Five Ways to Use Training
to Minimize Employee Turnover
T
employees leave companies. Roy Hinojosa,
a division president at Golden Corral, has a
different perspective: “I think it’s much more
important to know, at regular intervals, why
our people are staying with us. The more we
understand what’s most valuable to them,
the better we can provide more of that, and
keep them with us longer. That’s why regular
‘stay’ interviews, to me, are much more
by Jim Sullivan
valuable than an exit interview.”
Educate, don’t lecture. Take a good
hard look at the tone and timbre of your operation’s training
materials. Is the “voice” you’re using in your videos, e-learning and
position manuals patriarchal in tone? Uncertain? Read a couple of
pages out loud. You’ll know the answer.
Fix the disconnect. Do you sit new hires down with a
GM who pumps them up for 45 minutes about how awesome
the company is and then sends them off to HR for a few hours
of paperwork that commences with a detailed checklist of all
the ways they might get fired? Think through the process that
new team members experience and make certain it’s positive,
welcoming and engaging with no mixed messages. Ask employees
who just went through onboarding with you what they liked best
and least about it.
Many retail brands have grasped the competitive advantage
of transforming training in order to transform their teams, which
transforms their guest service. And they’re seeing lower turnover,
higher tenure and happier customers as a result. Simply put: from
here on out, make hiring the most important decision. G
Jim Sullivan is a popular speaker at leadership conferences
worldwide. You can get his training catalog of resources at
Sullivision.com and follow him on LinkedIn, YouTube or Twitter
@Sullivision.
he retail industry’s annual hourly employee churn averages
100 percent. Yes, you read that right. The number is obscene
and embarrassing, yet many retail operators merely shrug it
off as “the price of doing business.” That perspective is shortsighted
and wrong. I contend this 100 percent turnover rate is unsustain-
able for continued growth, untenable for manager tenure and
unnecessary for forward-thinking operators. Simply put, if your
labor strategy is focused solely on how to get the most out of people
while paying them as little as possible, you’re playing a zero-sum
game. So let’s discuss how training relates to turnover and share
a few best demonstrated practices to better engage and retain our
new and veteran team members.
Culture first, process second. “The only thing we have is
one another. The only competitive advantage we have is the culture
and values of the company,” said Howard Schultz, outgoing CEO
of Starbucks. “Anyone can open up a coffee store. We have no tech-
nology, no patent. All we have is the relationship around the values
of the company and what we bring to the customer every day. And
we all have to own it.” The goal of an effective training program is
to instill and align company culture, not simply to infuse a process.
Process can be looked up. Identify the five or 10 keystone cultural
behaviors that all employees should share like empathy, teamwork,
customer service, communication, etc., and redesign your training
program to reinforce those skills. Determine first what you stand
for and then what you should do to stand out.
Questions are the answers. Brand execs could ask them-
selves a simple question to help solve the turnover crisis: “What kind
of company would have employees fighting to get into it, not fighting
to stay out of it?” At Facebook, candidates are asked the following
question: “On your very best day at work – the day you come home
and think you have the best job in the world – what did you do that
day?” Document the responses, and incorporate those behaviors into
your supervisor’s and teammates’ development program.
Stay interviews. Ten years ago, the concept of “exit
interviews” was all the rage, a process designed to assess why
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