Employee turnover: every company has to deal with it and every company has to pay for it. In some cases, it’s good to weed out those who do not have the greater good of the company in mind. On the other hand, it would be better if those individuals were never hired in the first place. This would be an excellent skill for call center hiring managers.
A recent ERE.net piece focused on the “8 Questions to Ask, to Turn Around Employee Turnover.” The insight gathered in this article offers a few clues as to how you can turn the hiring process around for improvement. And what they found as the key source for turnover may surprise you.
Believe it or not, this publication suggests that the cause of most employee turnover is a poor fit with the supervisor. While it’s easy to assume that the individual hired wasn’t right in the first place, the actual problem may be a poor match between the candidate and the supervisor. The two may work well in other circumstances but for some reason do not work well together.
In other words, the employee is actually ill-suited for the job emotionally. At the same time, there could be an engagement problem. Gallup has suggested that there are four dimensions of employee engagement, including how the team can grow, how the employee belongs, what the employee gives to the team and what they get out of it. If the team can meet these different levels of engagement, they tend to consistently perform at higher levels than those who cannot.
There are other reasons why employees leave a company, of course. They may find a better position, a spouse may get transferred, a major life change occurs or any other of a variety of reasons. For those who willingly leave a company, however, most of them do so because of the supervisor. That doesn’t mean the supervisor is necessarily bad, but maybe they aren’t effective at mediating situations or they lack the training necessary to be good at their jobs.
If the supervisor is the issue, there are a number of reasons why he or she may cause turnover. It may be a matter of power or a lack of clarity in goals. If one supervisor has especially high turnover, it’s time to evaluate him or her more clearly to gain a better understanding of what’s lacking so as to make the necessary changes.
For call center hiring, it’s not always a situation where the supervisor is the problem. But if turnover is high, it’s worth consideration.