What about when the troubles in your business don’t even make sense considering all the effort you have put into taking care of the staff. In those situations, it is useful to wonder what is not readily seen.
Leadership & Bad Actors
There is some truth to the dialogue about leadership on LinkedIn, because leadership is where responsibility for the business begins and ends, but every owner/manager knows that there is more to it than that. The staff respond in ways that popular dialogue often omits. Sometimes, when the boss is busy conducting business, the staff pretend that they need more from leadership, and owners/managers fall into a trap of trying to manage people who are trying not to get along. That doesn’t happen for any good reason. It is almost always one or more bad actors within the staff, and they are almost always trying to be promoted over other people. Failing that, they are sometimes just bored and causing trouble because they can.
It's easier and more realistic than it sounds. I can recount a dozen examples of office dynamics that seem designed for promoting that kind of dark virtue. Here’s one: A franchise with multiple owners and multiple locations. The competition between the owners devolves into illicit and unethical strategies, such as sabotaging other locations within the company. Astute staff who are ‘players’ can see that going on around them and, to them, it represents opportunity. In the locations suffering from that competition, bold individuals play games of their own, leading to an attrition in which good staff flee for other jobs to avoid being associated with the toxicity. It’s only shocking until you witness it over and over.
Another example: A giant nation-wide corporation contracts services locally to a medium-size provider, displacing a much smaller local provider who somehow gets employed at the national company. Strangely, in the years following, the new provider has an inordinate amount of trouble finding reliable staff, leading to constant turmoil. Only when a third party observes the work does it come out that the displaced party has been employing a consistent barrage of petty sabotage and passive aggressive omissions. It is all supported by plausible deniability until the volume of misdemeanors sum up.
We feel confident saying that good people are hard to find but, that is especially so when bad people are actively driving them away. The boss may never even notice if the bad actors are well-placed and moderately clever. One more example: A prominent retail chain, locally owned, looks and sounds like a winning place to work. They have great service and a shiny appearance. It’s just that the staff turnover is shocking. You would wonder why that is until you witness the internal ‘welcome wagon’ that is gleefully on-boarding new employees- outside of work- and blaming them coverly for all of the gossip that plagues the location. One new employee stayed for a single afternoon shift before fleeing in horror. It certainly is hard to find good people when they’re horrified by your culture.
High Turnover & Quiet Quitting
You will hear people say that, “High turnover is just the nature of the business!” But it’s not. I have worked as a GM for businesses that do budget for staff turnover, and I’m saying it is just as manageable as any other aspect of business. The ‘problems’ mentioned above are not “natural” problems. They don’t just happen because the sun came up, or because it’s Monday, or something. They are artificial, sometimes arising because of unskilled leadership and very often for ‘instrumental’ reasons- that is, because somebody has something to gain from causing trouble.
Down on the ground- in the trenches- as they say, it can be very hard to add up all of the troubles into one single problem that can be solved. There is no solution in acrimonious blame yet, these issues do represent a cost way out of proportion to the presenting problem. In fast food restaurants, for example, just controlling staff turnover is a winning strategy for success because the costs of it are so high. It is when you take a step back and look at the big picture that the costs become clear. That step back is necessary to see if the problem is a natural one or an artificial one and, that will tell you what needs to be done about it.