What can you do about low performers in the workplace | HR Unplugged | BambooHR

0:00 um welcome to episode 25 how to manage employee turnover and making job transitions easier we invite you to visit us at HR unplugged where you can sign up to view all future episodes and be invited to all future episodes so just subscribe to our series and you can view our latest episodes in an OnDemand podcast format so please subscribe and leave us a review because we depend on your feedback to make our content interesting for you join our slack Community it's called HR Heroes because you're all heroes to us and you can Network ask questions learn new things connect with your team uh not teammates and colleagues so please do that and then this webcast and podcast if you've never done it before is highly interactive so get in the chat and meet new people let us know what you're

0:46 thinking about things share questions and we'll get to as many questions and reactions as we can as we get into all of this so let's go ahead and get started Vanessa's here with us again I love having Vanessa here so Vanessa take us away and let's get dived and just dive into this topic okay perfect well in our last episode we talked about what it means to be a good lever so in today's episode we want to do a deeper dive into what it means to make job transitions easier for everyone and that could mean when people are laid off when you have to let somebody go or when an employee leaves on their own so before we dive into this discussion we want to set the stage about why people leave on their own Anita can you share a few

1:31 quick thoughts yeah this was a great conversation um last year or last last episode and so it's really you know when people choose to leave on their own I've actually got somebody on my team that I just found out about yesterday who's leaving on her own and I'm super bummed about it um because I think you know I want to actually create a transition for her that when she goes through this next time in her life that she'll look at coming back to Bamboo so I think one of the key things here is to really support what they're doing and even if you before you look at a transition whether they're leaving on their own or you're letting them go you need to look at um in general turnover for your organization um is your turnover high is it low in my case this is definitely regrettable for me I don't know that

2:17 there's anything I could do to retain her because of the circumstance for which she's leaving but at the same time I want to manage the impact of the team because people make up their own stories and we're not at Liberty Liberty to talk about why people go so you know I think it's good to look at your average turnover for each department and keep in mind that your turnover targets by Department should also be different right like in HR I like it to be 7% regrettable 7% non- regrettable for a roll up of 15 overall if you have a early career CX customer success customer support org you can go up as high as 25 to 30% turnover same with inside sales so don't anchor to one turnover goal for your entire organiz ation definitely look at it by department and measure it and Benchmark

3:03 it to your industry if you have an organization or Department with no turnover I always get curious about that I'm like why is nobody leaving I think that's interesting there could be something in there so there's just a few thoughts we have a statistic here that the 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics report cited that overall turnover rate is 57.3 but that number drops to 25% when considering only voluntary turnover 29 % when considering involuntary turnover and just 3% when looking at high performers I'm not sure if I buy into those statistics and I want to know more about where they came from but we thought it was an interesting point for us to simmer on as we have this discussion well I think that when you talk about kind of the regrettable versus non- regrettable one one of the

3:49 good points there is this should be a Cadence that people look at consistently like get ahead of turnover before it happens or just understanding it constantly so that you're not surprised when things keep happening and all of a sudden you're like oh this last year look at our turnover it should be something that's in a constant conversation and part of the strategy of like how can we retain our top talent how can we make sure we don't have non-reg turnover there um because then it really affects uh you know you as a leader too um and we already have so much on our plates adding that to the pile is just so much weight it's so much weight and then it just is a distraction because to get to a point where you have a high performing team who's there and showing up consistently drives crazy

4:35 great productivity and results and when you always have a team member leaving it just impacts that so much and it's hard to feel like you can get ahead when I and and one of the thing the top things that we we see trending is people leave because of their bosses too that's right and you see that on LinkedIn all the time like as as far as that Trend goes and when you network with people sometimes you see like okay yeah that's like a a top reason for leaving and and sometimes it's just not having Clarity in the role maybe it's not communicating maybe it's the individuals not feeling like they have an open and safe space where they can have those open conversations of things that aren't going well I know we had that podcast episode about stay interviews that like insert you know

5:20 Shameless plug here um about the importance of those and you know that can help prevent that as well because that could happen yeah and that's why we want to give you tools to get ahead of it so just like our team members don't want to be surprised when we let them go we don't want to be surprised when people leave our team either well I like what Angie said are their expectations of their boss realistic and that's totally fair it is it is really fair and really I don't like the word expectation I think it leads to a bunch of things where you don't really know what you can count on so I like things to be explicit where everybody body knows this is what you can count on me for this is what you can't count on me for and then that way you're aligned and going forward and we're not holding people to standards

6:07 that we just don't share but we keep in our minds and everybody else fails well and that's why I like that you know coming to agreements conversation that we have a lot within our teams of what are we agreeing on together and if we're not meeting agreements it's easier for each to point back and be like oh yes we didn't hit the mark on that and it was a miss for sure for sure well let's discuss employee turnover a little bit deeper I know that we're getting a lot of Engagement in our chat so thank you for all the commentary we'll try to get to everyone but I know you have some really good advice on this topic and I want to start at the beginning our first question for this is how should HR leaders align with Management on turnover plans this can be

6:54 so broad but let's talk about when people leave on their own what would you recommend great so this is a difficult area but I don't think that it has to be um and so when people go to leave on their own I really want to analyze why they're leaving and figure out what's really going to happen as a result of them going um so I think it's important that you don't want to negotiate when somebody leaves like they've made their decision I'm a big fan of no Dives and saves you've heard me say this before like once somebody's already decided to leave you've got to let them go it doesn't mean that you don't want to learn why but to pay them more or to save them like I hear a lot of leaders speaking to culturally it creates a big

7:40 mess because you teach your people the way to get a pay increase is to go to get yourself another offer come back to your employer and they'll pay you more so I want to be really thoughtful before we gain um traction and and negotiation um also if you're committed to a pay philosophy you wouldn't be negotiating right you are already believe that they're paid consistently relative to the scope and autonomy level of their role compared to peers and similar jobs that they're in and so you know if you care about people that stay you don't need to do this as a leader 80% of employees that accept counter offers end up leaving their current employers within six months and this is a data point I've seen play out time and time again you go to save them you pay all this money and they freaking leave

8:26 you anyway so I don't know why you're just delaying the pain rip the Band-Aid find a great or better replacement and go forward because 90% of employees that accept counter offers end up leaving their current employers within 12 months so either way you're just shooting yourself in the foot and delaying the inevitable and you may feel like a hero at the time but culturally you're you're killing yourself based on this action and behavior one is it's interesting because on that topic uh we had a a comment in the chat about recruitment feeds into turnover rates especially when recruiters don't understand the cultural fit importance uh when putting candidates forward to employers and I think this is a really interesting topic and I know we could probably Riff on this for for a while hours and

9:13 hours yes and and I think that there's there's a couple different components with this as well because yes it's totally true your your recruitment team they're the ambassadors to your company and it's crucial that they understand the employer value proposition and understanding what you're looking for in culture and sitting down with them and making sure that there is that agreement do they really see and understand what it is you're trying to get across and what does that how look like in the what and what they're doing in their work um so they can better convey to the candidates of here's what it looks like here paint the picture and then you're getting the right people in it also helps in searching for those a players so that you can match what it is that the business needs but the other thing

9:58 too is that the other component and I'd love to get your thoughts after this too Anita is looking at is it just recruitment to be looking at here you know look at other areas of the business you know what does your onboarding plan look like are you setting up those those top performers or a players for success or those people just generally coming into your company and what does your training program look like what does the support system look like and the resources for them to be successful so there's kind of different areas to look at if you kind of take the helicopter View and look down of saying how can we make this a better experience yeah I think that's definitely the case that you have to look at all those things like are you bringing somebody in and helping them be successful do they feel like they have the tools and resources to be successful

10:44 in the job so I think looking at all of those things is definitely beneficial yes well and once you've aligned on like a more comfortable Benchmark uh with your leadership team on turnover what what should you do if your organization is having high turnover I know you kind of talked about the negotiating um so you C so do you believe in negotiating so you can encourage employees to say or any other input that you have on those two pieces um so no I don't believe that you should ever negotiate with team members um and I think it's really I don't like the word fair I like the word consistent so again you know if you believe in consistent pay practices you would never you would never negotiate so um I think

11:29 I think that's the most important yes you know for me I had to to think through my my reaction to Employees leaving and separate the feelings that I had as a leader to the employee that is leaving and then the reaction I have as a friend or colleague that's hard to separate because you you have the business Outlook but then you also have like I care so much about this individual how do you react and sometimes if you're not already prepared with that reaction you know you you want to have a good reaction uh and it kind of goes back to that conversation from our last podcast episode of how to be a good lever it's this conversation of how can you help people be a good lever and it's also about your reaction so for me

12:16 it's been important to think through that reaction and realize I can be supportive when someone decides to leave but also clear about what our our company's philosophy is when in when somebody puts in their notice so I'd love to get your opinion on that Anita H this brings up the question of do you believe sorry I I mixed up my words here but I love I love to to get your opinion on that of of that separation so um so like you said in our last episode we talked about being a good lever so what advice do we have for HR people as their people leave and what can we do to make the transition easier yes so I I think to your point about sometimes it's hard to be a friend and a colleague and um I know this may be hard to hear but in HR we don't have friends

13:02 inside the business we gave that up as soon as we decided to become an HR it doesn't mean that we can't be kind and nice to people as long as you're committed to having the hard conversation and I talk to CEOs all the time that want to have be friends with everyone and I'm fine with that as long as you can still have a performance conversation and I haven't seen it work out really well I think it's hard to be both and so it's important that you establish some clear boundaries where you still show that to care about somebody at the same time we're here to perform against the results of the business so that would be point one and so if you get to the point where both of you see it the same way that it's not working the relationship is not workable to go forward you know one thing I think for team members is you want to make sure that you leave things better than

13:48 when you found it and one quote we got out of the good lever podcast a few weeks ago is you want to leave it the way you would want to come in and find a job if you're the next person starting you want to leave it in a way that makes it good for your your successor that's coming in and I think as Leaders it's our job to help um team members doing it the right way so when someone decides to leave you can help them with a clear transition plan you know you want to understand the criticality of the role how many customers or employees are going to be impacted by this exit be clear about what work needs to be wrapped up moved or transitioned or stopped altogether we don't often think about that but from some of the comments in the chat you know you don't want to put a bunch of additive work into other team members till the backfill gets

14:34 stopped so this is where you can reduce expectations and you can go back to the stakeholders and say hey this project is going to be on hold until our backfill is in and trained we'll be back on that in six months which is actually a reasonable time frame uh to get somebody hired and on boarded so think about what you're actually going to stop doing and really be sure that you run a thoughtful Communications plan so that all people attached to this role are clear on what next steps are well I I loved uh with this topic of of even just our reaction alone Victoria had a really great comment of just because an employee leaves should not create a culture of traiter and if they decide to return it should be examined as an potential opportunity and should

15:19 reflect positively on your organization as a whole uh listen to arm and Trust employee retention one problem multiple views I love that because you see that sometimes happen where it does become that culture of traiter when it that doesn't create a a place of safety or you you miss out on talent coming back you do and that's a big bummer you know I always think that culture shows up and how you onboard people and how you exit people so think about the demonstration you're being in both of those scenarios well I love I love this advice that you're giving in need and I think pivoting a little bit into finding a successor for the individual leaving can you touch on that real quick this is so critical I really want each of you to

16:05 think about if you were to leave your job tomorrow and retire on a beach in Bermuda who could do your job better than you do you have your department even if it's a department of one or three or 10 in a place where it could run without you and I really want you to do this because I want you to be able to go on vacation a lot of HR professionals don't feel like they can leave to go vacation because who else would do it for them and I think it's really important you should always be looking for somebody to take your job and as a leader you should have three to four people ready in the stable that you're helping grow into that next step you know the timing to leave has to be right but as you're waiting for that time how are you growing your team one of our key pillars as people leaders is growth in

16:52 development so I want you to think about how much time you're spending on that stable of successor and know that it could take three to five years to build them into that role and it's completely worth it because you get to have better Harmony in your life they get to grow and learn things that they want to do um and you have to also be clear that the business has to be willing and have a place to grow you into so you may lose people to other organizations but at the end of the day I found I can sleep better by really giving my all and developing people as much as I can I love that and I love to get your advice on something I've seen a few comments and so I'm kind of compiling a theme Here is for for lean teams where they might not have anybody to either

17:38 back up for holidays or there's just not succession planning what advice would you give to somebody who really needs a break because we all need that break we we there's so much we're doing what advice would you give to help them out so and many times when I've been at in a small team I go to it I go to finance you know we did this originally when I started at bamboo we owned payroll we actually transitioned it over to finance our team is still the backup for payrolls so they can go on holiday so our team will cover it so go to other teams that you work closely with because I get that nonprofits and small teams are un limited budgets but don't feel like you have to look inside your own team we're all a team of one inside an organization so what other team members

18:23 would want to be curious about a tour of Duty and HR that's a perfect way to cross TR somebody in and also this is where you've got to manage by agreement versus expectation when you decide to go out on a holiday you can say these are the things that are going to get covered if you need it everything else can wait until I get back we can do that for S to 10 days there's no reason why we can't but that's where you can be the demonstration of that and say hey my friends in it are going to handle X Y and Z my friends in finance are going to handle everything A and C and and put it out and then learn get back and be like what worked with didn't work where did we have gaps you know and if there's an O crap that's where you might want to get approval for outside Council to be on speed dial so if you really have a significant team member issue or God

19:11 forbid something really bad happens so you've got to spend two to three hours of outside council's time to help you all on your vacation I still think that's okay I love that and I love that you talk about it's kind of it's it's just creating a plan of attack it's kind of the uh the I'm going to say this now want the hit by the bus scenario uh I can't remember what it was I'm I'm saying it totally wrong is it the what what was it called I don't know but I remember last last podcast or it was like the bus book and I'm like oh no we don't want the bus book Let's have the beach book yeah okay we'll call it the beach book because that's happier yeah yeah so with the beach book it's just creating that plan uh and and having everything ready and I like that you say like when you come back see what work

19:56 and didn't work but there's also like not not only like your finance and it teams like there's things that if you can set up for your leaders what are some frequently asked questions that you get that you can like help create some Resource page for your leaders that they can selfs serve while you're out so with the nonurgent things they can get answers quickly and still feel like they're being supported by you that's a great call Vanessa you know you don't have to have an employee communications platform you can have a Google Document that's locked down and it's like where do I go if I have this what happens if I need this how do you create self-service and this is a big theme that we've talked about before how do you teach your leaders to fish and make decisions and use you as a resource and it's a great opportunity for leaders to continue to learn and grow while you're

20:41 on holiday yeah one I love what uh Virginia said in here is I'm in a small company and I do all of our HR and operations but I have a lot of my duties mapped out on SharePoint so Finance or my boss can cover things while I'm away which I is amazing yeah it's a great Point Virginia it'd be great maybe if you could share what are the outlines of things you have on SharePoint maybe that would be useful for all of our heroes to be able to have a template for a beach book or a continuity binder as Patricia properly States well before we we turn to the the next topic there Katherine had a really good comment in here and I'd love to Riff on this for a second is it's talking about critical roles and and turnover and I thought this was really

21:28 good for the audience is the planning of upper management for offboarding of employees is often times not realistic and they don't understand the timelines associated with critical role turnover um what do you have anything to add there super passionate about this Vanessa and I just ran a critical role project inside bamboo so the time to talk about critical roles is not when they're leaving right you want to go through with each leader and say hey what are the critical roles which to US mean the business would stop the customer would have a significant issue we cannot move on and support our customers without this role there's very few roles in the organization that fall into this bucket and it's really really important for you to proactively

22:13 identify them so you can see if you have continuity plans to support those people um especially if they have a beach situation um you know who's there to back them up and we often don't find that until we're in a bunch of hot water I'd really encourage you to Pro actively identify those rules and figure out how you have continuity plans around them it's it's high risk when when it's not being looked at constantly it is it is and it's an important thing to refresh on your same cycle as you do Talent review yeah I love that all right let's get into the really hard topic that I'm sure is on everyone's Minds that we want to discuss is layoffs so we know that layoffs have been pretty significant for the tech industry this

23:00 year and late last year so this isn't a new concern but layoffs are something we as HR leaders should understand and know how to manage better so how should HR leaders prepare for large turnover transitions so this assumes that you've already done all the due diligence and you've decided this is the only thing that you need to do to reduce costs like you've you've taken away travel expense you've minimized your benefits cost you've done everything can do and if you don't reduce your cost basis from a team member standpoint your business is at the state where it will flounder or fail to exist so we've done all of that work which we've talked about in other episodes we can go through it deeper if we get some questions in the chat about that so you're at the decision that layoff is the next step I just want to

23:46 tee that up that there's been a lot into it yeah CEO takes a pay cut I've taken pay cuts before the whole management team all of those things you've gone through all of those things and you've just decided that this is the only way forward so we all know that humans and benefits are two largest expense line items and so really understanding that you're going to become more profitable that you're really going to fix the problem through this layoff and what I've heard from a lot of our peers about the current layoffs that have happened is that we haven't cut deep enough so I really want to emphasize that you cut once and you cut deep you can always hire people back but going through multiple rounds of layoffs is so painful to your organiz ational culture it's something that takes years to actually

24:31 repair from so I think it's really important that you understand that you do it once and you do it deep but you may decide that you could also go through and really manage out low performers you know standard um you know standard data would tell us that 10 to 15% of our organization isn't performing um to the level that you would need them to be so you could also start there and really manage out your low performers but that would assume that you have a Performance Management philosophy you're willing to go onto performance Improvement plans and you have leaders that are going to support this so that you can kind of cut maybe five to 10% of your organization through performance that's the step I like to take first and then if you don't get to the level of

25:17 profitability that you need to then you could go deeper into a layoff there is so much goodness and everything you just said well one of the the first things I want to call out is as HR leaders we need to think about our workforce management strategy and influence our leaders from that angle as well like if they're so for example like because you're talking about like just because layoffs is there it doesn't mean it's the right answer right away I know we've talked about this other podcast episodes y yeah but you I mean there has to be a lot of play and I think there has to be a lot of conversation about all the impacts for all the choices that you can make yeah and and it's it's thinking about like if we think about just the workforce strategy alone if there's people that

26:04 leave your organization like a backfill for a senior position for example pressure test the leader to see if a senior position is really the need because maybe the current team has a lot of seniors already and we could like senior roles and we could hire for somebody more junior or we could look at the scope of work and the business needs to allow for a l a lower level to be hired in so right there you're able to financially strategize and so it's like kind of that point in time of really making sure you're constantly thinking about what are all the different directions here and that's a viable motion I mean there's a number of companies usually owned by private Equity that have a whole philosophy of you're only hiring junior team members and you're growing them up quickly and your level of Senior Management is very

26:50 light and very thin and then you're managing costs based on spans and layers which means I'm a leader of humans and I have six to8 direct reports and you don't let somebody be in a leadership role without six to8 direct reports and that works like that works and it's super super effective I think it also depends on the phase and Stage that your business is at and what level of talent you need to meet those strategic objectives so an exercise I think we need to do more of is saying hey this is where we want to be in 2030 this is the vision of our organization these are the product lines that we're going to have what are the skills and capabilities that would require us to deliver on that vision and what is the gap between what we currently have in talent and what we need to get there and then we decide if we're going to build or buy to go forward in it I love the Builder buy

27:37 analogy because as soon as like you introduced that that phrase I was like oh it makes complete sense yeah yeah I mean it's super um you might in some teams get over indexed on either one and there's pros and cons I think you have to have a blend but again it depends on the growth rate of the organization what the pace is is how much you need to get done how quickly you want to do it all of those things weigh in and yes Uma it's challenging it's never easy yeah well another thing I want to call out that you mentioned is taking a look at the non-performers and if you have people who aren't rowing with the rest of the team and their work and are dragging others down and how they approach their work it could cause teams to fall behind on road maps and hurt the overarching

28:24 company goals so when we think about when you think about overall Performance Management strategy and do your management have the right tools and resources in place to not accidentally run into the sunt cost fallacy or in other words the escalation of commitment bias where you've got managers holding on to people for too long because they've already made such a large investment on when their performance is below expectations that's that's something that could totally happen um but just is another Avenue too of looking at okay where are we at with with our uh with our employees and what does that performance look like yeah it's it's so important that you look at um performance all the time because if you can show that you're actively managing out low performers

29:11 when these decisions come up it's going to be much easier and you can point to the work that you've already done to manage performance relative to results in the business I actually think that if we were better at managing low performers on a consistent basis we would not be in the place to do layoffs as often as we have been but there's there's one other point that I want to add to this that you could also do um before you lay off um that I think is another practice we could talk about to Vanessa yeah oh yeah well you don't want people sitting there twiddling their thumbs you don't nope the you know there's there may be other areas of the business where the workload is low and other areas of the business where the workload is high so getting an understanding of what the state of the state is so you can influence bringing people who are in the low workload areas

29:56 to assist in those high workload areas to save on resources and keep the business running um you know like for example we've talked about this before of like the recruiting team like hiring is low right now but we can you you can use recruiters in other areas of the business they hire for your roles and they understand what you're looking for and there's a lot of PE places that you can pull them into so what are those different roles you can kind of utilize the resources you already have to to help you really have to look at the need of the role and look like you're hiring into it and so you don't want to have people go through an application process but this is where if you're constantly in career development conversations you can say oh you've always been interested in being in legal you've been interested in being in sales hey instead of hiring an outside resource which I think is

30:42 where vaness is going you can move somebody in from a team that you don't want to do layoffs in but you want to maximize current team members and put them into a role like you said that has a larger workload that needs skills and abilities that match those of a recruiter or somebody else who you have a team that's overstaffed and so it's really it's really great to take um people that are already performing that you don't want to get rid of that can still contribute to the organization and move them into other roles love that and there's a really good comment here of if there are non-performers it could be a management issue an effective manager can help bring up the performance levels or manage the non-performers out of the company as a manager we need to

31:28 understand if it is a willingness issue or an abilities issue I love it we talk about this all the time is it will or skill and I think it's always interesting when you have a team of non-performers but you have a manager that's never been on a pip themselves so it's a great point where that you have to look at if you have a consistent team that's struggling well usually that is a leadership issue and what are you doing to continually help that leader or maybe they're not meant to lead that team yep well what are other paths you would recommend before a layoff if an organization needs to cut expenses and they choose to cut people so one of the best ways to do this is to manage your hiring plan so you know you can bring the hiring plan of net new hires down to zero and that way you can move people

32:15 that you already have into existing roles and you may only choose to hire externally for highly technical roles that you need to backfill if somebody has gone now there's PR and cons to this I've done this before where people will keep non-performers because they are afraid they won't get a backfill so that's the con to this but I think the pro is that if you stop external hiring immediately you're automatically and then you put a rigid process on to back filling you're already going to reduce your overall total headcount and expense profile so I like this with Performance Management as step one simultaneously you would also look at your real estate estate footprint you know a lot of us have big real estate bills and we don't have

33:00 people going into the office or you might do something different you might say hey we're going to keep this footprint and everybody's going to need to come in we see a lot of companies that are doing that so I think both could be effective in increasing um performance you could also take a stab at looking at your benefits I met with a group of peers of ours about a month ago in San Francisco and all of them had added in additional mental health benefits because there was a large demand for that earlier in 2020 2021 what was interesting though is that there's no utilization and so if there's not utilization in these added benefits that you've brought on cut them back out again and you know one of the things we just did at bamboo was a conjoint analysis where you have people rank benefits side by side what's most

33:46 important to you a Learning and Development budget or is it uh extra additional PTO and then you put like what's most important to you a high deductible plan with um you know low prescription cost which matters most and when you do that you can understand the prioritization for your team members and their loved ones so that you can make sure you're putting money into the benefits that matter most now be careful if you strip all of this away you're also stripping it away from your top performers so there's a big impact risk here to culture and morale of the people that you need to stay and continue to gut themselves to get the business to perform so I always encourage all of us to take care of the living right the people that need to stay in and do all of the work despite these tough economic

34:33 and and and times that we're in so you want to be really thoughtful not to cut too much if it's really important to your high performers but that's why again it's important to identify High performers before you go into a cycle like this so you know what's important to them and you can make those decisions thoughtfully well Heidi asked uh what did we call the survey I can't remember what what we called it when we sent it out to the rest of the company uh it's called a conjoint analysis and um we actually hired somebody outside of bamboo to do it so um you'll want to look for a data analyst that really has skills in this it's really fascinating especially if you have a larger team member based so it's something you could definitely look at and then I also while I love some Brokers some Brokers are great Brokers

35:20 are incentivized to do for themselves and I think you have to have a firm point of view on what your outcomes need to be and you need to have a really firm voice in guiding them for what you want to do in benefits otherwise you risk getting to the right outcome well Anita a lot of companies have had to do several rounds of layoffs uh what do you think about that and how can companies avoid it well I think you can go through all these things that we've kind of laid out right you slow your hiring plan you manage out non-performers you look at extraneous costs that AR providing impact to your top performers and so I think all of those things need to be done but I don't think they need to be done in tough Economic Times I think they need to be

36:05 done all the time as running a strong people team those are the things that you do all the time because you always want to be efficient right so so don't look at them only in times um you know famine if you will so if you need to go ahead and do a layoff you know I think you cut once and you cut deep like I've said that a thousand times and I'll continue to into it doing multiple layoffs is a performance and culture killer that I think none of us want to get into you know a study of over 4,000 team members who survived around of corporate layoffs found that 74% decline in productivity because they get afraid am I going to be next right am I going to be next 69% reported a decline in the quality of their company's product or service and I think it's because you

36:51 force people to think about their own well-being and they start thinking should I look for another job I mean when you decide to do this you introduce a giant distraction into the product and service that you deliver and I think oftentimes we don't look at the second and third order consequence of these decisions you know people say that customer service has declined and they were less likely to recommend their organization is a great place to work so you definitely pay full price when you decide to go through a layoff but you can always you know you can always hire people back and you can bounce back too with with strong efforts but I just want to put a lot of thought into it before you do it well what's the the bottom line bottom line advice for layoffs what if you could give one like what would it be

37:37 I think what you do is you take care of both the people that survive and you do excellent care for the people that are leaving so when we saw a lot of the layoffs start to take shape about a year ago there were a number of companies who did Big posts on LinkedIn and they talked about that they were doing layoffs from the company point of view and they proactively asked their networks to hire them on so they were saying we're laying off teams that are specialized in this this and this if you're hiring for these things please contact me and I will give you the names so I think you've got to take care of the community to make sure the community takes care of you so I always open up my network I make reference calls I make introduction calls for these people I want to make sure that they land in a good space and I take that on as part of my duty and ask my team to do the same

38:24 and so it's really the way that you do it it's how people feel is a big part of it I think you give them extra Severance and health benefits because you want them to have time to land on their feet and you also just want to make sure that you recognize it's not just the person that was working on your team it's their loved ones that you're also impacting and so one great example I heard about um I forget what Bakery it was you would recognize it was a big Bakery they were going through coid they actually called Walmart and said can you take some of our team members like can we give you some of ours so they still have jobs and then that way we can bring them back when we come back online it was like Paradise Bakery or a bigger parent company for that and I thought how awesome is that so if you're a SE Suite

39:11 group and you see an adjacent competitor going through hard times how can we reach out and help each other because we are all human at the end of the day and I think it's important that we reach out and ask for help in ways that may seem unconventional we can create great things together when we think outside of the box I love that thinking about is that that partnership in the community because a common bias that I would see in hiring because I was in recruiting for almost a decade a common bias I saw from different companies was if somebody is laid off there's an immediate bias that they were the worst performers that they were the bottom of the pile and that is not necessarily the case you don't know what thought was put into the layoffs and really take that bias out

39:59 and think about the person as as an individual and ask like the questions around like okay what is your experience what have you done what are the things that you were most successful on what are the projects that stand out like focus on what they C have delivered and not let that bias control of like I'm just going to write this person off because they were part of this initial layoff and it's it it it's not um helpful and it it's already scary enough for these candidates going out and so having that good Community Partnership is crucial it is and and like you said Vanessa you need to seek the context about why the layoff happened don't assume they are low performers you know 33% of HR managers say they're more willing to hire somebody who is recently laid off I mean I think there's benefit in that we talk about a state of

40:44 entitled team members um that was that still is pretty rampant I think when you hire somebody who was laid off I think they come in with a sense of gratitude and excitement for a job that maybe they didn't have before so I would definitely be open around around those topics yeah well before we wrap up I just want to spend a few minutes on how leaders can help employees when you need to let them go what do you recommend when it's time to fire or manage somebody out you really have to put on your empathy hat you have to think about the things that they're going to care most about and those things are Severance and health insurance right how long will I get paid and how long do my benefits go for and what else can I count on and so that's where these extra Services of resume creation additional

41:32 ways that you're helping them go out and secure a re um interviews and things like that you might hire a third party to help them build their resume make connections those types of things so I really encourage you to put yourself in their shoes and think about what you would want if you were getting ready to go to that transition you know be honest and be kind let them know if you would be a reference for them talk to them about what they want to do and how you can help them get on their feet even if it's a temporary or contract position until they find a full-time job I mean I've gotten so many calls lately where people are like can you just help me out and I've just been a sounding board for like have you talked to this person and this person and this person and that's why no matter what stage or phase of career growth you're in you always want to care for your network and your

42:17 relationships because it doesn't want to be a thing where I just lost my job and I'm reaching out to you so I think it's really important that you really mind that Network because you might need it for yourself or those that you care about thank you Anita as always I have learned so much from you in this episode and I really enjoyed this discussion I think we hit on a lot of different topics and love the the conversations that have been happening well before we wrap up I would love to answer maybe one H Q&A question if anybody's got one yeah do it so if you've got a question let us know in the chat but one one of the things that I wanted to to call out was um Andrew put in thank you Andrew I

43:05 know that you've been commenting a ton so love all the interaction there uh Andrew said I work for a company whose CEO is broadly considered the second highest overpaid CEO in America and rather than a just comp they cut coffee budgets for traveling EMP employees which was a culture killer yeah I mean that's where us as HR have to be truth tellers right and we have to say hey um is that really going to be the effect that you want like you're in a crisis a performance crisis right your customer is no longer buying your product and you think cutting coffee is the way to your team member's heart that's what I mean like talking about um you know the living is really really important and cutting out coffee just seems like Pennywise and pound foolish so that's where I really encourage you to go in

43:51 and you can't be judgmental you can't be harsh but say help me understand how this is going to Drive the outcome what problem are we solving by cutting out the coffee budget and I think that those questions can help them rethink it but also be prepared to come with like hey we need to get profitability to this these would be my three other suggestions about how we do that and still maintain our current performance space while optimizing our cost structure I love that well and it Linda had a question about does bamboo HR calculate retention rates what is your com on that I actually I prefer um anybody that's worked with me knows that I focus on retention over turnover so I want to make sure that our retention of our team members is really really strong in different areas and that's something

44:36 that we report on monthly back to our executive team love that well Nita thank you so much could you wrap us up in the three takeaways that our audience should take with them of course so today thank you for joining us we got together and we talked about how to align on turnover plans and the benchmarks we talked about about what you have to do and watch out for and large turnover transitions using layoffs as the last resort and we talked about how to help people with their transations and making a clear plan to optimize the time before during and after they leave for the stakeholders that are impacted so we're really um grateful that you joined us for this key topic we look forward to hearing more thoughts from you and our HR Heroes slack community and we want to make sure that you come back on July 11th for our

45:23 next episode where we talk about at hiring and what that means for HR leaders it's a big topic right now and so make sure to visit us at HR unplugged. comom so you see the actual time and details for episode 26 sign up and subscribe to our series you get all the info about what we're doing next and make sure you know that you can rewatch any of our podcasts in your favorite on demand podcast format Please Subscribe and leave us a review We count on you to develop great content that you want to come and listen to and we love you all Heroes keep doing awesome work out there we're so grateful for everything you're doing to make cultures great and have a super day thanks Vanessa for being with me today always a treat paying with you thanks Anita it's been fun have a super day have a great weekend happy fourth if

46:10 you're in America