7 Devastating Mistakes That Increase Turnover And Kill Profit

Keep Great Employees and Increase Profit with Better Hiring and Management Skills

In a world decorated with “NOW HIRING” signs the last thing any business wants is to lose a valuable employee. Sadly, most of those same businesses make devastating mistakes that chase away their top performers. Worse, they don’t realize it so they repeat the same mistakes and kill productivity and profitability. Avoid the 7 devastating mistakes that increase turnover and kill profit.

Creating a rock star team starts with keeping your existing rock stars. A fool proof way to aggravate your top performers is making any one of these mistakes. If you are making 2 or 3 (or more), don’t block the exits. Your best employees are going to stampede out the door to work for your competitors.

All of these mistakes are costly so it’s hard to rank them in order of severity. They are listed in order your employees encounter them instead.

1. Job Posts that Fail to Attract Ideal Candidates

If the perfect candidate can’t tell what your company does, or what they’ll be doing in the position, don’t bother posting the position. It’s going to lead to a revolving door of employees and a smoking trail of wasted revenue. All the legal stuff and EEOC requirements still has to be there, I’m not talking about that.

Job posts should start with something that resonates with the ideal person for the job. Stop wasting time sifting through unqualified applications. Check out 3 Simple Steps to Write Better Job Posts.

Register for the 2 hour workshop to start building your team.

2.  Job Descriptions that Don’t Describe the Job

A recent trend has been to get super creative with both job titles and job descriptions. The problem is nobody but the creator knows that a Universal Lifestyle Coordinator is a front desk customer service position. And the tasks and functions are equally as confusing. “Represent company in professional associations” and “Attend meetings as required by customers” are not job requirements.

Job descriptions should include the characteristics of people who will succeed in the position and the tasks they must complete daily. “Ability and willingness to multi-task” is not something that can be tracked. If team members can’t tell if they have succeeded in a task, they’ll get frustrated. Especially when management holds them accountable for something they didn’t know to complete.

3. The Interview Process Doesn’t Identify Culture Fit

Interviewing is a process and should have components to ensure they will be a welcome addition to the existing team. Attracting top talent is only the first part.

Even entry level team members should have an interview process. Checking a pulse doesn’t count. There’s a labor shortage nationwide right now, which makes it even more critical to get the right person in the door. Every dollar spent on hiring and training comes straight from the bottom line.

If you want to be more profitable, have less turnover. If you want less turnover, hire candidates that fit your company culture as well as have the skills needed to complete the job.

4. There’s No Onboarding Process (or it doesn’t prepare new hires in every role to succeed)

The first few days of every employee is critical. Leaving new team members in a fog and expecting them to figure things out on their own leads to frustration. Even worse, trap them in a cubicle with a computer and force them to endure endless days of online video training.

It’s often an attempt to reduce training costs and ensure compliance, especially for entry level positions. The real result is making new hires feel even more out of place. Instead of meeting new co-workers and building relationships, they are left alone to question their life choices.

Even advanced positions get this treatment. “They’re smart, they’ll figure it out.” “We don’t want to give them too much too soon.” “Let them ease into the new environment.” All nice sentiments, but ultimately doing a disservice to the new hire ready to start contributing. After all, the goal is to hire rock stars, right? Get them introduced to the team and started on meaningful work.

5. The Mission Statement and Guiding Principles Don’t Unify and Motivate the Team

This one kills me. I’ve written about this before. If you can’t recite your mission statement from memory, you don’t have a mission. Whatever is written on the wall or printed on page 8 of the employee handbook is worthless if it doesn’t drive the team. Everyone should know the mission, and be driven to accomplish it. Enough of a rant here, read more about mission statements in the previous post.

Motivate Your Employees with a Powerful Mission Statement

6. Every Position & Department Doesn’t Have Specific Goals and Priorities

Tom Brady would never play on a football field that didn’t have clearly defined goal lines and yard markers along the way. Your team needs clear expectations for success.

Business leaders often look around at all the things needing that need to get done and wonder why no one is working on them. The short (and sad) answer is – no one told them to.

Details aren’t missed when each department has defined priorities and every employee knows their role. (BONUS, management and team leaders don’t get pissed.) There is no downside to making sure everyone is CLEAR about what winning looks like.

If you haven’t defined clear expectations and don’t have a simple way to keep everyone on track, download and use this simple one page execution plan.

7. There is No Company Culture so Current Employees Don’t Refer for Open Positions

Every business’s number one resource for new employees should be existing employees. Creating a great place to work means great people want to work there.

Simple surveys of current team members can give invaluable insight into making a better place to work. That makes hiring easier, leading to longer retention and higher profit. This creates more upside, too. The current crew feels seen, heard and now owns part of the continued success of the business.

Avoid the 7 devastating mistakes that increase turnover and kill profit and transform your business into a profit-generating machine.

Build Your Team

Hiring the wrong person maybe the only thing worse than having open positions. Register now for the 2 hour Attract Ideal Candidate Workshop. Find the right person for any job, plus get 6 foolproof interview questions to identify rock stars so you never waste time and money on hiring someone that will leave you hanging.

Or get the full business leadership program to start building your rock star team. Register for the 8 week Business Leaders Group from CLEAR Message.