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A premier player in the U.S. meatpacking industry faced serious issues with absenteeism, long work hours, and a 50 percent turnover rate. Management knew it had a retention problem to fix, and it had an end goal in mind. The business case dictated that change was needed, but the legacy of the company was also on the line. After a collective leadership epiphany and paradigm shift, leadership demanded an enterprise commitment to change and the involvement of an old partner who had helped them before. Enter People Results.
Ten years after the initial engagement, People Results again partnered with the client—this time to help diagnose their issues, recommend changes, and help leaders implement them. The company needed training for its leadership—but what’s more, it needed to know that leadership would apply the lessons learned in training to their day-to-day work. Fortified with the full support of the CEO and senior corporate and plant leaders, we used proven tools such as evidence-based decision making, people analytics, and supervisor training to understand and attack the problem. By implementing a measurement approach that focused on the application of skills, accountability, and continual improvement, the client could be confident that their investment in training was making an impact, bettering their business, and contributing to a more positive work environment.
Issue:
- Leadership training was needed within the organization
- Employee sentiments about the employee experience, including interactions with front-line leaders, would be foundational to shaping training to address identified gaps
- To make a significant change, training would need to be carried from the classroom to the workplace
- The significant seven-figure, multi- year front-line leader experience would need to deliver measurable results to address the key people metrics that were negatively impacting operational efficiency (for example, safety, productivity, turnover, inadequate staffing, absenteeism)
Action:
- Conducted 160 focus groups with 1,300 employees
- Developed a comprehensive initiative across all organizational levels, which included an annual employee opinion survey, a leadership development training series, and the creation of employee communication channels
to improve the delivery and consumption of company information - Collected follow-up data about learning transfer and support after every training module
- Showed correlations between leader behavior change and employee engagement and the resulting impact on operational efficiency
Result:
- Supervisors felt significantly more engaged and could now act as the company’s new “chief retention officers”
- With management so positively focused, employees took notice and gave management credit for its efforts
- Just one year later, surveys showed that employees felt 26 percent more valued by their employer and 33 percent more likely to remain with the company for the next 12 months
- At the time of publishing, People Results continues work with this client—future work will further determine the impact of these efforts on retention, engagement, and business success
Have questions?
Call People Results at 877.448.9741 or contact us online for more information.