Managing Burnout in the Workforce

or so yeah i think people are really eager to hear about this topic for sure i think so there's a little bit of an issue out there with staffing right now so we're gonna have a nice candid conversation about what's actually happening and what's coming next for the workforce so really excited we've got like we said hundreds of folks joining us today so we're letting folks still get logged in here and maggie i'm ready when you are all right well thank you everyone for joining and welcome to today is magna culture's state of the workforce webinar and it is the great management walkout and i'm maggie augustine with magnet culture so i'll just be joining kara today at the beginning and the end of today's webinar and as many of you are joining you probably have started to notice in your workplaces that it's no longer just the front line that's looking for change so we're seeing i'm sure you're seeing that managers are exhausted from the labor shortages the overloaded workloads so burnout starting to rise and many leaders are starting to look for a more manageable position so kara is going to spend the next few minutes sharing about what's going on what we're seeing but also provide some management strategies as well as some executive strategies that you can start on today but be sure to stay for the entire session because as always we have a special offer at the end for each of you and as you'll see we are recording today's session so you'll get this recording in an email but also you can find all of our webinars at youtube.com slash magnet culture i'll put that in the chat here in a second and all of our webinars are on there this year we've been cut we've covered bullying in the workplace how to prioritize your retention initiatives and that one includes the retention audit as well so that one's a great one to check out so if you like what you hear today go and check out those as well and also just share them with your leadership team and anybody else you you want to share those insights with so makara let's dive into to to today's topic awesome thank you so much maggie and welcome everyone all right so how in the world did we get to this place right now where not only are we seeing our staff leaving due to the great resignation but we're also starting to see more and more leaders hit their breaking point so i have to tell you a story one of my clients happens to be a hotel management group and they may even be with us here today so hello friends um i was meeting with them last year to talk about who's leaving and who's staying and what's happening and what do we do about it and they expressed to me that of course it's no surprise a lot of room attendance which we might have called housekeeping in the past a lot of room attendants were really tough to get and keep so i started to ask more questions about the expectations of these room attendants and i asked why do we have such a heavy workload for folks today when we compare that to where we were 10 years ago so when i asked how many rooms was an attendant supposed to clean 10 years ago during an eight-hour shift their response was you know probably 10 to 12 rooms was a good rate and then today they tell me that they expect a room attendant to clean 16 rooms per shift okay now think about that for a second have the hotel room sizes changed no they didn't get any smaller or easier and so what happened during that time well as our conversation unfolded and as i've talked to other organizations as well we have realized this workload creep that has happened so what had tended to happen in almost every industry was there was an expectation and then there were rock stars there were rock stars who came in above that expectation so let's say somebody a few years ago could clean 14 rooms in a shift instead of 12. well that told the leadership 14 is possible so let's hold everyone to that standard then what happened when the pandemic hit for a lot of organizations they were already maxed out and pushing their folks to their maximum capacity and that meant there was no wiggle room my friends there was no wiggle room for people to be off on vacation or out sick or for somebody to leave and have to be replaced so then what happened was we were forcing people even beyond what they could typically do and saying look we're going to need you to do 16 rooms because we're short staffed because times are tough because things are busy right now and so we just kept pushing and pushing and pushing and the moment that we show those higher numbers are possible with a workload what happens the owners the senior leadership say that's our new expectation we know it can be done so we're going to go to the you know we're going to stretch people we're going to go to those highest capacity possible for folks but that is not sustainable is it right so no matter what organization you are in no matter what industry you happen to be in we know that this workload creep is not sustainable and we've already experienced the great resignation of our workforce the staff the workers those folks and i have to tell you all i'm seeing something quite disturbing moving forward because i talk to managers and leaders and owners and executives all the time about these exact issues and i want to tell you that we are now predicting the great management walkout moving forward in the next two quarters now some of you i'm sure are pushing back and going but but but there's an impending recession cara some say we're already in the recession others say it's coming some say it's going to be terrible some hope that it won't be but here's the deal today the day i am doing this webinar people are still hiring companies are still hiring whether it is for growth or it is just to backfill those other positions now it may not be every single industry and every single company but there are management positions out there and in the the industries that we work in they are still hiring like crazy okay so right now what i'm hearing from these individuals that i talk to is they are hitting their breaking point absolute breaking point after this terrible two to three years of being pushed and pushed and pushed and some of you probably feel that way who are on this call today you might say that's me i'm the one who's being pushed and pushed and pushed right and then the organizational leaders if you're an executive on this call today you're going yeah we've had to push and push and push because we had to for other reasons right so today we're going to get a little better handle on what's going on and figure out how can we avoid to the best of our ability this great management walkout because i'll tell you only those with a very low low risk tolerance who really don't like change are going to be the only ones who will put up with an overloaded workload much longer okay uh especially going into the recession even those who have confidence in their skills uh those who really care about their their family and their work life balance which i'll talk more about in a minute they are done now these companies they these managers feel like the companies have taken advantage of them and i'm not going to say that that was purposeful i don't think anybody said let's take advantage of our managers and put as much on their plate as they can stand no okay that did not happen what happened was it was the work load creep and now we have gotten into a work load crisis that we have hit today so um what exactly am i hearing from the managers first things first there are a ton of managers who are in a position called a hiring manager meaning you are responsible as the manager or director for that department to hire your own people and to replace your own people and to onboard and train your own people with some support from hr and recruiting but for the most part you are going to be the leader of that so let's talk about that for a second because what that means is somebody who let's say they're doing their job they're a director of a department they're doing their job and let's say ten percent of their job is recruiting and managing the new hires okay this is like pre-pandemic five plus years ago about ten percent of their job was in the recruiting selection onboarding time today i talked to companies and managers that are telling me they're hiring or at least interviewing four to five times as many people as they used to because of this great resignation that more folks have left so that hiring manager if they have not been given more recruiting support more hr support more onboarding support they are absolutely tipped in the wrong direction because that 10 percent of their job is now say 40 of their time that they're having to spend in posting the jobs screening applicants interviewing applicants making the offers getting them onboarded training and mentoring you see what i'm saying here so even though the job description maybe didn't change the workload shifted and they had a lot more recruiting and hiring responsibilities on their plate that also kind of crept in over time and now the managers don't have time to do that and their whole job also we're hearing that we're doing comp analysis over and over so my hr friends are saying i don't have time for this i gotta do comp analysis twice a year now and we used to only do it every 18 months or 24 months right so that's the hr workload there that has changed and then the managers are still dealing with their staff who let's be honest if we put ourselves in our staff shoes for a minute okay great so we bumped up our two to three percent pay increases this year to four percent five percent maybe six percent for some of you who were able to do that that's great but guess what the managers are hearing um don't you know inflation is nine percent why did i only get five and a half percent raised this year so then the managers have to buffer that situation between the corporate decisions that were made and the staff who even with more raises than they've ever gotten in years still aren't happy because they still can't pay for groceries and gas and utilities and other things that have gone up okay so we're dealing with even more pushback from our staff on those types of things as well i hate to even bring it up but in some industries and professions of course we're hearing a lot more about working from home and flexible working and flexible hours and things like that so i just bring that up to say the managers are dealing with a lot of pushback and a lot of questions and requests and even demands from our workforce right so that's another thing that's on their plate right now also not to mention they are filling in for the missing people they are absolutely going out on the floor and doing the job of the people who aren't showing up today or who have left and we have not yet replaced them so the managers feel that weight as well of filling in those vacant roles now there's another factor here that also plays in and that is the high pressure expectations that are still hitting managers and directors regarding corporate metrics and corporate goals or the owner's expectations i have seen so many companies in the last 18 months that are still trying to hit their numbers and still trying to push out new initiatives and new software and launch this new thing and the managers are going you've got to be kidding me you are going to put another initiative on my plate you are going to ask me to do another thing and you have not been out here to look at what is happening on the floor right you have not been out here lately or enough to see exactly what we're dealing with every single day and then you're pushing these unattainable corporate metrics from goal setting that we did years ago we can't meet those goals right now when we don't have the capacity that we used to have okay so i've i have also seen some of these corporate groups pause and halt new initiatives and say we're going to be there for you and we are absolutely um in your camp we know what's going on here we understand how bad this is and we are not going to push anything else out to you right now that's not required or necessary for getting the stabbing stability that we have to have back okay so i am seeing some of that happen but i'm still seeing a lot of companies charge forward as if their managers are not underwater which they are okay so uh if you've ever seen me present you've ever read any of my books any of that you're probably familiar with the trees and the revolving doors analogy that we use now of course everyone knows what a revolving door is that's the new hires that we're struggling to keep and our goal there is to slow the revolving door and keep the new hires longer on average to work on lengthening that average length of tenure the trees now i have to tell you things have changed since maybe the last time you saw me speak because it used to be that i said the trees those are the deep-rooted people in the organization you know they can weather the storm and they're probably not going anywhere even if you want them to okay so we had all these trees in our organization that were dependable and again deep rooted you know how hard it is to transplant a 20 year old oak that's how hard it is to transplant a deep rooted manager and director who's been at the organization for a long time but things have changed all right and now moving forward what i'm seeing is a lot more of these trees the people who've been at our companies seven to ten years 15 to 20 years they absolutely are over weighted on their branches okay we want to stick with this tree analogy here they are starting to collapse under the weight that has been put on them and they cannot weather another storm so what we're seeing in their mentality as i talk to more of these managers is one they're not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel because the owners and executives are saying well we've tried everything you know we raised wages and there's not much more we can do you just gotta hang in there and when the managers hear that they're they're hitting that breaking point they're just beside themselves what do you mean we've tried everything that's all we can do a lot of the managers are telling me they don't think that the company itself is willing to make big enough changes for what is needed to stay competitive and to get the people we can't afford to lose so one reason if you're telling your folks just hang in there we're trying the best we can but your company is not taking big leaps to make changes then that's what they're feeling right now is there's no light at the end of that tunnel for little tweaks and things like that there's also uh that sense of obligation that a lot of i would say gen x and the baby boomers have a lot more of that than millennials do if you've heard me talk about generations that sense of obligation to stay with the company that's taken such good care of them or even a true sense of loyalty to an employer or even just to a boss a lot of people are seeing that sense of loyalty and obligation dry up because they just can't take it anymore right some people are telling me their health is suffering now because of the stress and exhaustion haven't slept in years properly and that's not sustainable right for any of our bodies they also are telling me that their family structures their marriages their relationship with their kids and even their support systems of the grandma and grandpa who help out with child care and and things like that that those support systems are crumbling underneath them because of the long endured long hours and expectations and always being on call and different things like that so i just want to put you in the mindset of these managers and directors who are carrying this enormous burden of these organizations right now to let you know where they're coming from all right now i'm certainly going to get to some strategies of how do we work through that uh here in a minute but i wanted to share with you that while our work is industry agnostic right we work across all different industries coast to coast uh i was recently asked just this past week to analyze and respond to a large-scale industry specific leadership survey that was done in the senior care space all right so the data found that more than half of the people that were sitting in the top management positions more than half of them had considered leaving their job in the last three months and this was just done this july and august this data so this is fresh hot off the presses all right more than half of those top leaders have or are considering leaving their jobs just in these past three months so these are people keep in mind who have been in those roles for years most of them and the survey said they find great meaning in their job because of course they are in a caregiving field that brings a lot of meaning so they love the job they love who they serve and what they do every day but what they're telling me in one-on-one conversations is they are finally hitting their breaking point and they can't move forward much longer all right um in fact i'm hearing this across various industries not just senior care for sure i'm hearing it from other managers as well and if you didn't see it on linkedin the other day um i just posted about this great management walkout and what was happening and i got tons of responses not just on the post itself but tons of private messages because people didn't want to tell their manager that they're thinking about leaving and so i heard things like uh here's some quotes for you i just left my director level position for a smaller less stressful position and i was willing to take a pay cut to do so that was one another one said i used to warrior through anything but the last three years have been so very tiring i hit my breaking point last month and i'm leaving my job in a few months so this person has been kind enough to give a longer notice but this person is going to continue consulting for that organization they just can't stay on the clock every day this person said it was one of the hardest decisions they've ever had to make but the stress was ruining their health so now they're going to take some time off reset figure out what's next and of course these are very talented folks with a lot of experience so they will be able to find more opportunities because in our space where we're working still people are hiring like crazy uh one other quote from that linkedin post was i no longer have a quality of life and it's impacting my health they just laid off a lot of support functions to increase margins but i can only do 14 hour days for so long right so that's what the folks are telling us even if they're not saying it to your face please understand that this is the sentiment going on out there in the in the positions where people feel overloaded now i will tell you most people don't want to quit okay they do not want to quit it's just a factor of they've hit a tipping point now where their life and their well-being now needs to take priority over their job or even career right that they need to take a step back and re-evaluate that to some extent some people let me change that a lot of people are using the phrase work-life balance that's why everybody's quitting it's work-life balance it's work-life balance but the problem with using that phrase is everyone defines work-life balance differently some people think work-life balance oh we can't let people work from home so sorry about you and that's not work-life balance i mean maybe for some people but that's not what a lot of people mean it isn't even just flexible schedules it's also that mental load right do you have your managers and directors on call after their shift or their hours on site are they still even going home whether they're on call or not are they still worried about filling the positions and filling the shifts and things like that if they're taking that home with them that mental stress and strain then that will hit a breaking point where their health can't keep up with that okay so that's what we're seeing today i would not talk to your executives about it's a work-life balance issue don't use that phrase it's too ambiguous and some people have already said oh i hate that buzzword instead uh we really need to talk about a life and health issue for our managers and our directors okay so there's enough about kind of what's going on putting ourselves in those managers shoes and and seeing things from their perspective now i'm going to shift over to the strategies so what in the world do we do about it okay now i've separated things into management strategies and executive strategies and we have both on the call today i hope you will stick around to hear both so you can have really powerful conversations with those below and above you on the org chart and of course make sure to stick around for the offer here at the end of the session as well but i want to start first with the managers but again execs hold tight because i've got some specific strategies for you in just a moment also if you are a manager of managers take note because these are some ideas that you can cascade throughout the organization you can teach them to help get through this difficult time and as well as support them in these strategies if you know you want them to implement these things then you can help provide templates and support and even time to do that okay so first things first we need to do better as managers of our departments of operationalizing the turnover and what i mean is we tend to run our departments like well-oiled machines right we have our standard operating procedures and we have our checklists and you know all the stuff we have systems in place that we follow and that we use to make sure that we deliver the best product service care right we deliver the best we can and we do that by creating that well-oiled machine now what we want to do on the turnover side is we know turnover is not going away right it's not uh this is not gonna solve itself and so think about the things that you have to do and say over and over because of turnover right it's part of the onboarding it's you know part of the recruiting process and things like that i hope that you are not writing from scratch any emails now that pertain to recruiting people offer letters onboarding people anything like that at this point we need to have created templates and a lot of systems email systems will even let you save a template or maybe you could keep a separate word doc on your computer there that is easy to access that has here's my template for this here's my template for that right we have to save time by creating some more templates for those types of emails and communication now you want to make it personal as best you can especially if you're offering someone the job and how you know of course tell everybody how great it was to meet them and that you'd love to have them on the team maybe mentioning if you can one or two specific things about them that you love or that you notice through uh the interview process right but if you have the template at least that saves you time on writing 90 of those emails so make sure you have templates for a lot of that communication if it's not already in your applicant tracking system which some of you have in place okay now another thing you can do is think about your onboarding process and instead of haphazardly oh well come watch me do this for a little bit oh hey go over there and watch her do that for a little bit instead we want to make detailed onboarding checklists okay and what i recommend is have a day one and when i say day one i don't mean hr okay hr has its own compliance and company checklist that it has to get through i'm talking about you manager when a new person comes onto your team what does day one look like all right so make your onboarding checklist for day one with a new person on your team what do you want to cover not just how to do the job and compliance type stuff or systems training they of course need that but also the culture side who are we who's on the team what are the roles and responsibilities what are some of the unwritten expectations that weren't covered in the handbook okay so create a day one checklist and then a week one checklist ideally you would then create a month one checklist and finally a quarter one checklist because we don't want to tell new hires everything right up front we need to space that out over time okay so executives for you a way to support your managers on this is to create some templates um or at least a tool that your managers can use to manage these checklists whether you have a learning management system or your applicant tracking system maybe the recruiting software also goes into the onboarding process but give your team a space for that if you're a manager who's having to do this on your own excel spreadsheets work just fine okay and you can absolutely put each new hire's name down there and then check the box on what they've accomplished and what you've taught them over time okay so we really want to again operationalize this are there a lot of faqs the frequently asked questions that new hires have make a sheet for that an faq sheet that you can just give them on day one or week one okay also do you have a professional development mentoring schedule in place where you can check in with folks and either do it by person where you're doing one-on-one mentoring with them or do you have topics that each month or each staff meeting or huddle that you cover these expectations and this type of professional development for your team if you get those onto a calendar onto a schedule then it doesn't go on the back burner and say oh i just don't have time to come up with a topic right now you can sit down and come up with 12 topics that you want to cover throughout the year and then those are your focus areas for each month okay so again we're standardizing this and making it to where you don't have to remember all of these things yourself same thing with birthdays and anniversaries of staff you can absolutely automate that with calendar systems or collecting get to know you sheets from the new hires to learn about their birthday time and what kind of candy they like best those types of things okay so with the get to know you sheets if you don't already have a template for that go to our hidden vault and download the one that we created to save you time okay so you go to magnetvault.com magnetvault.com that's got all all kinds of goodies in there for you and one of my favorites is our get to know you sheet that you can give to every new hire and it helps collect that kind of information from them alright so first things first for managers operationalize your turnover and your new hire processes okay it will i know it sounds daunting right now but it will actually save you a ton of time later once you have your templates and tools in place okay so that's the first thing second of all is back to fundamentals communicate your expectations you guys have all heard me say this as i tell you my story about keeping my shoes on at the office at my first job but i have a new example for you that really hit home at one of my recent programs i did a keynote on understanding the different generations and keeping the younger workers longer and right afterwards a cfo came up to me afterwards and she said ugh cara okay i hear you about these generational differences and i understand that i'm supposed to communicate my expectations better but i am communicating my expectations and it is still not working all right so i said great tell me what's going on what is your expectation and she said well i'm the cfo and i expect my finance team at every weekly meeting to come to the meeting prepared to give me a status update i said great are they not doing that she said no all they do when they come to the meeting and i ask them how are things going what's your status update every person says something like everything's good we're all on track my department is fine and i waited for a moment and said isn't that a status update [Music] [Laughter] and she thought about it for a minute said well i mean i guess somebody might translate that as a status update but to me i said great tell me what it is to you what is a status update she said to me a status update is what have you accomplished since our last meeting where are you now what are your next steps have you hit any roadblocks you know things like that and i just paused for a moment and let it sink into her that she hadn't told them that yet so finally it hit her you could see the light bulb go off and she said whoa now i understand i wasn't communicating my expectations here she thought she was because she was saying come to the meeting for with a status update but they thought they were hitting the mark by saying yep everything's on track boss instead she needed to communicate more clearly what she wanted for that status update so now she will tell them exactly what she wants to hear and hopefully will get those four things right the what have you accomplished where are you now what are your next steps and what roadblocks have you hit that can be her new agenda person by person for that round robin on those weekly calls okay so there was a big misunderstanding there and i can't even express to you how frustrated she was in fact i think her first comment to me was i just don't understand why these millennials are such terrible communicators that's how she started her example she's very frustrated and of course pushing it on to the staff as they are the problem and ultimately she walked away after that conversation saying okay now i know how to bridge that gap i know how to be a better leader and better communicator to solve my own problem okay so managers please remember just back to the fundamentals i know we are busy and that's why we drop the fundamentals we forget to do it or just don't have time but we really have to step up right now and make sure that our new hires get the communication that they need and they deserve in their new positions all right because keep in mind your new hires cannot read your mind did everyone hear that your new hires cannot read your mind and they don't know how it's always been done so please slow down check in with your people and be prepared to do more walk throughs of what your expectations are but also put those in writing as best you can or put them on your checklist your onboarding checklist so that you don't miss those expectations and communicating them to the new hires all right so operationalizing turnover and communicating expectations are two things that managers can do immediately to hopefully lessen their workload from miscommunication and problems and and conflict on their teams um but also be able to keep people longer to get their head back above water okay all right so now let's shift over to some executive level strategies and the reason i separate this out as you all can imagine is some people have the decision-making authority for policy changes and total leadership approach and resources across the company and other people do not so everybody can make a difference by working on being a better leader better manager and creating a better place to work but there are some things that only the executives can sometimes make the changes in all right so let me tell you this i was not too long ago riding down the highway with my seven-year-old son in the back seat and he saw that there was a car broken down on the side of the highway so he said mommy what happened to that car and i said oh well uh it looks like he blew a tire okay note to self do not tell your seven-year-old child that tires can blow up while you're on the highway all right because my very sensitive seven-year-old said oh mommy is our tire gonna blow up i didn't know tires could blow up and he freaked out on the highway uh in the back seat okay so here's what i told him no no no no no no honey calm down no our tires are not going to blow up do you know why because mommy and daddy get maintenance on our cars we change our tires when they get bald right when they when they lose their tread we also pump up our tires at every oil change and even sometimes in between we maintain our vehicles and so that is not likely to happen to us not a hundred percent you know proof but uh but certainly it helps our chances so once i explained that to him it really hit me that that's exactly what's going on in the work world is that we are running in many cases on bald tires we have just been going and going and going and we have not stopped to breathe to sleep to get an oil change mentally you know or physically we have really just kept going and kept going and we have gotten rid of that time for maintenance because we had to keep pushing through and now what's happening the tire is blowing now somebody is exploding at someone else right the chaos is just enormous that conflict is a big outburst not just a little bit of a disagreement okay or people are saying i quit because their tire has burst so this is where we go back to the conversation around workloads okay we have got to evaluate where our workloads are today versus where they were in the past and what i ask executives to do right now is to really do a workload and job description check we have to go back and re-evaluate whether or not the workloads we have in place are sustainable i have seen so many organizations lose a key person a key director let's say and they had to replace them with two people two people that it took to replace that one person so why do you think that one person left because they were overloaded we have to absolutely make sure we have not asked people to absorb so much of the the extra stuff we've had to take on and maybe people have left and then we haven't replaced them i've seen a lot of that going on as well and so as executives and owners of our organizations we have to make sure that we are pruning you know just like we do rose bushes that we are pruning some of the jobs um because as you know with a rose bush if you don't prune it it will get too heavy it will wilt it will fall over and not bloom as big and bright the next year so what do we do we prune it we cut it back so that next year it can blossom and it has the right weight on the branches and not too much weight on those branches that's not sustainable for the next year okay so so job pruning is big reviewing those job descriptions and not just the job description but remember if recruiting was 10 of their job and now it's 40 of their job recruiting is still on the job description but you might need to weight it differently that it isn't the same part of the job that it was before now it's a much heftier part of their responsibility so don't just look at the job description to say yep they're doing that yep they're doing that yep they're doing that but look at how much time those things are taking for them as well okay i'm seeing a lot more organizations put in more recruiting and retention support for these hiring managers the ones that have to find their own people and recruit their own people and onboard their own people so if you don't already have a retention specialist in place to help with employee engagement and onboarding or maybe you don't have centralized to some extent or maybe even decentralized depends on which strategy would work better for your organization uh hr support a lot of times i'm talking to managers and hr departments that just feel there is not near enough hr support for all the recruiting and retention efforts that are going on right now okay another thing that baffles me is 10 and 20 years ago there were assistant managers do you remember that it's like where have all the assistant managers gone it's just blown my mind how we eliminated those positions over the years even assistant directors there were assistant vice presidents and yes i know that some of that we maybe took too far um and it was a little bloated but now a lot of times we don't even have time for the person who's in the management role they can't do both the operational side of the job and get the functions done at the same time as managing and mentoring and training and supporting the rest of the staff they don't have time to do both so in a lot of cases that's what assistant managers or assistant directors do one person takes on more of the operational expectations and the other person takes on more of the staffing and leadership expectations okay so consider that as well people say all the time oh where's that money gonna come from cara look at the dire situation we are in now and tell me that we do not need to fix it with some big changes like we said earlier that these managers and directors need owners and executive teams to make some big changes and strides to get the right people into the right positions so we can have a sustainable workload for folks and be able to keep our team members okay so the job pruning creating more either assistant positions or more hr roles to help support this increased function of employee engagement and onboarding it's a huge undertaking and the managers just can't hold on to that any longer okay so there's the first one for executives and the second is you know i'm seeing that people people are just not even on the same page i mean leaders at the exact same organization i'll talk to one vice president and another vice president or the ceo and they think that it's going to take different things to get to the retention numbers that they need to get to right to get to the culture and build out the leadership the way it needs to be built out and they're not even on the same page so how can we possibly be marching to the same drum and headed in the same direction when each department or leader is coming at it from a different direction so the next strategy is get your senior leaders on the same page if you have not already i highly recommend that you take our retention audit okay so you can actually go to magnetvault.com and find that as well it's just a 10 question audit where you put yourself in the staff's shoes and look at how they view the organization and that document is meant to help you prioritize those initiatives in fact we did a webinar i believe in january of this year just kicking off the year with how to prioritize your retention initiatives in that webinar which is at youtube.com culture you can go watch that and it walks you through the audit as as well as some strategies to implement when you get to that point okay so definitely start with the audit and then also get together schedule a meeting and get together that is focused on retention only or staffing recruiting workforce only because we cannot be running in different directions and we cannot have an annual meeting where 25 of the annual meeting is talking about staffing because staffing is one of the largest if not the largest issue that everyone on your team from top to bottom is dealing with today so instead focus on retention and do an intensive do a retreat a one day a two day whatever that looks like as long as you need to lock yourself in a room together you've got to hash out what's going on you have to look at so so we do these all the time here let me give you our sample agenda and you can run this yourself you can bring us in if you need help but you can do this okay just get everybody together you've got to talk about the market trends and the real data what is happening not last year today what is happening right especially with the impending recession things are going to change over this next year quarter by quarter so get together and talk about what exactly is happening and where are we heading with staffing you've got to talk about the true cost of turnover because that's where you're going to find the dollars to put toward new and different initiatives that are needed to reduce turnover so talk through the real true cost of turnover that you're experiencing right now you've got to get in the mindset of this workforce and talk about who are they what's going on in their head and what's that competition look like why would they leave and go elsewhere we need to talk about realistic recruiting processes and expectations for busy managers what can managers do and what is that relationship between hr and the managers who are hiring folks what does that process and collaboration look like onboarding is huge right now so what does onboarding um what what is that need as far as a revamp and a rework because the new hires continue to be our greatest flight risk especially that 30 60 90 day for for lower wage workers and then that first year or two for higher wage workers we're still losing a lot of those new hires so really focusing on the new hire experience in that retreat and conversation and then ultimately figuring out who owns what when we say oh retention is everybody's job guess what it's nobody's job so we have to put some ownership in place uh for any management action steps that we are going to take and determine who has time if you're going to do new initiatives who's going to own that and who has time to own that when everyone will tell you they're already overloaded right it's kind of a chicken or the egg i literally had a company tell me the other day we don't have time to do training on retention for our managers because our managers are so busy they don't have time and the reason that they're busy is because we're short staffed right so that becomes chicken or the egg and very cyclical we have to get ourselves out of that what we call death spiral of turnover okay so have to be careful with that um if you want our sample agenda that you can build your own retreat around if you want to do that internally just shoot me an email cara magnetculture.com i'd be happy to send you you know kind of a great agenda walk through that's been working for our clients that you can do as well okay so um our training team comes out and does these every single day so we're happy to walk you through that we're happy to come on site and facilitate um but also just give me a call if you want some ideas of of how to do that yourself in fact as well so our clients totally love these and they tend to come out of those meetings with a one or even two year plan of what they're going to do to get staffing back on uh on course so you know your leadership team just needs to show up and have those conversations and we'd be happy to walk you through that now there's no silver bullet right as you can tell i've talked a little bit about this a little bit about this and managers have to be involved and executives have to be involved and so i wish there was a magic pill there's not um but we need executive time and attention on this issue we cannot let this great management walk out walk out walk out uh we can't let this happen and so you've got to stay ahead of it and i'm here today with this webinar we we've just popped this webinar up really quickly because i don't want this issue to blindside anybody we can see it coming i am talking to your managers i am talking to your managers one on one they are calling they are messaging me on linkedin they are emailing and telling me they are looking for other jobs so we don't want to let this happen um not too long ago we did a retention retreat with one of our clients we did the two-day version where we really dove in super deep and afterwards the ceo told us cara we will never be the same after this day of training we we are forever changed because the mindset was different the way they were looking at the problem was different and they have since made significant i mean i'm talking big leap changes of the way that they lead their people so of course the biggest pushback that you probably have right now is oh but we don't have time for that going back to what i just said a minute ago it's it's going to put us in a death spiral of turnover if we don't address the issue now even if it means pause stop talk about it deal with it so we really have to stop and put in real time real effort real initiatives if we're going to be sustainable and still even in business 12 to 24 months from now okay so we want to avoid that death spiral of turnover where you can't do anything else because you're so short staffed and my heart goes out to you if you're already in it because some folks that i talk to already are and so i wish you the best of luck and i want to help you as best i can but for the rest of you let's avoid that death spiral uh because it's really really tough to get out of it once you're there okay but um anyway we are still hearing more and more that the managers think the owners just aren't doing enough to to solve the problem so back to that bigger leap bigger changes and really thinking about the whole issue differently is so important because the managers they're saying look i'm not going to stick around long enough to watch this implode i don't want to be here when that happens and we don't want that for anybody all right so um it's time to kind of recalibrate figure out what we need to do next and i hope that these strategies i hope that these conversations while it probably was not what you wanted to hear and i i admit that i know that um i hope that this is what you needed to hear today and i really hope that you can share this program if you've been watching live today i really hope that you will share this recording with all the managers and executives at your organization from top to bottom so that you can get on the same page and start thinking differently about the issues all right so don't forget about magnet vault maggie's going to tell you in just a minute about our free offer as well for those of you who are on the program today but don't forget to go into magnetvault.com which is always free and grab the cost of turnover calculator the retention audit questions we have a new mini book if you guys already have maybe the purple and or the red one we have a new mini book redefining employee retention and that mini book is also in the vault so you can grab that as well so pop your questions into the q a i'm going to stick around after the webinar today and answer those questions but while you put your questions in i'm going to let maggie take it away yeah so as kara mentioned we plan retreats all the time so we would love to work with you many of our clients incorporate these retreats into their annual meetings but a lot of them just hold stand-alone retreats so let us take that off your plate if a lot of the things kara talked about today you're experiencing it's a super simple process we jump on a call together we pick a date and time and then one of our trainers flies out and facilitates the retreat for you so and as part of our retreat some clients love to have us bring a scrub to capture while people are talking and ideas are flying that person actually captures that and then we will deliver an executive report at the end that captures all the highlights so we normally that is an add-on to our retreat but since you are part of this webinar today we will add that at no cost to your webinar if you book by the end of august so again that's an executive report thrown into your retreat if you book by the end of august so i will put a link in the chat that you can click on and book a call today so kara i know there's a lot of questions coming in so if you want to if you want to dive back in and answer some of those as i said we've got hundreds of people on the call today which is awesome so excited that this is a popular topic so we have a lot of questions i'll cover a few of those and then if i didn't cover yours or you want more to ask more questions later just message me on linkedin and i'd be happy to get back to you so one of the questions great question and so timely right now what are your thoughts on quiet quitting have you guys heard about this okay so quiet quitting they're trying to attach it they meaning the media they're trying to attach it to gen z because there's been some tick-tock challenges going around and whatnot and um and so as far as tactics to address quiet quitting people have been quiet quitting for decades right let me just be honest with you right maggie i know um i have seen people you know 20 years ago quiet quit which just means they're doing the absolute minimum to not get fired um or they're barely even doing that they are just showing up to work but not working while they're at work and so some tactics that i would say is first and foremost i already said it today communicate your expectations because a lot of times they just don't know i know when my first job in uh food service my boss used to say right i was a hostess and i'd be leaning on the on the hostess stand and what did they say if you've got time to lean you've got time to clean that was always the saying and so that told me oh i'm not supposed to just stop and chill because i don't have anyone to see right now i should be checking the windows checking the bathrooms checking the floors and you know other parts of my job and so definitely communicating the expectations and also one of the reasons i think quiet quitting is happening is because the managers are too busy to really notice and to be engaged with their people if you are checking in every week with your people about what's going on what do they need help with where are they you know on their workload or whatever if you're regularly checking in with people they can't quite quit on you because you're talking to them about their performance and what they've gotten done or where they are and what's next those types of things so absolutely checking in with your people more regularly is huge to avoid the quiet quitting as well okay all right another question um do you have a good onboarding template that works we are working on that so keep checking magnet vault um we actually have one of our amazing team members brittany is on maternity leave right now um and so everyone wish her well hello brittany we love you and we miss you terribly and so she's out on maternity leave but that is one of her fall projects is working on building out the onboarding template that we have uh you know that we've worked with some clients on those types of of uh models but we've never built a custom template for that so we're working on it and check back in a little bit awesome uh when employees aren't happy why is it the manager's responsibility to make things better what about our what about our happiness in the workplace your i assume you're saying our happiness like the managers ah okay yeah this is a big one so this person is asking why is it the manager's responsibility to make everybody else happy so i posted last week on linkedin a great explanation of this exact thing that it wasn't me it was someone else's explanation and i could not have said it better myself they said for the the in what is it the traditionalist and even the baby boomer time uh early baby boomers our work world was about it was the industrial age it was about having the paycheck the food on your table roof over your head right and people didn't care about the workplace or their bosses they went to work to feed their family then comes the later boomers and gen xers and it became the information age instead of the industrial age we started sitting behind desks more we had all this computer jobs and and things like that the work world just shifted not for every single job but certainly a big chunk of it okay so then we became the information age and people wanted um i've even said for years especially with gen x they wanted a standard of living and a certain status of success so they wanted to you know make more money and they were willing to put in the hours to get the bigger house and the bigger nicer car and things like that so that was the next stage now this gentleman just beautifully described it as now we are in the social economy and now people care more about their relationships with others and that social side of work so you can say all day long well i shouldn't have to thank you for showing up that's why you get a paycheck that's our relationship you work i pay you that's it okay but guess what you can go anywhere and get a paycheck and so now the competitive factor is culture the competitor the competitive advantage that organizations now have is absolutely that social aspect of how good are your managers to their people are they creating a place where people want to come back tomorrow okay it's really really important that managers absolutely take responsibility for creating a team and a department and an organization that people want to work in and for and around okay so yes um it it absolutely should be part of the job description now of not necessarily making employees happy because we can't keep everybody happy all the time but absolutely creating that better place to work where people want to come back all right so awesome man we are at an hour i can't believe we've taken up so much of your time today but thank you to everyone who was watching and who had great questions there were more questions i couldn't get to everything but again message me on linkedin i'm the only cara saletto on the planet so i'm pretty easy to find online and thank you all so much for your time and for what you do every single day taking great care of the people you serve and for those internal customers the people that work for your company thanks have a great day

or so yeah i think people are really eager to hear about this topic for sure i think so there&#39;s a little bit of an issue out there with staffing right now so we&#39;re gonna have a nice candid conversation about what&#39;s actually happening and what&#39;s coming next for the workforce so really excited we&#39;ve got like we said hundreds of folks joining us today so we&#39;re letting folks still get logged in here and maggie i&#39;m ready when you are all right well thank you everyone for joining and welcome to today is magna culture&#39;s state of the workforce webinar and it is the great management walkout and i&#39;m maggie augustine with magnet culture so i&#39;ll just be joining kara today at the beginning and the end of today&#39;s webinar and as many of you are joining you probably have started to notice in your workplaces that it&#39;s no longer just the front line that&#39;s looking for change so we&#39;re seeing i&#39;m sure you&#39;re seeing that managers are exhausted from the labor shortages the overloaded workloads so burnout starting to rise and many leaders are starting to look for a more manageable position so kara is going to spend the next few minutes sharing about what&#39;s going on what we&#39;re seeing but also provide some management strategies as well as some executive strategies that you can start on today but be sure to stay for the entire session because as always we have a special offer at the end for each of you and as you&#39;ll see we are recording today&#39;s session so you&#39;ll get this recording in an email but also you can find all of our webinars at youtube.com slash magnet culture i&#39;ll put that in the chat here in a second and all of our webinars are on there this year we&#39;ve been cut we&#39;ve covered bullying in the workplace how to prioritize your retention initiatives and that one includes the retention audit as well so that one&#39;s a great one to check out so if you like what you hear today go and check out those as well and also just share them with your leadership team and anybody else you you want to share those insights with so makara let&#39;s dive into to to today&#39;s topic awesome thank you so much maggie and welcome everyone all right so how in the world did we get to this place right now where not only are we seeing our staff leaving due to the great resignation but we&#39;re also starting to see more and more leaders hit their breaking point so i have to tell you a story one of my clients happens to be a hotel management group and they may even be with us here today so hello friends um i was meeting with them last year to talk about who&#39;s leaving and who&#39;s staying and what&#39;s happening and what do we do about it and they expressed to me that of course it&#39;s no surprise a lot of room attendance which we might have called housekeeping in the past a lot of room attendants were really tough to get and keep so i started to ask more questions about the expectations of these room attendants and i asked why do we have such a heavy workload for folks today when we compare that to where we were 10 years ago so when i asked how many rooms was an attendant supposed to clean 10 years ago during an eight-hour shift their response was you know probably 10 to 12 rooms was a good rate and then today they tell me that they expect a room attendant to clean 16 rooms per shift okay now think about that for a second have the hotel room sizes changed no they didn&#39;t get any smaller or easier and so what happened during that time well as our conversation unfolded and as i&#39;ve talked to other organizations as well we have realized this workload creep that has happened so what had tended to happen in almost every industry was there was an expectation and then there were rock stars there were rock stars who came in above that expectation so let&#39;s say somebody a few years ago could clean 14 rooms in a shift instead of 12. well that told the leadership 14 is possible so let&#39;s hold everyone to that standard then what happened when the pandemic hit for a lot of organizations they were already maxed out and pushing their folks to their maximum capacity and that meant there was no wiggle room my friends there was no wiggle room for people to be off on vacation or out sick or for somebody to leave and have to be replaced so then what happened was we were forcing people even beyond what they could typically do and saying look we&#39;re going to need you to do 16 rooms because we&#39;re short staffed because times are tough because things are busy right now and so we just kept pushing and pushing and pushing and the moment that we show those higher numbers are possible with a workload what happens the owners the senior leadership say that&#39;s our new expectation we know it can be done so we&#39;re going to go to the you know we&#39;re going to stretch people we&#39;re going to go to those highest capacity possible for folks but that is not sustainable is it right so no matter what organization you are in no matter what industry you happen to be in we know that this workload creep is not sustainable and we&#39;ve already experienced the great resignation of our workforce the staff the workers those folks and i have to tell you all i&#39;m seeing something quite disturbing moving forward because i talk to managers and leaders and owners and executives all the time about these exact issues and i want to tell you that we are now predicting the great management walkout moving forward in the next two quarters now some of you i&#39;m sure are pushing back and going but but but there&#39;s an impending recession cara some say we&#39;re already in the recession others say it&#39;s coming some say it&#39;s going to be terrible some hope that it won&#39;t be but here&#39;s the deal today the day i am doing this webinar people are still hiring companies are still hiring whether it is for growth or it is just to backfill those other positions now it may not be every single industry and every single company but there are management positions out there and in the the industries that we work in they are still hiring like crazy okay so right now what i&#39;m hearing from these individuals that i talk to is they are hitting their breaking point absolute breaking point after this terrible two to three years of being pushed and pushed and pushed and some of you probably feel that way who are on this call today you might say that&#39;s me i&#39;m the one who&#39;s being pushed and pushed and pushed right and then the organizational leaders if you&#39;re an executive on this call today you&#39;re going yeah we&#39;ve had to push and push and push because we had to for other reasons right so today we&#39;re going to get a little better handle on what&#39;s going on and figure out how can we avoid to the best of our ability this great management walkout because i&#39;ll tell you only those with a very low low risk tolerance who really don&#39;t like change are going to be the only ones who will put up with an overloaded workload much longer okay uh especially going into the recession even those who have confidence in their skills uh those who really care about their their family and their work life balance which i&#39;ll talk more about in a minute they are done now these companies they these managers feel like the companies have taken advantage of them and i&#39;m not going to say that that was purposeful i don&#39;t think anybody said let&#39;s take advantage of our managers and put as much on their plate as they can stand no okay that did not happen what happened was it was the work load creep and now we have gotten into a work load crisis that we have hit today so um what exactly am i hearing from the managers first things first there are a ton of managers who are in a position called a hiring manager meaning you are responsible as the manager or director for that department to hire your own people and to replace your own people and to onboard and train your own people with some support from hr and recruiting but for the most part you are going to be the leader of that so let&#39;s talk about that for a second because what that means is somebody who let&#39;s say they&#39;re doing their job they&#39;re a director of a department they&#39;re doing their job and let&#39;s say ten percent of their job is recruiting and managing the new hires okay this is like pre-pandemic five plus years ago about ten percent of their job was in the recruiting selection onboarding time today i talked to companies and managers that are telling me they&#39;re hiring or at least interviewing four to five times as many people as they used to because of this great resignation that more folks have left so that hiring manager if they have not been given more recruiting support more hr support more onboarding support they are absolutely tipped in the wrong direction because that 10 percent of their job is now say 40 of their time that they&#39;re having to spend in posting the jobs screening applicants interviewing applicants making the offers getting them onboarded training and mentoring you see what i&#39;m saying here so even though the job description maybe didn&#39;t change the workload shifted and they had a lot more recruiting and hiring responsibilities on their plate that also kind of crept in over time and now the managers don&#39;t have time to do that and their whole job also we&#39;re hearing that we&#39;re doing comp analysis over and over so my hr friends are saying i don&#39;t have time for this i gotta do comp analysis twice a year now and we used to only do it every 18 months or 24 months right so that&#39;s the hr workload there that has changed and then the managers are still dealing with their staff who let&#39;s be honest if we put ourselves in our staff shoes for a minute okay great so we bumped up our two to three percent pay increases this year to four percent five percent maybe six percent for some of you who were able to do that that&#39;s great but guess what the managers are hearing um don&#39;t you know inflation is nine percent why did i only get five and a half percent raised this year so then the managers have to buffer that situation between the corporate decisions that were made and the staff who even with more raises than they&#39;ve ever gotten in years still aren&#39;t happy because they still can&#39;t pay for groceries and gas and utilities and other things that have gone up okay so we&#39;re dealing with even more pushback from our staff on those types of things as well i hate to even bring it up but in some industries and professions of course we&#39;re hearing a lot more about working from home and flexible working and flexible hours and things like that so i just bring that up to say the managers are dealing with a lot of pushback and a lot of questions and requests and even demands from our workforce right so that&#39;s another thing that&#39;s on their plate right now also not to mention they are filling in for the missing people they are absolutely going out on the floor and doing the job of the people who aren&#39;t showing up today or who have left and we have not yet replaced them so the managers feel that weight as well of filling in those vacant roles now there&#39;s another factor here that also plays in and that is the high pressure expectations that are still hitting managers and directors regarding corporate metrics and corporate goals or the owner&#39;s expectations i have seen so many companies in the last 18 months that are still trying to hit their numbers and still trying to push out new initiatives and new software and launch this new thing and the managers are going you&#39;ve got to be kidding me you are going to put another initiative on my plate you are going to ask me to do another thing and you have not been out here to look at what is happening on the floor right you have not been out here lately or enough to see exactly what we&#39;re dealing with every single day and then you&#39;re pushing these unattainable corporate metrics from goal setting that we did years ago we can&#39;t meet those goals right now when we don&#39;t have the capacity that we used to have okay so i&#39;ve i have also seen some of these corporate groups pause and halt new initiatives and say we&#39;re going to be there for you and we are absolutely um in your camp we know what&#39;s going on here we understand how bad this is and we are not going to push anything else out to you right now that&#39;s not required or necessary for getting the stabbing stability that we have to have back okay so i am seeing some of that happen but i&#39;m still seeing a lot of companies charge forward as if their managers are not underwater which they are okay so uh if you&#39;ve ever seen me present you&#39;ve ever read any of my books any of that you&#39;re probably familiar with the trees and the revolving doors analogy that we use now of course everyone knows what a revolving door is that&#39;s the new hires that we&#39;re struggling to keep and our goal there is to slow the revolving door and keep the new hires longer on average to work on lengthening that average length of tenure the trees now i have to tell you things have changed since maybe the last time you saw me speak because it used to be that i said the trees those are the deep-rooted people in the organization you know they can weather the storm and they&#39;re probably not going anywhere even if you want them to okay so we had all these trees in our organization that were dependable and again deep rooted you know how hard it is to transplant a 20 year old oak that&#39;s how hard it is to transplant a deep rooted manager and director who&#39;s been at the organization for a long time but things have changed all right and now moving forward what i&#39;m seeing is a lot more of these trees the people who&#39;ve been at our companies seven to ten years 15 to 20 years they absolutely are over weighted on their branches okay we want to stick with this tree analogy here they are starting to collapse under the weight that has been put on them and they cannot weather another storm so what we&#39;re seeing in their mentality as i talk to more of these managers is one they&#39;re not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel because the owners and executives are saying well we&#39;ve tried everything you know we raised wages and there&#39;s not much more we can do you just gotta hang in there and when the managers hear that they&#39;re they&#39;re hitting that breaking point they&#39;re just beside themselves what do you mean we&#39;ve tried everything that&#39;s all we can do a lot of the managers are telling me they don&#39;t think that the company itself is willing to make big enough changes for what is needed to stay competitive and to get the people we can&#39;t afford to lose so one reason if you&#39;re telling your folks just hang in there we&#39;re trying the best we can but your company is not taking big leaps to make changes then that&#39;s what they&#39;re feeling right now is there&#39;s no light at the end of that tunnel for little tweaks and things like that there&#39;s also uh that sense of obligation that a lot of i would say gen x and the baby boomers have a lot more of that than millennials do if you&#39;ve heard me talk about generations that sense of obligation to stay with the company that&#39;s taken such good care of them or even a true sense of loyalty to an employer or even just to a boss a lot of people are seeing that sense of loyalty and obligation dry up because they just can&#39;t take it anymore right some people are telling me their health is suffering now because of the stress and exhaustion haven&#39;t slept in years properly and that&#39;s not sustainable right for any of our bodies they also are telling me that their family structures their marriages their relationship with their kids and even their support systems of the grandma and grandpa who help out with child care and and things like that that those support systems are crumbling underneath them because of the long endured long hours and expectations and always being on call and different things like that so i just want to put you in the mindset of these managers and directors who are carrying this enormous burden of these organizations right now to let you know where they&#39;re coming from all right now i&#39;m certainly going to get to some strategies of how do we work through that uh here in a minute but i wanted to share with you that while our work is industry agnostic right we work across all different industries coast to coast uh i was recently asked just this past week to analyze and respond to a large-scale industry specific leadership survey that was done in the senior care space all right so the data found that more than half of the people that were sitting in the top management positions more than half of them had considered leaving their job in the last three months and this was just done this july and august this data so this is fresh hot off the presses all right more than half of those top leaders have or are considering leaving their jobs just in these past three months so these are people keep in mind who have been in those roles for years most of them and the survey said they find great meaning in their job because of course they are in a caregiving field that brings a lot of meaning so they love the job they love who they serve and what they do every day but what they&#39;re telling me in one-on-one conversations is they are finally hitting their breaking point and they can&#39;t move forward much longer all right um in fact i&#39;m hearing this across various industries not just senior care for sure i&#39;m hearing it from other managers as well and if you didn&#39;t see it on linkedin the other day um i just posted about this great management walkout and what was happening and i got tons of responses not just on the post itself but tons of private messages because people didn&#39;t want to tell their manager that they&#39;re thinking about leaving and so i heard things like uh here&#39;s some quotes for you i just left my director level position for a smaller less stressful position and i was willing to take a pay cut to do so that was one another one said i used to warrior through anything but the last three years have been so very tiring i hit my breaking point last month and i&#39;m leaving my job in a few months so this person has been kind enough to give a longer notice but this person is going to continue consulting for that organization they just can&#39;t stay on the clock every day this person said it was one of the hardest decisions they&#39;ve ever had to make but the stress was ruining their health so now they&#39;re going to take some time off reset figure out what&#39;s next and of course these are very talented folks with a lot of experience so they will be able to find more opportunities because in our space where we&#39;re working still people are hiring like crazy uh one other quote from that linkedin post was i no longer have a quality of life and it&#39;s impacting my health they just laid off a lot of support functions to increase margins but i can only do 14 hour days for so long right so that&#39;s what the folks are telling us even if they&#39;re not saying it to your face please understand that this is the sentiment going on out there in the in the positions where people feel overloaded now i will tell you most people don&#39;t want to quit okay they do not want to quit it&#39;s just a factor of they&#39;ve hit a tipping point now where their life and their well-being now needs to take priority over their job or even career right that they need to take a step back and re-evaluate that to some extent some people let me change that a lot of people are using the phrase work-life balance that&#39;s why everybody&#39;s quitting it&#39;s work-life balance it&#39;s work-life balance but the problem with using that phrase is everyone defines work-life balance differently some people think work-life balance oh we can&#39;t let people work from home so sorry about you and that&#39;s not work-life balance i mean maybe for some people but that&#39;s not what a lot of people mean it isn&#39;t even just flexible schedules it&#39;s also that mental load right do you have your managers and directors on call after their shift or their hours on site are they still even going home whether they&#39;re on call or not are they still worried about filling the positions and filling the shifts and things like that if they&#39;re taking that home with them that mental stress and strain then that will hit a breaking point where their health can&#39;t keep up with that okay so that&#39;s what we&#39;re seeing today i would not talk to your executives about it&#39;s a work-life balance issue don&#39;t use that phrase it&#39;s too ambiguous and some people have already said oh i hate that buzzword instead uh we really need to talk about a life and health issue for our managers and our directors okay so there&#39;s enough about kind of what&#39;s going on putting ourselves in those managers shoes and and seeing things from their perspective now i&#39;m going to shift over to the strategies so what in the world do we do about it okay now i&#39;ve separated things into management strategies and executive strategies and we have both on the call today i hope you will stick around to hear both so you can have really powerful conversations with those below and above you on the org chart and of course make sure to stick around for the offer here at the end of the session as well but i want to start first with the managers but again execs hold tight because i&#39;ve got some specific strategies for you in just a moment also if you are a manager of managers take note because these are some ideas that you can cascade throughout the organization you can teach them to help get through this difficult time and as well as support them in these strategies if you know you want them to implement these things then you can help provide templates and support and even time to do that okay so first things first we need to do better as managers of our departments of operationalizing the turnover and what i mean is we tend to run our departments like well-oiled machines right we have our standard operating procedures and we have our checklists and you know all the stuff we have systems in place that we follow and that we use to make sure that we deliver the best product service care right we deliver the best we can and we do that by creating that well-oiled machine now what we want to do on the turnover side is we know turnover is not going away right it&#39;s not uh this is not gonna solve itself and so think about the things that you have to do and say over and over because of turnover right it&#39;s part of the onboarding it&#39;s you know part of the recruiting process and things like that i hope that you are not writing from scratch any emails now that pertain to recruiting people offer letters onboarding people anything like that at this point we need to have created templates and a lot of systems email systems will even let you save a template or maybe you could keep a separate word doc on your computer there that is easy to access that has here&#39;s my template for this here&#39;s my template for that right we have to save time by creating some more templates for those types of emails and communication now you want to make it personal as best you can especially if you&#39;re offering someone the job and how you know of course tell everybody how great it was to meet them and that you&#39;d love to have them on the team maybe mentioning if you can one or two specific things about them that you love or that you notice through uh the interview process right but if you have the template at least that saves you time on writing 90 of those emails so make sure you have templates for a lot of that communication if it&#39;s not already in your applicant tracking system which some of you have in place okay now another thing you can do is think about your onboarding process and instead of haphazardly oh well come watch me do this for a little bit oh hey go over there and watch her do that for a little bit instead we want to make detailed onboarding checklists okay and what i recommend is have a day one and when i say day one i don&#39;t mean hr okay hr has its own compliance and company checklist that it has to get through i&#39;m talking about you manager when a new person comes onto your team what does day one look like all right so make your onboarding checklist for day one with a new person on your team what do you want to cover not just how to do the job and compliance type stuff or systems training they of course need that but also the culture side who are we who&#39;s on the team what are the roles and responsibilities what are some of the unwritten expectations that weren&#39;t covered in the handbook okay so create a day one checklist and then a week one checklist ideally you would then create a month one checklist and finally a quarter one checklist because we don&#39;t want to tell new hires everything right up front we need to space that out over time okay so executives for you a way to support your managers on this is to create some templates um or at least a tool that your managers can use to manage these checklists whether you have a learning management system or your applicant tracking system maybe the recruiting software also goes into the onboarding process but give your team a space for that if you&#39;re a manager who&#39;s having to do this on your own excel spreadsheets work just fine okay and you can absolutely put each new hire&#39;s name down there and then check the box on what they&#39;ve accomplished and what you&#39;ve taught them over time okay so we really want to again operationalize this are there a lot of faqs the frequently asked questions that new hires have make a sheet for that an faq sheet that you can just give them on day one or week one okay also do you have a professional development mentoring schedule in place where you can check in with folks and either do it by person where you&#39;re doing one-on-one mentoring with them or do you have topics that each month or each staff meeting or huddle that you cover these expectations and this type of professional development for your team if you get those onto a calendar onto a schedule then it doesn&#39;t go on the back burner and say oh i just don&#39;t have time to come up with a topic right now you can sit down and come up with 12 topics that you want to cover throughout the year and then those are your focus areas for each month okay so again we&#39;re standardizing this and making it to where you don&#39;t have to remember all of these things yourself same thing with birthdays and anniversaries of staff you can absolutely automate that with calendar systems or collecting get to know you sheets from the new hires to learn about their birthday time and what kind of candy they like best those types of things okay so with the get to know you sheets if you don&#39;t already have a template for that go to our hidden vault and download the one that we created to save you time okay so you go to magnetvault.com magnetvault.com that&#39;s got all all kinds of goodies in there for you and one of my favorites is our get to know you sheet that you can give to every new hire and it helps collect that kind of information from them alright so first things first for managers operationalize your turnover and your new hire processes okay it will i know it sounds daunting right now but it will actually save you a ton of time later once you have your templates and tools in place okay so that&#39;s the first thing second of all is back to fundamentals communicate your expectations you guys have all heard me say this as i tell you my story about keeping my shoes on at the office at my first job but i have a new example for you that really hit home at one of my recent programs i did a keynote on understanding the different generations and keeping the younger workers longer and right afterwards a cfo came up to me afterwards and she said ugh cara okay i hear you about these generational differences and i understand that i&#39;m supposed to communicate my expectations better but i am communicating my expectations and it is still not working all right so i said great tell me what&#39;s going on what is your expectation and she said well i&#39;m the cfo and i expect my finance team at every weekly meeting to come to the meeting prepared to give me a status update i said great are they not doing that she said no all they do when they come to the meeting and i ask them how are things going what&#39;s your status update every person says something like everything&#39;s good we&#39;re all on track my department is fine and i waited for a moment and said isn&#39;t that a status update [Music] [Laughter] and she thought about it for a minute said well i mean i guess somebody might translate that as a status update but to me i said great tell me what it is to you what is a status update she said to me a status update is what have you accomplished since our last meeting where are you now what are your next steps have you hit any roadblocks you know things like that and i just paused for a moment and let it sink into her that she hadn&#39;t told them that yet so finally it hit her you could see the light bulb go off and she said whoa now i understand i wasn&#39;t communicating my expectations here she thought she was because she was saying come to the meeting for with a status update but they thought they were hitting the mark by saying yep everything&#39;s on track boss instead she needed to communicate more clearly what she wanted for that status update so now she will tell them exactly what she wants to hear and hopefully will get those four things right the what have you accomplished where are you now what are your next steps and what roadblocks have you hit that can be her new agenda person by person for that round robin on those weekly calls okay so there was a big misunderstanding there and i can&#39;t even express to you how frustrated she was in fact i think her first comment to me was i just don&#39;t understand why these millennials are such terrible communicators that&#39;s how she started her example she&#39;s very frustrated and of course pushing it on to the staff as they are the problem and ultimately she walked away after that conversation saying okay now i know how to bridge that gap i know how to be a better leader and better communicator to solve my own problem okay so managers please remember just back to the fundamentals i know we are busy and that&#39;s why we drop the fundamentals we forget to do it or just don&#39;t have time but we really have to step up right now and make sure that our new hires get the communication that they need and they deserve in their new positions all right because keep in mind your new hires cannot read your mind did everyone hear that your new hires cannot read your mind and they don&#39;t know how it&#39;s always been done so please slow down check in with your people and be prepared to do more walk throughs of what your expectations are but also put those in writing as best you can or put them on your checklist your onboarding checklist so that you don&#39;t miss those expectations and communicating them to the new hires all right so operationalizing turnover and communicating expectations are two things that managers can do immediately to hopefully lessen their workload from miscommunication and problems and and conflict on their teams um but also be able to keep people longer to get their head back above water okay all right so now let&#39;s shift over to some executive level strategies and the reason i separate this out as you all can imagine is some people have the decision-making authority for policy changes and total leadership approach and resources across the company and other people do not so everybody can make a difference by working on being a better leader better manager and creating a better place to work but there are some things that only the executives can sometimes make the changes in all right so let me tell you this i was not too long ago riding down the highway with my seven-year-old son in the back seat and he saw that there was a car broken down on the side of the highway so he said mommy what happened to that car and i said oh well uh it looks like he blew a tire okay note to self do not tell your seven-year-old child that tires can blow up while you&#39;re on the highway all right because my very sensitive seven-year-old said oh mommy is our tire gonna blow up i didn&#39;t know tires could blow up and he freaked out on the highway uh in the back seat okay so here&#39;s what i told him no no no no no no honey calm down no our tires are not going to blow up do you know why because mommy and daddy get maintenance on our cars we change our tires when they get bald right when they when they lose their tread we also pump up our tires at every oil change and even sometimes in between we maintain our vehicles and so that is not likely to happen to us not a hundred percent you know proof but uh but certainly it helps our chances so once i explained that to him it really hit me that that&#39;s exactly what&#39;s going on in the work world is that we are running in many cases on bald tires we have just been going and going and going and we have not stopped to breathe to sleep to get an oil change mentally you know or physically we have really just kept going and kept going and we have gotten rid of that time for maintenance because we had to keep pushing through and now what&#39;s happening the tire is blowing now somebody is exploding at someone else right the chaos is just enormous that conflict is a big outburst not just a little bit of a disagreement okay or people are saying i quit because their tire has burst so this is where we go back to the conversation around workloads okay we have got to evaluate where our workloads are today versus where they were in the past and what i ask executives to do right now is to really do a workload and job description check we have to go back and re-evaluate whether or not the workloads we have in place are sustainable i have seen so many organizations lose a key person a key director let&#39;s say and they had to replace them with two people two people that it took to replace that one person so why do you think that one person left because they were overloaded we have to absolutely make sure we have not asked people to absorb so much of the the extra stuff we&#39;ve had to take on and maybe people have left and then we haven&#39;t replaced them i&#39;ve seen a lot of that going on as well and so as executives and owners of our organizations we have to make sure that we are pruning you know just like we do rose bushes that we are pruning some of the jobs um because as you know with a rose bush if you don&#39;t prune it it will get too heavy it will wilt it will fall over and not bloom as big and bright the next year so what do we do we prune it we cut it back so that next year it can blossom and it has the right weight on the branches and not too much weight on those branches that&#39;s not sustainable for the next year okay so so job pruning is big reviewing those job descriptions and not just the job description but remember if recruiting was 10 of their job and now it&#39;s 40 of their job recruiting is still on the job description but you might need to weight it differently that it isn&#39;t the same part of the job that it was before now it&#39;s a much heftier part of their responsibility so don&#39;t just look at the job description to say yep they&#39;re doing that yep they&#39;re doing that yep they&#39;re doing that but look at how much time those things are taking for them as well okay i&#39;m seeing a lot more organizations put in more recruiting and retention support for these hiring managers the ones that have to find their own people and recruit their own people and onboard their own people so if you don&#39;t already have a retention specialist in place to help with employee engagement and onboarding or maybe you don&#39;t have centralized to some extent or maybe even decentralized depends on which strategy would work better for your organization uh hr support a lot of times i&#39;m talking to managers and hr departments that just feel there is not near enough hr support for all the recruiting and retention efforts that are going on right now okay another thing that baffles me is 10 and 20 years ago there were assistant managers do you remember that it&#39;s like where have all the assistant managers gone it&#39;s just blown my mind how we eliminated those positions over the years even assistant directors there were assistant vice presidents and yes i know that some of that we maybe took too far um and it was a little bloated but now a lot of times we don&#39;t even have time for the person who&#39;s in the management role they can&#39;t do both the operational side of the job and get the functions done at the same time as managing and mentoring and training and supporting the rest of the staff they don&#39;t have time to do both so in a lot of cases that&#39;s what assistant managers or assistant directors do one person takes on more of the operational expectations and the other person takes on more of the staffing and leadership expectations okay so consider that as well people say all the time oh where&#39;s that money gonna come from cara look at the dire situation we are in now and tell me that we do not need to fix it with some big changes like we said earlier that these managers and directors need owners and executive teams to make some big changes and strides to get the right people into the right positions so we can have a sustainable workload for folks and be able to keep our team members okay so the job pruning creating more either assistant positions or more hr roles to help support this increased function of employee engagement and onboarding it&#39;s a huge undertaking and the managers just can&#39;t hold on to that any longer okay so there&#39;s the first one for executives and the second is you know i&#39;m seeing that people people are just not even on the same page i mean leaders at the exact same organization i&#39;ll talk to one vice president and another vice president or the ceo and they think that it&#39;s going to take different things to get to the retention numbers that they need to get to right to get to the culture and build out the leadership the way it needs to be built out and they&#39;re not even on the same page so how can we possibly be marching to the same drum and headed in the same direction when each department or leader is coming at it from a different direction so the next strategy is get your senior leaders on the same page if you have not already i highly recommend that you take our retention audit okay so you can actually go to magnetvault.com and find that as well it&#39;s just a 10 question audit where you put yourself in the staff&#39;s shoes and look at how they view the organization and that document is meant to help you prioritize those initiatives in fact we did a webinar i believe in january of this year just kicking off the year with how to prioritize your retention initiatives in that webinar which is at youtube.com culture you can go watch that and it walks you through the audit as as well as some strategies to implement when you get to that point okay so definitely start with the audit and then also get together schedule a meeting and get together that is focused on retention only or staffing recruiting workforce only because we cannot be running in different directions and we cannot have an annual meeting where 25 of the annual meeting is talking about staffing because staffing is one of the largest if not the largest issue that everyone on your team from top to bottom is dealing with today so instead focus on retention and do an intensive do a retreat a one day a two day whatever that looks like as long as you need to lock yourself in a room together you&#39;ve got to hash out what&#39;s going on you have to look at so so we do these all the time here let me give you our sample agenda and you can run this yourself you can bring us in if you need help but you can do this okay just get everybody together you&#39;ve got to talk about the market trends and the real data what is happening not last year today what is happening right especially with the impending recession things are going to change over this next year quarter by quarter so get together and talk about what exactly is happening and where are we heading with staffing you&#39;ve got to talk about the true cost of turnover because that&#39;s where you&#39;re going to find the dollars to put toward new and different initiatives that are needed to reduce turnover so talk through the real true cost of turnover that you&#39;re experiencing right now you&#39;ve got to get in the mindset of this workforce and talk about who are they what&#39;s going on in their head and what&#39;s that competition look like why would they leave and go elsewhere we need to talk about realistic recruiting processes and expectations for busy managers what can managers do and what is that relationship between hr and the managers who are hiring folks what does that process and collaboration look like onboarding is huge right now so what does onboarding um what what is that need as far as a revamp and a rework because the new hires continue to be our greatest flight risk especially that 30 60 90 day for for lower wage workers and then that first year or two for higher wage workers we&#39;re still losing a lot of those new hires so really focusing on the new hire experience in that retreat and conversation and then ultimately figuring out who owns what when we say oh retention is everybody&#39;s job guess what it&#39;s nobody&#39;s job so we have to put some ownership in place uh for any management action steps that we are going to take and determine who has time if you&#39;re going to do new initiatives who&#39;s going to own that and who has time to own that when everyone will tell you they&#39;re already overloaded right it&#39;s kind of a chicken or the egg i literally had a company tell me the other day we don&#39;t have time to do training on retention for our managers because our managers are so busy they don&#39;t have time and the reason that they&#39;re busy is because we&#39;re short staffed right so that becomes chicken or the egg and very cyclical we have to get ourselves out of that what we call death spiral of turnover okay so have to be careful with that um if you want our sample agenda that you can build your own retreat around if you want to do that internally just shoot me an email cara magnetculture.com i&#39;d be happy to send you you know kind of a great agenda walk through that&#39;s been working for our clients that you can do as well okay so um our training team comes out and does these every single day so we&#39;re happy to walk you through that we&#39;re happy to come on site and facilitate um but also just give me a call if you want some ideas of of how to do that yourself in fact as well so our clients totally love these and they tend to come out of those meetings with a one or even two year plan of what they&#39;re going to do to get staffing back on uh on course so you know your leadership team just needs to show up and have those conversations and we&#39;d be happy to walk you through that now there&#39;s no silver bullet right as you can tell i&#39;ve talked a little bit about this a little bit about this and managers have to be involved and executives have to be involved and so i wish there was a magic pill there&#39;s not um but we need executive time and attention on this issue we cannot let this great management walk out walk out walk out uh we can&#39;t let this happen and so you&#39;ve got to stay ahead of it and i&#39;m here today with this webinar we we&#39;ve just popped this webinar up really quickly because i don&#39;t want this issue to blindside anybody we can see it coming i am talking to your managers i am talking to your managers one on one they are calling they are messaging me on linkedin they are emailing and telling me they are looking for other jobs so we don&#39;t want to let this happen um not too long ago we did a retention retreat with one of our clients we did the two-day version where we really dove in super deep and afterwards the ceo told us cara we will never be the same after this day of training we we are forever changed because the mindset was different the way they were looking at the problem was different and they have since made significant i mean i&#39;m talking big leap changes of the way that they lead their people so of course the biggest pushback that you probably have right now is oh but we don&#39;t have time for that going back to what i just said a minute ago it&#39;s it&#39;s going to put us in a death spiral of turnover if we don&#39;t address the issue now even if it means pause stop talk about it deal with it so we really have to stop and put in real time real effort real initiatives if we&#39;re going to be sustainable and still even in business 12 to 24 months from now okay so we want to avoid that death spiral of turnover where you can&#39;t do anything else because you&#39;re so short staffed and my heart goes out to you if you&#39;re already in it because some folks that i talk to already are and so i wish you the best of luck and i want to help you as best i can but for the rest of you let&#39;s avoid that death spiral uh because it&#39;s really really tough to get out of it once you&#39;re there okay but um anyway we are still hearing more and more that the managers think the owners just aren&#39;t doing enough to to solve the problem so back to that bigger leap bigger changes and really thinking about the whole issue differently is so important because the managers they&#39;re saying look i&#39;m not going to stick around long enough to watch this implode i don&#39;t want to be here when that happens and we don&#39;t want that for anybody all right so um it&#39;s time to kind of recalibrate figure out what we need to do next and i hope that these strategies i hope that these conversations while it probably was not what you wanted to hear and i i admit that i know that um i hope that this is what you needed to hear today and i really hope that you can share this program if you&#39;ve been watching live today i really hope that you will share this recording with all the managers and executives at your organization from top to bottom so that you can get on the same page and start thinking differently about the issues all right so don&#39;t forget about magnet vault maggie&#39;s going to tell you in just a minute about our free offer as well for those of you who are on the program today but don&#39;t forget to go into magnetvault.com which is always free and grab the cost of turnover calculator the retention audit questions we have a new mini book if you guys already have maybe the purple and or the red one we have a new mini book redefining employee retention and that mini book is also in the vault so you can grab that as well so pop your questions into the q a i&#39;m going to stick around after the webinar today and answer those questions but while you put your questions in i&#39;m going to let maggie take it away yeah so as kara mentioned we plan retreats all the time so we would love to work with you many of our clients incorporate these retreats into their annual meetings but a lot of them just hold stand-alone retreats so let us take that off your plate if a lot of the things kara talked about today you&#39;re experiencing it&#39;s a super simple process we jump on a call together we pick a date and time and then one of our trainers flies out and facilitates the retreat for you so and as part of our retreat some clients love to have us bring a scrub to capture while people are talking and ideas are flying that person actually captures that and then we will deliver an executive report at the end that captures all the highlights so we normally that is an add-on to our retreat but since you are part of this webinar today we will add that at no cost to your webinar if you book by the end of august so again that&#39;s an executive report thrown into your retreat if you book by the end of august so i will put a link in the chat that you can click on and book a call today so kara i know there&#39;s a lot of questions coming in so if you want to if you want to dive back in and answer some of those as i said we&#39;ve got hundreds of people on the call today which is awesome so excited that this is a popular topic so we have a lot of questions i&#39;ll cover a few of those and then if i didn&#39;t cover yours or you want more to ask more questions later just message me on linkedin and i&#39;d be happy to get back to you so one of the questions great question and so timely right now what are your thoughts on quiet quitting have you guys heard about this okay so quiet quitting they&#39;re trying to attach it they meaning the media they&#39;re trying to attach it to gen z because there&#39;s been some tick-tock challenges going around and whatnot and um and so as far as tactics to address quiet quitting people have been quiet quitting for decades right let me just be honest with you right maggie i know um i have seen people you know 20 years ago quiet quit which just means they&#39;re doing the absolute minimum to not get fired um or they&#39;re barely even doing that they are just showing up to work but not working while they&#39;re at work and so some tactics that i would say is first and foremost i already said it today communicate your expectations because a lot of times they just don&#39;t know i know when my first job in uh food service my boss used to say right i was a hostess and i&#39;d be leaning on the on the hostess stand and what did they say if you&#39;ve got time to lean you&#39;ve got time to clean that was always the saying and so that told me oh i&#39;m not supposed to just stop and chill because i don&#39;t have anyone to see right now i should be checking the windows checking the bathrooms checking the floors and you know other parts of my job and so definitely communicating the expectations and also one of the reasons i think quiet quitting is happening is because the managers are too busy to really notice and to be engaged with their people if you are checking in every week with your people about what&#39;s going on what do they need help with where are they you know on their workload or whatever if you&#39;re regularly checking in with people they can&#39;t quite quit on you because you&#39;re talking to them about their performance and what they&#39;ve gotten done or where they are and what&#39;s next those types of things so absolutely checking in with your people more regularly is huge to avoid the quiet quitting as well okay all right another question um do you have a good onboarding template that works we are working on that so keep checking magnet vault um we actually have one of our amazing team members brittany is on maternity leave right now um and so everyone wish her well hello brittany we love you and we miss you terribly and so she&#39;s out on maternity leave but that is one of her fall projects is working on building out the onboarding template that we have uh you know that we&#39;ve worked with some clients on those types of of uh models but we&#39;ve never built a custom template for that so we&#39;re working on it and check back in a little bit awesome uh when employees aren&#39;t happy why is it the manager&#39;s responsibility to make things better what about our what about our happiness in the workplace your i assume you&#39;re saying our happiness like the managers ah okay yeah this is a big one so this person is asking why is it the manager&#39;s responsibility to make everybody else happy so i posted last week on linkedin a great explanation of this exact thing that it wasn&#39;t me it was someone else&#39;s explanation and i could not have said it better myself they said for the the in what is it the traditionalist and even the baby boomer time uh early baby boomers our work world was about it was the industrial age it was about having the paycheck the food on your table roof over your head right and people didn&#39;t care about the workplace or their bosses they went to work to feed their family then comes the later boomers and gen xers and it became the information age instead of the industrial age we started sitting behind desks more we had all this computer jobs and and things like that the work world just shifted not for every single job but certainly a big chunk of it okay so then we became the information age and people wanted um i&#39;ve even said for years especially with gen x they wanted a standard of living and a certain status of success so they wanted to you know make more money and they were willing to put in the hours to get the bigger house and the bigger nicer car and things like that so that was the next stage now this gentleman just beautifully described it as now we are in the social economy and now people care more about their relationships with others and that social side of work so you can say all day long well i shouldn&#39;t have to thank you for showing up that&#39;s why you get a paycheck that&#39;s our relationship you work i pay you that&#39;s it okay but guess what you can go anywhere and get a paycheck and so now the competitive factor is culture the competitor the competitive advantage that organizations now have is absolutely that social aspect of how good are your managers to their people are they creating a place where people want to come back tomorrow okay it&#39;s really really important that managers absolutely take responsibility for creating a team and a department and an organization that people want to work in and for and around okay so yes um it it absolutely should be part of the job description now of not necessarily making employees happy because we can&#39;t keep everybody happy all the time but absolutely creating that better place to work where people want to come back all right so awesome man we are at an hour i can&#39;t believe we&#39;ve taken up so much of your time today but thank you to everyone who was watching and who had great questions there were more questions i couldn&#39;t get to everything but again message me on linkedin i&#39;m the only cara saletto on the planet so i&#39;m pretty easy to find online and thank you all so much for your time and for what you do every single day taking great care of the people you serve and for those internal customers the people that work for your company thanks have a great day

Transcript for:Managing Burnout in the Workforce

Transcript for:
Managing Burnout in the Workforce