Making Employee Retention Personal: Focusing on Safety

Elements of Safety

Safety sits at the bottom of the hierarchy representing the most basic needs of any employee. Your staff need to feel free from harm to bring value to your company. Lacking freedom from harm, employees will tend to churn within 90 days and often within 30. If your company is experiencing turnover in the first hours, days, or month, you likely have at least one problem with safety.

Safety includes three components: physical, financial, and emotional. Physical safety ensures your employees work in an environment free from threats of physical harm or injury. . Many manufacturing environments, for example, have real physical dangers where employees can be permanently harmed. These companies, however, have several safety protocols mitigating the inherent danger, which allows staff to feel safe despite the danger.

A recent Whistle manufacturing client was seeing high attrition in the first week of employment, sometimes on the first day (at lunch). The client was frustrated and unclear about the cause of the churn. It turned out that a recently promoted safety manager was focusing the first half day of on-boarding to safety training. That person’s approach to safety training was to dive into the details of all the dangers on the manufacturing floor, so everyone would be aware of them. Unfortunately, this caused many new hires to become so anxious about the dangers at the company they left during lunch on day one. They didn’t feel safe.

Financial safety provides staff compensation sufficient to address their most basic needs. The lack of financial safety can cause employees to be distracted at work, experience high levels of stress and anxiety and depart the company for any increase in wages. 

When a Whistle client used the Employee Loyalty Index (ELI) to pinpoint strengths and challenges in the company culture, financial insecurity peaked for one of the locations. While not pervasive across the company, one specific location was paying lower-than-standard wages. Turnover was higher at that location, but, prior to the ELI, the cause was not clear. Once the cause was identified, it became clear the savings in lower wages were being dwarfed by the additional costs of higher turnover. Ironically, paying people a little more in this area of the business reduced overall costs by providing financial safety and reducing turnover. 

Emotional safety creates an environment where employees feel free from harassment or discrimination. This could include policies that affect workers broadly, such as requiring people to work on holidays of a religious minority group. Or it could include a failure to protect the emotional safety of an individual. Unwanted sexual attention, differential treatment based on a person’s ethnicity, or leaving someone out of an event because of a disability (rather than providing accommodations) are examples of individual level experiences that undermine emotional safety.  An environment without emotional safety sows the seeds of anxiety and resentment, and causes people to withdraw from their work. 

When employees feel emotionally safe, they are more productive, stay at a company longer and experience fewer accidents. Just prior to the pandemic a client wanted to send an executive to Saudi Arabia for a 3 month assignment. The executive declined the assignment because the environment was hostile to gay people. That person didn’t feel emotionally safe.

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https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236198/create-culture-psychological-safety.aspx