THE NUMBERS SUPPORT THE CONCEPT
It was such an honor to see you in person at the WorkHuman event.
I wanted to share how I feel we use your work and ideas in our work.
I work for the customer service group of an insurance company. Specifically, the majority of my time is spent on on-boarding new hires, skill building our tenured staff and doing development with our leadership team … We launched a new program in the past two years, focused on finding ways to reduce our crazy high turnover rate, to speed up the learning curve to allow success/independence in the role sooner, and to remove some of the demands of teaching and supporting new hires for our supervisor team. We translated those objectives to delivering a proficient employee that could successfully transition into the workforce.
Our first step was the data gathering. How long did it take to get to proficient? What were the reasons for turnover? What gaps were there in the learning that led to dependence on sups? Were we hiring people with the right combination of skill, desire and capacity?
I did searches for how to make happy employees. And I ran across your work.
Fast-forward: We call my leadership staff the tribe of baby unicorns. We show Shawn Achor’s TED Talk at the end of our first day of training. We then ask them what they heard. They get it. They get that I won’t hold them to an average. That we will make our own dots; we will be positive outliers. Each day, we celebrate accomplishments. We don’t wait for the next opportunity or the next accomplishment to be joyful in our work.
And the numbers support the concept.
Before, it took on average around 9.5 months for a new hire to perform at the same level as our tenured staff. Now our learning curve is right around 6 months. We have reduced our first year turnover to just under 50%. Our overall employee engagement surveys improved, beating our stretch goals and moving us into high performing categories. Our volunteerism numbers increased in both number of hours logged and number of people participating in the programs.
Do you remember the game tag—and how you could be safe because of “electricity” –your friend was on base and you reached them before you got tagged—the base passed through to you? The new hires are like the electricity … they are spreading the idea to our tenured staff.
We practice “happiness” each day … and it is not hard anymore.
Thanks for stepping into our world with each new hire … and weaving a theme throughout the process. It truly is making an impact on all of us!
-Lisa C