Why Child Care Professionals Quit
Julie Bartkus
Dr. Tom Mahan, President of the Work Institute, joins me to share key strategies for discovering why staff in your child care program quit. Dr. Mahan is a workplace attraction, retention and corporate responsibility researcher. Our journey begins with understanding that having the intent to increase retention and make positive change happen within your program is the best reason to find out why child care professionals quit. This means not only finding out the reasons employees give to an insider about why they quit, but digging deeper and discovering the real reasons that they may only tell an outside, confidential source. Tom states that there is a large variable between what employees say to an insider and what their real reasons for quitting are. Exit interviews are key - The ideal time for conducting an exit interview is 3-5 weeks after one's departure date. No permission is needed from an employee to conduct an exit interview, however, the process will be more successful if you share information with all staff (even your new staff) about the exit interview process. Communicate with them your goal of interviewing employees after they leave to find out what your program can do more of or differently to increase retention rates and make positive change happen. Ensure them that the information they share is kept confidential and only the data in group format will be shared. Then as the year progresses, share with them organizational strengths and plans for improvement. You've heard the saying: the grass is always greener on the other side. Well, that's exactly how some employees who quit feel. One reason is because many organizations do a great job selling themselves. They are experts at luring employees away. But once employees leave their current places of employment and they start their new jobs, they realize that the grass is not greener and in some instances they find out that the grass is worse than where they were. This is important: sometimes former employees want to return to their previous places of employment but they don't know how to get there. Tom worked with an organization, facilitating exit interviews, and he found out that many employees who left wanted to return. With Tom's help, 150 good performers returned to work for that organization. When turnover is left unanalyzed and accepted as a normal part of doing business, huge amounts of money is just being wasted. That's why effective exit interviews are so critical in breaking the cycle of turnover. With good data, you can develop a plan of action to break the cycle. Good data is collected from a skilled exit interviewer who can uncover the truth through an in-depth telephone conversation. It's one thing to ask an employee: "Why are you leaving?" It's another thing to dig deeper and discover the truths that an employee won't often share with an insider. Why doesn't an employee want to share his/her truth? Many times it boils down to not wanting to burn bridges. Child care professionals have often shared with me this their feelings of: "What difference will it make anyway if I tell my director how I really feel?" Tom states that a skilled exit interviewer will dig down through 4 levels of questions to discover the truth. They will also use their time on the phone to conduct a competitive analysis to find out where former employees are currently working and how much they are making. Tom conducted a survey based on 170,000 exit interviews across the nation to see what the main reasons were that employees quit their jobs. He said that pay was number 4 or 5 on the list. The number one item at the time of the survey was poor supervisor skills and attitudes. As important as this data is, be careful not to assume that this is applicable to your organization until you collect good data. Another component of good data is high response rates from top performers. Let's say you're an organization with not a lot of budget to spend on hiring an external exit interviewer. Is there any way you can still get to the main reasons child care professionals quit? The answer: absolutely! The key is to develop strong, positive and professional relationships with your employees. My leadership retreats have helped child care professionals all around the world accomplish this task. Another way is to keep in touch with former employees who you would welcome back to your program. Keep a tickler file with their names and contact information in it and touch base with them every two months or so. ************************************************************************** To listen to this interview click on the related article below.
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