Why My Best Employees Never Leave

Summary

• I've realized the importance of not just attracting top talent but also retaining it, as losing employees is more costly than losing customers.
• To retain top talent, employers need to provide clear context, set realistic expectations, and offer comprehensive onboarding that mirrors the future role.
• Retention incorporates the concept of Ascension; if employees feel they're growing and advancing, they're more likely to stay.
• The five pillars crucial for retention are opportunity for growth, measurable impact, fair pay, recognition, and community.
• Replacing an employee can cost 1.5 to 2 times their annual salary, making retention strategies not just beneficial but cost-effective.
• Implementing an employee growth plan with a clear career path is key to showing employees a future within the organization.
• Employees need to see their impact clearly; use measurable outcomes and share stories of success to make this impact evident.
• Fair pay is important; paying at the top of the market can increase retention as employees often produce more when they're paid more.
• Recognizing your team can be done in several ways: for exemplifying values, for efforts, for reaching milestones, or by achieving certain outcomes.
• Building a strong community within the company revolves around having charismatic leaders, a shared culture or cause, and a unique approach or method.
• Begin working on retention by choosing just one of the five pillars and make incremental improvements over time.
• Keep in mind that fulfilling promises and focusing on both retention and Ascension will create an environment where A-players want to stay.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest implementing a few easy steps to help keep great people in your business. Here's a simple plan you can start today:

1. Create Clear Expectations: When someone joins, make sure they know what a good job looks like. If you want them to make their bed like a five-star hotel, then say that. It helps them do what you want.

2. Share the Why: Tell them why their job is important. Like if you need a customer support director, explain what happened in the company to make this job needed.

3. Mirror Future Roles in Onboarding: Make their first days look like their regular days will look. If they will work alone a lot, don't talk to them all day in the beginning.

4. Show A Clear Career Path: Talk about how their role can grow. For example, if they start as a manager, say how they could become a VP one day.

5. Celebrate Small Wins: Use stories of success to show how their work helps. Maybe make a special shout-out in your team meetings or a channel in Slack.

6. Pay Fairly: Try to pay as much as the top places do. People often work harder and stay longer where they're paid well.

7. Recognition: Pick one way to recognize people, like when they show the company's values. Start small, and just do it one way at first.

8. Build Community: You can have a group where people feel close, like a team. Have leaders that everyone likes, share what your company cares about, and how you do things differently.

Start small. Pick one thing and work on it. Keep your promises and help people grow. This can make your business a place where the best people want to keep working.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"Attracting talent is just as much a sales skill as it is getting customers"

– Leila Hormozi

"You can be really good at sales but that doesn't really matter in terms of growing your business if you can't keep the people that you're selling"

– Leila Hormozi

"The five pillars of retention are opportunity for growth, measurable impact, fair pay, recognition, and community"

– Leila Hormozi

"If an employee doesn't have a clear path for growth, they don't have a vision of how they're going to fit into the company"

– Leila Hormozi

"The opportunity cost or the loss that you have if you leave [a job] is much greater if you were to leave somewhere that doesn't pay well"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

acquire Talent so in the first part we talk about how to get eight players in this part what I want to talk about is how to keep eight players people are leaving because they're going to start their own business they want to become an influencer online or they want to go work for this company that is going to pay twice as much they're not even have to work as much how do I keep people once I get them in so back in 2016 when I started gym launch I felt like I got a really good hang of attracting talent because like I explained in my last video attracting Talent is just as much a sales skill as it is getting customers what I realized was that it would come up with the same problems that you come up with the customers which is you can be really good at sales but that doesn't really matter in terms of growing your business if you can't keep the people that you're selling the same goes for candidates and the thing is is that with candidates or employees is that it's much more costly to lose employees than it is customers and the more often that you lose employees the more often you're going to lose customers and so if you're in that spot where you're like I don't know how to keep the talent that I'm getting I don't know how to keep them excited I don't know if I'm even doing a good job once you found someone in it sends actually then they're in fulfillment right and fulfillment for an employee is really training and support the way that I look at it there's really three pillars to training and support there's context there's expectations and there's onboarding so when it comes to keeping Talent the one thing that will drive employees crazy is if you continue to tell them they're not doing a good job well you haven't even told them what a good job is in the first place and so they don't know what good looks like and so if you don't tell them what good looks like if you just say go make your bed and then they go make their bed and it looks okay but you're like no that's not how I want to make your bed again you just get frustrated you just yell at them but in reality it's like maybe you need to be more explicit which is like make your bed like a five-star hotel would it's like ah okay I can visualize that I know what that looks like thank you I can understand that expectation and a lot of times the reason that employees leave is because they feel underappreciated because bosses are constantly punishing employees for expectations that they're not meeting that they never told them it's not meeting their expectations if you don't want to do that what you would rather do is expectation is lower when I'm on an interview process and I'm setting expectations for a job I like to almost over emphasize how much I don't know how much I can't help them how much of a mess it is and when they come in they're like Layla this is not nearly as bad as we said it there's way more in place you've done a great job and I'm like well have I and the reason that it's that way is because I would rather they come in and be delighted that it's not a complete show right because they thought it might have been then they come in and be disappointed now the second piece of this is context context is the why context is the set of circumstances that has created the job what has happened within the company to create the need for this job tell them the story give them the context why do we need a customer support director let me tell you why we started this company this was our mission our value is timeliness we started this team we try to promote this person they're incompetent now we have this huge problem because we're behind on all these customer things and so now I'm like I think I need a customer support director and if people have context they have a much easier time prioritizing so if they want to create a more timely customer service department what do they need to know about of the company what circumstances have created to not be timely that they need to know about so they can create it to be timely and then what resources are they going to need to know about or be aware of to help them get the job done how do they go buy something you know how do they go pay for this there's so many things that are surrounding the job and so the question that I like to ask myself is what circumstances does this person need to know about in order to do the job exceedingly well and then the last piece to fulfillment is onboarding what I want you to understand for this video in terms of fulfillment is that onboarding should be a mirror into the future of the role okay so a lot of people create an onboarding program that does not align with what the role is going to look like in the future let me explain say that this role is one where you can't train the person you don't know what the job looks like and you won't be talking to them for the most of the time they're in the job maybe it's somebody else they're going to be talking to but you onboard them you talk to them every day you train them as much as you can you're talking them all day every day and then once their onboarding is up two weeks in you're like see ya here's the job go figure it out they're like what the heck bruh you're mismatching expectations onboarding should be almost like the accelerator for the job so it should match the same conditions again we're talking about conditions and expectations here it should match the conditions that they're going to enter into when they're fully onboarded so if they need to go and be autonomous and figure things out for themselves that should be what you're doing in the onboarding and then it should just continue on so the second piece to keeping a players and keeping employees is really understanding the five pillars of retention and Ascension and here's the thing is that Ascension is part of retention if you want to retain people you want to ascend to people so I'll explain that later in this video but the Five Pillars to essentially retention are opportunity for growth measurable impact Fair pay recognition and community and so I'm going to break each one of these down to explain how you can retain employees with each of them now what you have to understand the average employee loss in a company is going to cost you 1.5 to 2 times their annual salary so if you bring someone in and then within two months they're not the right fit and you were paying them seventy thousand dollars a year you most likely are losing a hundred thousand dollars when we go into retention I want you to understand that I'm taking this from a point of view of ownership which is we have to own the reason that we turn employees and yes there is good churn in certain roles but most turn it's not good turn it's just being irresponsible and so a lot of people look at it and they're like people just aren't cut out for this job it's like well then why wouldn't you figure that out in the interview process why'd you got to figure that out after you offer them the job after they quit the other job they have there's no reason for that and so to save you a bad reputation and to save them or make a huge life change just put these things in place the first piece of retaining an employee is having an employee growth plan and listen I used to not have these in place because I'd be like dude how am I going to put a growth plan in place when I don't even know we're going to be in six months or a year I didn't even think the business would survive this long I know a lot of people feel that way you're like I got lucky and now it's working and like now I don't know what to do the thing is is that if an employee doesn't have a clear path for growth they don't have a vision of how they're going to fit into the company and what you want is you want a vision is so big for your company that they can fit their personal Vision inside of that vision and so what you want to do is you want to make that real for them an employee growth plan really just has a few parts to it broken down first you've got a clear path which is when you bring someone and you want to be painting the picture of where you see them ending up so if I bring someone in and say they're just a customer success manager and they're working hand-to-hand combat with clients but they have a lot of experience in their background I might paint the picture that I eventually one day want them to be VP of customer success and then every time we're talking what we're aiming towards is we're I'm always talking in context with the goal I'm like well if you're going to be VP of customer success one day then this is what we've got to do now to get there here's what we should do this quarter to get you there here's what the team should look like to get you there and I'm constantly talking about what it needs to look like to get them there to that goal so setting that clear path and it's reinforcing that path now the second piece of that is training and a lot of people say they're like Layla I don't know what a VP of customer success is how am I supposed to train them of being a VP of customer success you don't need to train them you're just responsible for facilitating the training so if you don't know what looks like that's fine you are responsible for acquiring the resources to train them which means maybe that means you pay for a seminar or you pay for a workshop or you pay for some kind of certification they're going to get there's other people that can train them you're just responsible for facilitating the training the third piece from that is feedback because as this person's learning and training you want to know what does good look like like we talk about the expectations what does good look like they're taking the training and they're taking everything they're learning and they're putting it into the job and now you want to give them feedback because when people are doing things that are new and they're trying to acquire more skills they're going to go and they're going to swing on what I call like the pendulum of death which is anytime you try something new you go extreme One Way extreme the other way and eventually end up in the middle and so you need to be there when they're on the pendulum of death to tell them hey you're on the extreme you're all the way towards like I only love employees and I everything else and every other department a lot of people go that way they're going to be like I'm learning how to be a leader and all they do is value the employee they overpay them they over baby them they overcompensate them and then you're going to tell them that they're going to go the other way on the the impending of death they're going to say employees it's always their fault they suck not paying them anything paying them very little all this stuff right you're gonna say listen man that's not the right either and they're coming to the Middle where they're like I should pay people family I should treat them well I should take ownership but they should take ownership too right they're being reasonable and so you want to be there to tell them when they're on that pendulum of death learning new skills where do they fall because when they're in that training session they're always going to lean one way or the other and you just want to be there and tell them which way they're leaning and what way they need to lean in order to get higher in the company and follow that career path the fourth piece to Career expansion is opportunity and so if you want to create opportunities for that person it's basically what I call is like stretch goals a stretch goal is when you give someone a task that is above their current job but you believe they can achieve it's a reasonable they can acquire like they have an 80 chance of being able to succeed in this task that's what I would call a stretch goal and so when you're putting this person on this career path in order to ascend into that VP of customer success I might say okay cool say I'm out of town for two weeks I'm gonna say hey I want you to play a VP of customer success for those two weeks that I'm gone drafted a job description of what that would look like and I want you to do these five things over the next two weeks while I'm gone I don't want to see how it goes and I'll come back and it's low risk to you because like how much could someone possibly mess up in two weeks if you're giving this to them you're believing that they have less than 80 likelihood they're gonna succeed and the last part of the career path is really expansion which is then that's finally giving them the clear path to how they're going to get that VP of customer success and then letting them expand into it which is usually saying here's how you get promoted here's how you get a pay raise it's very clear it's laid out so it's like if you want this promotion you need to do these three things the second practice in retaining Talent is measurable impact and so people want to stay in organizations where they have an impact on the organization if you look the second top reason that people leave is they don't feel that their work is impactful and so how do you create the feeling of impact in the company because the reality is that most people have an impact in a company but they just don't know that because employers don't understand how to demonstrate the impact to them and so let's talk about how to demonstrate measurable impact to people impact is always had in any organization there's an action and there's the result of it right so what we want to do is we want to close the gap between Action Impact so here's what that looks like I have an acronym which is impact I stands for illustrate the meaning okay so what that means is that when someone comes in you're explaining to them the meaning behind the job so if you've seen Simon Sinex demonstration of why what you want to explain them is why have the role why does this role exist you want to illustrate the meaning of that to them and that's why I start with telling them what problem are you solving because typically that relates back to the why and so it's all always illustrating someone the meaning of the job on the job description itself in team meetings on their quarterly reviews on their one-on-ones telling them why the role is so important the second piece is the m which is you're going to measure all outcomes this is why kpis are so important you're literally showing them the impact the role has on an organization people think that employees don't like kpis employees love kpis if you're measuring the right things that show the impact they're having on the organization if you could show a department say Finance how much money they've saved the company that month that quarter and say they get a percent of that money imagine how impactful it is for them they're like holy crap I'm saved the company this much money by doing my job that's cool same with a customer success Department you're like we've increased the revenue that our customers bring in through their companies by X percent this quarter they're like that's so cool we've helped companies make that much more money for our company Prestige Labs we used to always show the people like this is how much we've made in commissions so to date Prestige Labs has made 16 million dollars in commissions for gym owners that's money that we don't take that's money that we've made that imagine how proud our team feels knowing that they've made people 16 million dollars that's crazy it's measuring the outcome of the meaning the third is p which is you're going to present results constantly okay so people say how do I present the results constantly it's like I'm showing you the kpi you understand the why blah blah right typically the best way to present results is to share stories so it's sharing stories on your team meetings on your huddles of client wins of the results driven it's always sharing stories and so when I say presenting all the results constantly I mean sharing stories constantly hey did you see what happened over here with this client the other day hey did you see what the finance department did that just saved our sale the other day hey and it's just constantly sharing the stories the best way to do that is to do it on company huddles and Company meetings the a or the fourth piece to it is acknowledge the person of cause so a lot of times when you're sharing all these things you're kind of talking big what you want is you want to actually call people out and so a great way that you can do this in terms of calling people out is you can just do shout outs so a great way to do that is like on a slack channel for example have a shout out section she's like hashtag shout out it's just like anytime someone does something good shout them out on that channel it's super simple the next piece is C which is Cheer them off and so this one is really encouraging people okay so when you look at encouragement it's basically encouragement and recognition which is cheering them on giving them positive reinforcement for doing the thing and so if you look at it it's like a feedback cycle a huge piece of that is positive reinforcement so how are you going to positively reinforce the impact this person is having on the organization and it's usually just positive encouragement and the best person they could hear that from is their boss the last piece of impact are arguably the most important is tea which is tie it back to the mission okay A company that does this extremely well and almost all of them do are all non-profits you know what they say when you buy the girl style cookies they tell you how much money from buying the Girl Scout cookies is going to go towards this cause as save this many children it's the same with something like underground railroads you're like if you donate x amount of money you save x amount of children from Human Trafficking if you can do that within your company then imagine the impact people feel when they're doing their work that's why so many people go and they love working for non-profits because they feel the impact you have the same elements of a non-profit you just make profits so you can figure out the impact just as easily you just need to take the time to sit down and think it through so after impact the third practice in terms of retaining people is fair pay and this is a super controversial topic and listen I've tried all different ways of paying people and I have come to the learning that paying people fairly and paying people as much as you can for the most part or what I would say is not as much as you can but top of the market is the best way to retain people and so a lot of people argue with me for this a lot of Studies have been done on this less higher paid employees produce more than more lower paid employees okay so this stemmed from Henry Ford Henry Ford actually called this one of his best cost cutting moves when he doubled the wages of all of his workers and he actually increased the productivity and the revenue of the company and the profitable company if it you have a customer who pays you 10 times as much as all the other customers do you pay them more attention do you do more for them you're thinking yes wouldn't you do more for an employer who paid you more than everybody else it's a reciprocity factor and here's the other thing is that the opportunity cost or the loss that you have if you leave is much greater than if you were to leave somewhere that doesn't pay well so if you look at opportunity costs they're like oh I could leave and go do this over here and then you're like but nowhere else is really going to pay me this while like it would take me all this work to make as much money as I make here the fourth piece to retaining employees is recognition and guys I have a whole video in recognition and so you can go watch it here but recognition there's really four ways that you can recognize people there's outcome effort Milestone and value okay and so what I mean by that is value-based recognition would be that you're recognizing people when they act upon them values of the company outcome-based recognition is that when you recognize people for hitting outcomes that are expected from their role effort-based recognition is recognizing the hard work or the effort someone is putting in towards getting an initiative done and then Milestone based is basically recognizing the progress someone has made towards completing a project and so if you don't feel like you're recognizing employees at all right now here's my suggestion take one of those and start saying every time someone exemplifies this core value or every time someone completes a third of this project or every time someone gets this specific outcome I'm going to recognize them and start with one because here's why people go wrong they hear me say this and they say I'm gonna go try and do all of it it's like dude I can't even do all of it okay that's ideal but that's not real life and so just trying to do one and I think the easiest one to start with is anytime you see someone exemplify a certain core value pick one of your core values go recognize those people the last piece to employee retention is community and here's what's really easy if you can create Community within a client case you can create Community within an employee base a lot of people don't get this if you've seen this formula Russell Brunson has it's creating a mass movement okay there's three aspects to it there's the charismatic leader there's the cause or the culture and there's a new opportunity where the vehicle of change okay so let me explain to you how I have those in my company so charismatic leader is myself and Alex right we're the charismatic leaders of acquisition.com then there's the culture if you guys hear us talk about it it's like sincere Candor competitive greatness unimpeachable character we Hammer those home and we use those all the time in our company and people are hearing us constantly saying those things because we're also out there putting all this content out it's not just for the outside it's not just for people like looking into our companies but also the people that we want to work in our company so the culture is stemming from our messaging the message that we want to document and share the best practices of building a world-class business and then we paint the picture for what that's going to look like what's our cause what's our reasoning well one day we want to create a school for entrepreneurship one day one of you that will help people who are 17 16 to 20 you want to be able to put all of our extra funds towards that and create something really free from all the essentially what I call sawdust from all the wood we've been sawing within the company creates sawdust which is all the extra leftovers which is like we have all this content we have all these trainings we have all these people we could create something pretty easily over here from people who are really young to figure out where they want to do with their life it's not college so that's our cause and then the third piece to it is what's our new vehicle the value acceleration Capital method right which is what we call van and so that is our unique vehicle because we say hey we're not pee we're not management consulting we're not a mastermind we're also not BC what are we we're like we're van we're this new thing that guess what we made it up but it's a new vehicle for how we're going to accomplish our goals and so if you're trying to think how do I create a community for people community is created by having those three aspects a company where every person has one friend in the organization have 12 percent more profits than companies don't it's crazy that in itself is how you retain employees and so if you look at it holistically it sounds like a lot I know if I were you what I would do is I would look at the five things that I've just mentioned I would pick one to start with and I might pick one of the five things in that one to start with and you just take one step if you could just do one thing every quarter two to three years from now you're gonna have like turn busting machine I was a lame word but it is what it is you're gonna have a company that nobody wants to leave okay so just one step at a time don't overwhelm yourself so overall if you want to keep people on your team it's really these two things right it's fulfilling on your promises and then it's retention which creates Ascension right Ascension is part of retention and so that is how you keep eight players on your team I'm going to make a couple more videos that I think I want to make on more tactically so I'd love to hear in the comments like what are the tactics in terms of retention that were a little unclear or I could go extrapolate out a little more would love to hear that in the comments and again if you haven't seen part one in terms of how to get a players go ahead and watch that video it's linked here and let me know what you thought