How He Cut Turnover 40% in Six Months | Clark Ingram

Clark Ingram (0:00)

What is the goal for customer return to a manufacturing company? Zero. What is the manufacturing defense? Zero. What's the goal for patient falls in a hospital?

Zero. Okay. So now, are we going to get to zero turnover? No.

We should have the same onus on us that everybody else has. Those best companies out there, they don't have a whole lot of turnovers. They're way below industry standard. And that's the problem that I see. Too many people, they're judging themselves against the industry standard.

Well, wait a minute. Everybody else is judging themselves against much higher standards than that.

Mickey Anderson (0:41)

Welcome back to UNLEASHED. Today, we're talking about the real reasons people leave good organizations, why engagement has flatlined globally despite billions of dollars and untold hours invested, and what it takes to keep your team through this wild AI decade. Today, I'm welcoming Clark Ingram, founder of People Profits and author of Churn. Welcome to the show, Clark.

Clark Ingram (1:05)

Thank you very much.

Mickey Anderson (1:06)

Hiring and keeping people retention, engagement are all big challenges that organizations are facing right now. And I'd love to get your take on what's causing this engagement flatline and how we should be looking at this problem from our own organization.

Clark Ingram (1:22)

I think that one of the things that got started on culture was Peter Drucker said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. And I believe that's true. But I also think it's equally true that employee turnover eats culture for breakfast. If you're running 30, 40% turnover in your company, you may have some agreed on things with some of your employees, but you really don't, you don't have the ability to have a true culture. My background is a little different than the typical HR person. I'm a finance guy. To this day, I still see myself as a finance guy.

And I got thrown into HR by a CEO who needed results. And so in the entire time I've been here in HR for 30 years now, is that it seems like we kind of devolved into building these awesome cultures that are wrapped around activities. Dinners and pizza parties and taco trucks. That's not what employees are looking for. You invite me to a pizza party, I'll eat the pizza. Okay. There's no question about that. But when it gets right down to it to engage into a company, that's not what I'm looking for. And the funny thing about it is, Mickey, the studies have all been done on this and the answers have been known all along. And everybody actually agrees that this is true. And that is one of the very first things that the employees are looking for, are shared goals and values.

They want to know, when I'm working 10 hours a day, how is that helping our company go on the journey that we're going? The more that you can tie those two together, the better. And then secondly, values. I have a buddy of mine who graduated from Texas A&M. He went to work for Exxon and he worked there for 40 years. He had numerous jobs within Exxon, but he stayed at Exxon. I personally could not work at Exxon. I am too entrepreneurial of a person and it would drive me crazy. And that's another thing, is you're trying to get those kinds of people where you're agreed on those kind of values, integrity and respect. If you're going to say you're going to do something, you better do it. And then the second thing is we all have a God-given and inherent worry. Whether we are the CEO or we're the junior part-time janitor, it doesn't matter. We all are a human being and should be respected for that. Communication, we all know that. It is so hard to get communication right because there are so many ways you can screw it up. Then, transparency.

Tell people, okay, yes, this was a mistake. We made a mistake. We need to fix this. Here's what we're doing. We need your input. All of that kind of thing. All of that starts building up. Then, employee growth, whether it's on the personal side or in the professional side. That and then lastly is just the environment. I'm looking at behind you and you've got a very organized thing behind you, and so do I. Most employees, they don't want chaos. Even if they live in chaos, they don't want chaos.

They also want clean. Those are the things that engage people.

Unfortunately, a lot of times, the very reasons why people are leaving are the very same reasons they're not engaging.

Mickey Anderson (4:47)

That's such a great point. There were a few nuggets we're going to chew on there. But the first one I want to talk about too, is that clarity that you talked about at the beginning, how everything ties towards what we're doing and how it connects to the organization and where we're going. Conceptually, it's a really simple concept for us to all understand. And most of the time, we think we're doing that. So if you have a CEO or a leader in front of you who says, well, we've been working on that, we've been doing that. What are some of the ways that you would challenge them?