lean improvement. Processes that previously needed 3 people to complete may now only need two, if the efficiency were discovered. So what happens to that one person that has valuable acquired expertise, representing a significant investment by the employer? Would the wise outcome of Lean efforts be to just cut that person from the lineup?
The short answer is most likely not. Any efficiency and cost savings brought about by the Lean redesign would be offset by the loss of the expertise for which the investment has already been made. Most likely the reason for the Lean was not in reaction to no return on worker investment, but rather a desire to increase the return on worker investment.
If the worker is reassigned to another department, and no task-based training infrastructure is in place, that reassignment may lower the efficiency there which, again, reduces the gains made by the Lean effort. So part of the Lean effort must be the deliberate cross-training of workers in temporary assignments or longer-term reassignments to other departments that seem to have the need for increased staffing, perhaps as a result of the increased throughput achieved from the Lean effort in the upstream department in the chain.
click here to expandAnother outcome of a lean effort may not include moving personnel, but either equipment or processes out of the Leaned department into another department up or downstream, often without structured training to absorb the new activities and maintain efficiency. Here the loss of gains made are similar if no training on how to perform the processes or run the equipment is provided.
In an efficiently run organization, every department has detailed, documented best practices and training materials that are always maintained, and training tracking systems to ensure cross-training occurs quickly and to the necessary level of performance and capacity. In an organization that does not have these systems, any gains and efficiency expected from Lean efforts may be unnoticeable or, worse yet, non-existent or negative. Read More
Supervisors and First Line Management Need Structured On-The-Job Training, Too
by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.
It seems every organization is scrambling to “lean” the operation these days. This implies producing the same amount of output, or more, with decreased amount of inputs by fine-tuning logistics, internal work flows and processes. Workers get moved around or out, and processes get reorganized and relocated.
Changes to the operation signal that the workers responsible to implement changes will need to know the new way of doing things. All affected workers, all shifts. Yet, often very little thought is given to the effectiveness of improvements if not everyone is one the same page.
“One of the supervisors who participated in the program development said with clear certainty, ‘I wish you had this when I started. When you hired me, I was just shown my desk and told to call HR or the manager if I had any questions. Yes, you had me attend some management classes on leadership, quality and striving for excellence, but I really couldn’t connect what was learned to my job since I had not yet learned what I was supposed to do and how to do that well. Until we completely analyzed all of the tasks that make up my job, I really had no idea which tasks I never have had a chance to learn or even knew I needed to learn them.’ ”
What should be an obvious “must,” the notion that increasing worker capacity at all levels through task-based, deliberate, documented, measurable and verifiable structured on-the-job training is often usurped. It is replaced by a policy of hopefulness that workers will learn to perform the tasks of their job on their own or by osmosis or, even less effective and disappointing, attending a class here and there in expectation of closing the “skills gap.” I often discuss this in the context of production or service workers, but this extends to all levels of most organizations. The impact doesn’t go unnoticed by controllers and CEO’s under pressure to increase revenue or lower costs, but measures to correct this imbalance are seldom explored let alone utilized.
click here to expandInvariably, the most target-rich environment for harvesting huge savings and significantly increasing capacity is bypassed – either from a lack of understanding of what it takes to be a “subject matter expert” or entrenched neglect. Ignoring the need for structured on-the-job training is like investing in a state-of-the-art machine, then waiting for it to set-up and program itself. Even artificial intelligence needs someone to train it the first time to do the things expected in the proper way.
When one considers the serious collateral damage caused by underdeveloped or underutilized worker capacity (e.g. scrap, rework, loss of “tribal knowledge” when someone retires or moves on, loss of customer confidence, loss of employee confidence), red flags and alarms should be going off continuously, since all of these are present on a daily basis. But distractions and diversions seem to get in the way. Several articles have appeared in the Proactive Technologies Report newsletter that discuss these costs in more detail, including: Estimating the Costs Associated With Skipping Employer-Based Structured On-The-Job Training and The High Cost of Employee Turnover. Read More
Read the full June, 2024 Proactive Technologies Report newsletter, including linked industry articles and online presentation schedules.
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