It’s Not Rocket Science: Insights from a Leading Employee Retention Expert

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Chason Hecht: High performers need feedback of positive and constructive, they want to know that they're high performing. They also want to know how to get even further and faster and bigger and better. Those are the people you want.

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Rob Levin: Today I am joined by Chason Hecht, the CEO and founder of Retensa, global leader in employee retention strategies. He has worked with companies across six continents to create environments where employees feel valued and engaged, recognized as a thought leader in talent management, he has been featured in major media outlets and speaks regularly on the topics of workforce retention, employee engagement, and the future of work.

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So, If we talk about micro business, let's say five -ten employees, your number one problem really here is customers, first, just get customers if you're struggling like, If you got three, four employees and you can't keep them, okay, you have a bigger problem, some fundamentals, right?

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So that under five, that micro business 5 to 10, it really, if you're building the product and the service and the customers. Typically, that is first wave. Employee retention, candidly, isn't necessarily top of mind, and I'm okay with that because if you don't have a viable business, you can't provide an offering, right? It's okay. So if we're talking about, like, say, 10 to maybe 500, 10 to 1,000?

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I'm going to speak to, and probably for most of this conversation to define like the, you know, if I'm five, 10, maybe 15% growth rate, kind of a company, maybe flat, maybe as high as 20%, that's sort of flat to 20%, is what I can speak to. If you're flailing, if you're struggling, to find and keep people, call me, there's like basics that we probably gotta work on. If you're hypergrowth, if you're like at 25, 50, 100% growth, then you're not gonna take this tactic, if you ask me to drive and you point to a Formula 1 car versus a Hyundai, that's those are very different tactics. So put the Formula 1 aside bell curve in the middle, fundamentals in here, is about hiring right at the probably the 10 to 50 range, in 10 to 50 employees; if you if they're in that listening audience, it is really about kneeling down who fits in this organization, who aligns with this vision, who is going to provide maybe a couple hacks, right.

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Chason Hecht: Right, as the owner operator, as the founder, sort of leader, in that organization, much of that is driven by that individual, whomever they are, strengths and weaknesses, and it emulates and sort of waterfalls outside of that.

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If you haven't figured out some of those workforce issues, the curve is just so much steeper because talent is more expensive, truly 10, 20 years ago, when we're talking about $7, $8 an hour, when we're talking about cogs and wheels, it's just highly specialized, there's no business where you don't need someone who has problem solving skills, is that helpful?

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Chason Hecht: Okay, so what's happening here is your ability to avert mistakes in that path, right. If I'm a .001 degrees off, when my rocket takes off for the moon, I end up in Jupiter. So at speed, at velocity, and at trajectory, minor mistakes bite you in the ass; and so if I'm on that hyper growth curve and trajectory, I need to be more attuned to these interconnections between people versus just getting somebody in space, just consider, in some ways your constellation of asteroids that are around the planet, and let's say we're talking about planet Levin. It's a lush, it's a rich planet, wet, some would call it, right for life. And these asteroids, these moons, these rocks, sort of, we bring into the orbit around planet Levin. And what we're doing is making sure that they're not crashing into each other and bumping up, but that they're forming a harmony in concert working with each other in the right direction.

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Rob Levin: While you're growing very quickly, and you're focused on so many different things. Is it safe to come to the conclusion that the faster the growth, the more important retention?

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Rob Levin: And there's something that you said maybe a minute or two ago, that's so, to me, it's so important, which is really understanding that personality type, if you will, that fits into the organization. So we're talking about retention, but really this all starts in the hiring process as well.

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Rob Levin: Yeah, I can speak firsthand about this because in previous companies, when you and I met 20 years ago or so, I had the New York Enterprise Report and you actually knew a lot of my team, we had a pretty good staff, but the culture was not by design. And this time around,

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Chason Hecht: So, as you ramp up, as you speed up, you've got this mass and what happens is things become a cost of this doing business. I think one of the one of the biggest mistakes and it concerns that we discover is that a business doesn't know the cost of employee turnover. They haven't calculated that, they calculated customer acquisition, they've calculated average recurring revenue, product margins. Okay, what's your cost of turnover? How is that not in, and I'm working hard to make sure that is in, the pantheon of business metrics, the cost of employee turnover, is staggeringly more than most people think it is, and we have tremendous amount of data now over 20 years, but we've probably done more cost of turnover analysis than anyone in the world; by the way, there's a free calculator, so anyone can do this on retensa.com, you can go there, cost of turnover, it's takes about nine minutes and you can determine, okay, this is what it's really costing me; and knowing that cost total like per year, tells me how much I should spend to reduce it. Nobody writes a check to turnover, right? That would be nice, you know, here's my expense sheet for the, no.

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Chason Hecht: So, as you ramp up, as you speed up, you've got this mass and what happens is things become a cost of this doing business. I think one of the one of the biggest mistakes and it concerns that we discover is that a business doesn't know the cost of employee turnover. They haven't calculated that, they calculated customer acquisition, they've calculated average recurring revenue, product margins. Okay, what's your cost of turnover? How is that not in, and I'm working hard to make sure that is in, the pantheon of business metrics, the cost of employee turnover, is staggeringly more than most people think it is, and we have tremendous amount of data now over 20 years, but we've probably done more cost of turnover analysis than anyone in the world; by the way, there's a free calculator, so anyone can do this on retensa.com, you can go there, cost of turnover, it's takes about nine minutes and you can determine, okay, this is what it's really costing me; and knowing that cost total like per year, tells me how much I should spend to reduce it. Nobody writes a check to turnover, right? That would be nice, you know, here's my expense sheet for the, no.

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So that's one, just capturing the cost. I think the other thing for small midsize business is trying to be a big business. Definitely see that 50, that 100, 200 person company and their attempting to be the 5,000 person company; and that hiccup of bringing in maybe benefits or tactics or even people, who are like, oh, we're going to play with the big boys, so I'm going to bring someone in from a fortune 100 or fortune 500 company, I rarely see that work. I mean, half of your friends, are business owners.

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Rob Levin: Yeah. How can companies mitigate that, and other challenges, that they typically face when it comes to retaining the people that they want to retain?

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Chason Hecht: You can't do it alone, you need software for that, I mean period, right, and that's fine because there's plenty of software out there that can do that, we have obviously have a platform that we think captures it faster and easier, but fundamentally it is about creating a feedback loop with your workforce that is frequent, organic, and accessible meet them in their medium.

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So for the join question, it would be, What do you want out of this experience? What are three goals that you want to have in your life by working here in the next six months? we asked that question, Retensa, of every single person from intern to, director of marketing that we have ever hired; we asked, what do you want in your life, in six months, that, you can get through working here? And now I'm aligning life and work because for most modern humans, you know, we are what we do, that's an expression of ourselves.

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Rob Levin: You're getting this, are you looking at the aggregate results or are you looking at the individual results?

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That's what's really important. There's two dots for a line, okay, and the line is good, right? But a third dot is a curve, I know the direction I'm going, which is join, stay and leave around that employee life cycle. Leave is the exit interview, stay is would be a commonly like a climate survey, engagement survey, people call her a stay interview and new hire, I could do applicant surveys, I could do new hire surveys, etcetera; those are the anchors in my feedback triangle.

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Chason Hecht: There's a lot of evidence now in data, especially in the last five years, as the shift towards remote has occurred, and there are a few gaps that are now well documented, and so the on-site staff feels more connected to on-site staff, and remote staff tends to feel more connected to remote staff, and there's a giant chasm between the two; So, if you're a hybrid organization and you've got some combination of people working off-site and remote, it becomes more imperative to get people in one place at one, at the same time.

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And it's a version of this that's going to happen, at any organization where culturally you've created this, embrace for a remote and now you force every people in one place; so coffee badging is swiping your badge at the desk, downstairs at the lobby, getting your cup of coffee, walking around the office, making sure everyone sees you, and then walking out.

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This is universal, this does not have elasticity at company size; what happens is when you're remote worker What the data indicates is that what you're doing in that spare time is walking the dog, going to the gym, managing your life, you're actually increasing balance with your work and life experience. You're getting things done that serve, and fulfill you in other ways.

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That's a good thing, I'm not working, but I'm not building that. I'm not necessarily better managing my life. So, work-life balance is more of a struggle of onsite workers because I'm losing commute time back and forth, and I'm not doing the things to serve my life.

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Both are going to occur. If they're remote, they're not going to work full-time, they're going to create work-life balance. If work-life balance is what you want your employees to exhibit, to experience, if that's an important part of the life you want to give, then let them be remote. Again, you got to measure input, you got to measure outputs. If you don't have basic outputs.

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Rob Levin: What I'm taking out of this is look, you can't stop progress, if you will, right? I've been saying for a while, like this work-life balance shift didn't just happen since the pandemic; this has been happening for over 100 years. And if you accept this, which is, give your people a little bit of flexibility because it's going to happen anyway, this can actually be an amazing retention tool.

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Chason Hecht: Absolutely, we instituted something and, I think that this probably on the minds of a lot of listeners, viewers, is like low-cost no-cost stuff. How do I do some of this, and sort of embrace that. A lot of people know summer Fridays; and that's pretty low cost, we kind of see there's very little impact to give people a few extra hours on Fridays, and if you don't have a business where someone has to be in the store at that time. Like a hospital, right?

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And I love what I do, I love my company, I love everyone I work with, it's phenomenal. You know what? I like Sunday night doing something else; I like doing other things too. Winter Mondays is that for the first three hours on a Monday, you don't book a meeting with that person; for three months out of the year, when we don't have the sunshine and the sunlight, we actually biorhythmically take longer to get up to speed. Don't book a meeting with anyone at 9:30 or 10 a.m. on a Monday, let them acclimate.

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Chason Hecht: A key element for high performers, in particular, top talent, and I really want to define because this is part of the theme that's important; you don't retain everyone low performers. Let's put them aside, but high performers need feedback of positive and constructive, they want to know that they're high performing. They also want to know how to get even further and faster and bigger and better. Those are the people you want, and oftentimes we are, as managers, leaders, we're distracted by the middle.

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So, high performer, absolutely positive and constructive feedback, give them care and feeding. If you're watching this podcast, find the top three high-performing people in your organization right now, write them down, and tell them right down next to it, what you can thank them for, and then make that phone call, make that email, if they prefer text, then meet them in their medium, give it to them in the medium that they value three people. What did that cost you 20 minutes, maybe.

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exitpro.com is a place you can go for free employee exit interviews, new hires, 360s, you can sign up. Talent Pulse, Talent Pulse is software that you can get free trials to get feedback from a workforce, that you're up and live in four minutes or less. Again, if any of this is a black hole, if there's any blind spots in your life, in the employee life, you don't know, like why people are joining, staying, leaving, then tackle that. You can sign up in minutes and be live and capture these insights and transform that data into decisions.

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