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How He Cut Turnover 40% in Six Months | Clark Ingram · UNLEASHED By LoyaltyOps

• Clark Ingram: what is the goal for customer returns in a manufacturing company? Zero. What is the manufacturing defects? Zero. What's the goal for patient falls in a hospital? Zero. Okay? So now are we going to get to zero turnover? No. We should have the same onus on us that everybody else has. those best companies out there, they don't have a lot of turnover. They're way below industry standard. And that's the problem that I see. Too many people they're judging themselves against the industry standard. But wait a minute. Everybody else is judging themselves against much higher standards than that. Mickey Anderson: Welcome back to Unleashed. Today we're talking about the real reasons people leave good organizations, why engagement has flatlined globally despite trillions of dollars and untold hours invested, and what it takes to keep your team through this wild AI decade. Today I'm welcoming Clark Ingram, founder of People Profits and author of CHURN. Welcome to the show, Clark. Clark Ingram: Thank you very much. Mickey Anderson: hiring and keeping people retention, engagement are all big challenges that organizations are facing right now. And I'd love to get your take on what's causing this engagement flatline and how we should be looking at this problem from our own organizations. Clark Ingram: I think that one of the things that got started on culture was Peter Drucker said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. and I believe that's true, but I also think it's equally true that employee turnover eats culture for breakfast. If you're running 30, 40 percent turnover in your company, you may have some agreed on things with some of your employees. And you really don't you don't have the ability to have a true culture. my background's a little different than the typical HR person. I'm a finance guy. I s to this day I still see myself as a finance guy. And I got thrown into HR by a CEO who needed results. And so in the entire time I've been here in HR for 30 years now. Is that it seems like we kind of de evolved into building these awesome cultures that are wrapped around activities. dinners and pizza parties and taco trucks that's not what employees are looking for. you invite me to a pizza party, I'll eat the pizza, okay? there's no question about that. But when it gets right down to it to engage into a company, that's not what I'm looking for. And the funny thing about it is, Mickey, the studies have all been done on this and the answers have been known all along. And everybody actually agrees that this is true. And that is one of the very first things that that the employees are looking for are shared goals and value. They want to know when I'm working, 10 hours a day, how is that helping our company go on the journey that we're going on? the more that you can tie those two together, the better. And then secondly, values. I have a buddy of mine who graduated from Texas AM he went to work for Exxon and he worked there for 40 years. He had numerous jobs within Exxon, but he stayed at Exxon. I personally could not work at Exxon. I am too entrepreneurial of a person, and it would drive me crazy. And that's another thing is you're trying to get those kind of people where you're agreed on those kind of values, integrity and respect. if you're gonna say you're gonna do something, you better do it. And then the second thing is we all have a God given inherent worth. Whether we are the CEO or we're the junior part time janitor, it doesn't matter. We all are a human being and should be respected for that. communication, we all know that. I mean it it's so hard to get communication right because there's so many ways you can screw it up, And then transparency. tell people, okay, yes, this is this was a mistake. We made a mistake. We need to fix this. Here's what we're doing. We need your input. All of that kind of thing. And all that starts building it up. And then employee growth, whether it's on the personal side or on the professional side. That and and then lastly is just the environment. I'm looking at behind you and you've got a very organized thing behind you and so do I, And most employees they don't want chaos. Even if they live in chaos, they don't want chaos. And they also want clean, Those are the things that engage people. And unfortunately a lot of times the very reasons why people are leaving are the very same reasons they're not engaging. Mickey Anderson: that's such a great point. there were a few nuggets we're gonna chew on there But the first one I want to talk about too is that clarity that you talked about at the beginning, how everything ties towards what we're doing and how it connects to the organization and where we're going. conceptually it's a really simple concept for us to all understand. And most of the time we think we're doing that. So if you have a a CEO or a leader in front of you who it says, well, we we've been working on that. We've been doing that. What are some of the ways that you would challenge them or help them identify that actually this is the problem? People don't see that connection between what we're doing, why we're doing it, and the work that they're doing on the ground. Clark Ingram: Think the first thing you have to start off with is unfortunately the way I see the C suite and HR are doing this right now. They're conflicting and they're not on the same page, they're not talking the same language, et cetera, et cetera. And so one of the things that I tell the HR people that they have to do up front. And what I have found in 30 years is that about half of the turnover is being created by HR. Because HR is not doing certain things. Now here's the problem is a lot of HR people, especially you see this on LinkedIn a lot, is that they're just blaming leadership. Leadership creates all turnover. I I have not found that. generally most organizations do not do a good job of telling people who they are as an employer. Why should you come work for me? why should you pick me over those other people? where we are right now in the workforce, they those other people have lots of choices. And the better that the person is, the more choices they have. The more skills they have, etcetera, etc. You better be giving them what I just listed off as what they're looking for. we need to do a better job of explaining up front. I just finished doing a consulting job. And on their careers page when I got there, it all it really said was, our people are our greatest asset. Well, that doesn't tell you anything. Okay. So Mickey Anderson: Everybody says that. Yeah. Clark Ingram: yeah, yeah, everybody said it exactly. They say it. and so the next thing is that who were they as an employer? I asked a bunch of the employees to tell me, you know, what's the five reasons you work here? And what they came back was and I wrote up an employer brand based on what the employees said and I handed it to the COO, who then handed it to the CEO, and both of them said, This is who we are. that's what employee candidates are looking for on your careers base. Who are you? Are you that more bureaucratic, monolithic, very powerful organization? Or are you a company that got started five years ago? But you're doing very well. both of those are very attractive employers. those are the kind of things that HR needs to fix first. That way they can already show the C suite that, I'm already making you millions over here. what happens is like at the hospital within six months. Our trend rate for turnover went down by 40%. We've staffed from the mid-80s to the mid-90s. Right now, the mid-90s is about as good as you're gonna get. Here's the reason why. You got those hard-to-fill jobs where the where the demand for that job is here and the supply is here. they just don't exist, And that's the problem. But once you do all that, that gives you a lot of power. you have now created a lot of value and a lot of political clout. Now you can go into the C-suite, and for instance, in just about every organization I've ever worked with, Mickey, over the years, there's been at least one VP, if not a couple of VPs, with what I call the VP disease. And that is I'm a VP. I don't have to play by the rules. I get to play by whatever rules I want to make up, and et cetera. And I reject that. I've I've been VP for 31 years, the way I always saw it is I had greater responsibility. The higher you are in the hierarchy, the more responsibility you have. And to play not just by the rules, but not even have a taint that you're doing anything outside of rules. But at that point, and in my opinion, I'm not going to go to that CEO and start talking to him about one of the VPs or something until I've already built all that capital. And then at that point, go to him and say, okay, seriously, you know, and here's the really bad news. I put out an article on LinkedIn today talking about hypocrisy and how the employees see the hypocrisy. they all know who that VP is, they all know. about this going on and that going on. So you're only fooling yourself. one of the things I tell people all the time, both as an employee but also as a leader, be brutally honest with yourself. look at yourself the way everybody else looks at you. Okay. Are you living up to that standard that you should be living up to? But you have to fix the other things first, then go to the C-suite and start having those conversations. Mickey Anderson: it's interesting. One of the conversations we have a lot is the time and attention and resource put on client acquisition, it it really should be reflected the same way with talent acquisition and retention, The time, attention, focus, all the things that you're doing to keep clients happy and get clients in the door and keep them you should be spending the same amount of time and resource on your people because they're the ones who are gonna service and keep the company growing and keep those clients happy. Clark Ingram: Mm-hmm. Mickey Anderson: One of the things you mentioned was values earlier. And I think values often get slapped on a wall. and we we talk about values, everyone knows our values, but do they and what does that look Clark Ingram: What is that? Mickey Anderson: like in the day-to-day? So when you see an organization that has values, but they're not really being reflected in the way employees are working together or being recruited and maintained, how do you approach that problem of making sure that the day-to-day reflects those company values? Clark Ingram: Very, very sad story for you. we had a particular organization, we had worked on our values and we were reworking our values, and we made a big, big deal. The CER was talking about it on a daily basis, So at one point we we had re we had refinished our values and we come out with a bunch of other values. And Everybody like in this list that I just came up with with things of what's engagement, one of them is integrity. I mean, you know, how can I trust you, Mickey, if you don't show me integrity? How why would you trust me if I don't show integrity back, right? And so here's what happened. the CEO was standing up in front of a rather large group of employees and he was going down these values and he got to the word integrity. And literally there was a wave of eye rolling Every single employee in that group rolled their eyes. after the meeting was over, I went to the CEO and I said, Did you see that? And he said, No. He didn't say that. And I said, every single employee That's the word that that tells you right there. That is our number one word. And just so you'll know, we did have a couple of VP diseases in that company. And they were not showing integrity. And you had no reason to trust them unfortunately, this is something I talk a lot about, and that is you only need one person. Whether they're in the VP ranks or the directors or the managers or or just an an employee that you don't do anything about. we had a situation one time where we had an employee and he treated everybody so badly but it was another one of those things that he okay, he brought some value, yeah. But he was killing that value many times over. that's the truth of the matter. It doesn't have to be a VP, it's just that much more worse as you go up the up the ladder. the sincerity, there's a reason why sincerity is number one on the list, for instance, one of my sad stories about myself, and there was a lady in the manufacturing company one time, and I never could remember her name. just a blind spot, you know. but here's the issue. I could always remember that her look she had a grandson that played junior football. And that's all I had to say. That's all I I you know, I I I I tried to call people by their names and all that because that's important, right? But at the same time, she never knew that I didn't could remember her name because I showed that I at least had connected with her on something else. And that's really important. I don't care how many people you have in your in your building, that's another good reason to cut your turn over. you're having the same people that you're dealing with and all that. And you can work with them more about about their weaknesses and things like that. But you've got to sincerely show off those values. And keep in mind all you have to do is screw it up by this much and by the time it gets to the employees it's this much, And the whole story that they're gonna come up with is gonna be a lot worse than what actually happened. Mickey Anderson: that moment of having to decide, can this person be coached and developed to the point where they can become a a great leader, a great contributor, aligned with our values, or are they at a place where there's no real potential for that, the risk is too high or the damage is done too far? Navigating that decision, a lot of people struggle with. So from your perspective and experience, when we're looking at an employee, maybe it's a VP with VP disease, so to speak, Clark Ingram: Mm-hmm. Mickey Anderson: how do you identify or what does the process look like for understanding whether this person can develop into that role and become a a values aligned contributor or if it's time to let them go and move on? Clark Ingram: I think that a good portion of this is their own self perception. And unfortunately we've all met people like this where they've never done anything wrong. It's always somebody else's fault. this whole issue of when somebody says that, that they that yeah, it was it was that person's fault or that per whatever, then that tells you that unfortunately they're probably a good ways down the road. of not being able to really look at themselves and if they're willing to accept counseling and accept that, okay, this behavior that I'm doing is inappropriate. the other thing that you run into is how long has this been going on? Is this something that's been discussed over and over and over again. And and this is one of the things I talk about in my book is the really good employees, they don't want you to fire people, you know, and just firing them left and right. And they don't want that. what they want though is they want some sort of resolution. And if that means having the person go away, then that's one thing. But most people that's not what they want But at the same time, somewhere along the line, the employees are going to go, okay, look, we've done everything we've done, we've tried everything, we've we've put we gave this person a corporate coach. And I think that's fair that of letting people know that, okay, this is what we're doing, these are the different things that are going on. But at the same time, good employees do not want to work for a company that puts up with bad behavior. What they want is and this is this is my whole thing, one of one of my kind of goals that I tell people, I want less people making more money, being hyper productive, and having that organization be very successful while they're being very happy. there's been numerous times I've I've done something where we've had four people in a department. And we figured out that one of them truly wasn't putting anything into the deal. And all of a sudden we realized that, you know, we could do that department with just the other three people and take the money, you know, some of the money we're giving this person here, spread it among these three people here. I've had that happen many times where that the company has come out way ahead on the deal. somewhere along the line, you cannot allow that just to keep on going. Because the employees are gonna say, Okay, we've had enough. You should have done something Mickey Anderson: Mm-hmm. Clark Ingram: about it by Mickey Anderson: it's an erosion over time. And a lot of times it's new Clark Ingram: Good word. Mickey Anderson: to leadership, New it's new to me, a new problem to me, but it's been there and it's only being brought to me now. So it's not new to the organization or new to the team. One of the things that I I want to chat about too is the environment within an organization. I think it gets very little attention. We focus a lot on process, on workflow. We focus a lot on our clients, But we don't spend a n a lot of time really thinking about the environment that creates great high performing teams that keeps people engaged and and pushing themselves for the company's sake. And so I'd love to hear what you've seen works and maybe doesn't work in terms of creating a a really culturally aligned, high performing environment within a company. Clark Ingram: So I there's a couple of stories that that I that I think about and one one of them in involved a situation again, kind of back to the to the toxic employee. They came up with an answer to that problem. And he was he was a lawyer for a large company. And what they literally did was they dismissed him from the company, they bought him an office up in the tower. we were in a large corporate tower. And his one and only client was us. the only people that could go see him was the CEO and the general counsel. Nobody else, he he was not allowed to come down, and no one else was allowed to go up to see him because that yes, it was truly that bad. And that's part of your environment, you know, when you're allowing those people Dude, and I mean, literally, you know, he he he would leave blood on the walls just walking down the hallway. He was that kind of person. It was just ridiculously bad. another story that I was a manufacturing company and one time they changed out the lights from fluorescent lights to LED lights, and the brightness was like twofold. And all of a sudden everybody was like, my God, we can actually see what we're doing. And that it was one of those things. They didn't even realize how dark it was until all of a sudden somebody turned the lights on. Yeah. And the other thing that was kind of cool about that was that they also realized just how much dust this was a a h a low tolerance manufacturing company And it was it was dirty. And they all realized it was dirty, but they didn't realize it was dirty because it was dark. The other thing, and just and this is kind of close to your issue of environment, was in that same company, we also started doing scanning. So that we had this piece of metal that was moving down the line from one guy to the next, and they were scanning in and out, after they analyzed some of the scanning, they found out that some of the people who they thought were really good employees were not that great of employees. All of a sudden now they had objective information that they were looking at. And some of the people that they thought were low level employees were some of their best employee. Yeah. I always think that's so funny as as a manager and all that of just, you intentionally, I mean you you're not going out of your way to be biased, but you are because you're a human being, But all of those kinds of things works into that environment, the difference, for instance, I worked for a company one time that was an oil and gas company. And oil and gas companies are really w weather known for we we want everything done yesterday, okay, and they're in this big rush. Well, a lot of that came from the old oil field days a long time ago, And that's really not that true anymore. Versus I had I worked for a hospital recently, and their whole thing was we're more worried about getting done right. We're gonna do a CAT scan on this guy. We're gonna make sure that the CAT scan is a good one that the that the doctor can look at and really see everything. And if it takes a little bit more time to do it, then we're just fine with that. And I think that's another thing you have to balance that of what kind of environment are I mean, are okay, the deadline was today, well, is it because the the people are not ready yet? Is it because they're truly working on it and they're going to give you a better answer tomorrow, or are they just screwing around and they waited to the last minute, to me, that's that's part of the environment for managers all the way from the supervisors up of trying to really understand, how are the employees responding to everything I just said. Mickey Anderson: it's so interesting when you start to really understand the power of those objective measures in understanding employee performance versus, you know, likability and character trait and you know th those sorts of things. But then also, I mean, I worked with a a company, they called themselves a precision manufacturer and there were errors in every email I received. And it w it was it just made me laugh. And that was one of the conversations. It was like, okay, the how you do anything is how you do everything. And if you're gonna call yourself precision, what does that actually need to look like across the organization, not just in this one tiny piece? So your environment really does need to be set up to align with your values, align with Clark Ingram: Mm-hmm. Mickey Anderson: your purpose as the organization, and set your employees up to be able to do the best work they can. AI is on everyone's mind, and I think it's on a lot of HR professionals' minds as well. They're being tasked with so many things from governance over what AI tools people are using. They're also Clark Ingram: Mm-hmm. Mickey Anderson: leveraging tools like AI to recruit and find talent. And so I'm curious from your perspective, from the HR perspective and the organization as a whole, how can we best leverage AI or is it Becoming more of a distraction and hurting us in terms of finding the right people? Is there a balance here in using it? Clark Ingram: All the above. Right now, you know, we hear about AI just constantly, And I think that there are going to be certain areas, especially in HR, in customer service, And I know this is a radical concept for some HR people, but they're in customer service too. The c the customers are are a different group of people. one of the things I've always done, I I put the same standard on HR people responding to employees that we put on our customer service press when we're dealing with our clients. The exact same thing. You know, twenty four hours and what we got down to was ninety nine percent of the time the answer was immediate. You know, just a matter of looking it up and doing what we had to do, right? I think that there are a lot of different things on I will be able to help us that we know at this time. And one of the things I'm not, I don't consider myself to be an AI expert. I'm keeping up with it just like everybody else is. But where are they gonna be two years from now, five years from now, ten years from now? There's the question I I would love to know the answer to. and they don't know. that's the truth of the matter. But I think there's a lot of customer service things that we can do. How many of the questions in an HR department where an employee is coming in and they're just looking for a form? Or they're l they have a relatively simple question, And a good half the questions I would say roughly that we were getting were relatively simple things, the other thing that I would say is a lot of your recruitment kind of things, once you set up your system, but here's the here's one of the problems. so I again I'm kind of the the the John the Baptist here. I'm kind of the heretic guy looking at HR, so I'll be a heretic here for a second. Here's my problem one of my problems with HR is So many times this person applies for a job that they're not qualified for. But how many times does HR look at that resume and go, yeah, but he's perfect fit for this job over here? And that was one of the things, that was the charge that we always had was, okay, first off, if we've got a good resume and the person is clearly educated especially, is if I've got it coming from an employee who I trust, how do we fit this person into our company? Or can we? AI can't do that. here's the other side to this that I wish that more people would talk about, one of my big things is finding the organizationally specific root causes of your turnover. that's not going to be done by AI. That's somebody with a brain looking past the symptoms, you know, and that's another thing AI is good at. They're good at giving you data and all that, but that's that's your first why. You got four more to go. And that's a human brain thinking. I'm a little concerned that we're gonna have people who are gonna go, no, no, A guy can do this and do that, when it may not necessarily be true. I think back to o again, over thirty years of finding those root causes, none of them were at a surface level. they were all deep down in there. of what's really going on here. And unfortunately that's gonna be fortunately and fortunately. the other thing is, Mikey, I think I've got a few years on you. And Mickey Anderson: Yeah. Clark Ingram: so I've been through a few more generations of all of this, okay? And I Mickey Anderson: Yeah. Clark Ingram: mean we s way back when we we had a thing called pencil and paper, okay? And yeah, yeah. And and one of the things that ha happened every single time We went through another generation, you know, emails and you know all the rest of it, that they always made it out like everybody's gonna lose their jobs. yeah, and this this new generation of tech is gonna take over the world and blah blah blah, and it never happened. And matter of fact, it it the way it always seems to work out is instead of eliminating jobs. All they really do is kind of morph some jobs. we're going to do away with some of these easy, low level customer service jobs. What jobs are now going to be created to be able to do that? And are you going to have people going through there, figuring out ways that it will pop out to know that okay, we we've got something out some human eyes need to look for. Mickey Anderson: I think just based off of what I'm seeing as well, we're already seeing the morphing of jobs. One of my my favorite examples recently is IKEA, So they brought in AI to take over the low level customer service. But instead of those, you know, I think it was eighteen thousand employees and getting rid of them, they retrained them in interior design. AI-enabled interior design, right? And built on another Clark Ingram: Yeah, yeah. Mickey Anderson: billion-dollar arm of their business. And I think there's a lot of creativity, there's a lot of judgment needed. But I don't know that it's going to be this black and white switch, that a lot of people are expecting. One of the things that we've talked about a lot are the root causes. I'd love to hear a few examples of what you've seen in terms of root cause that maybe the top few that CEOs should really be thinking about or leaders in HR should be thinking about and looking for. and then I wanna kinda transition into the way that HR functions now in most most organizations, which is kind of there in a backroom that nobody talks to or sees unless somebody's getting hired or fired, right? Compared to how organizations can properly leverage HR really as a profit tool as opposed to, you know, this form filing Clark Ingram: Yeah. Mickey Anderson: cabinet. so let's kick off with the root causes and then we can chat a little bit more about HR in general. Clark Ingram: I'll tell you the very first one that I ever ran into was we were training these guys up and they were senior technicians and these were the people who made us money. backbone of our company. And what was happening was that they were going through our training program and their value was going up like this, And this was over a period of a couple of years But the problem was that their compensation was not keeping track with that. And we got to a certain point or our competition and there was a linchpin in the training called tech school. And all of our competition knew these tech sch and whether or not they graduated tech school, they were immediately worth more money. the moment they graduated from tech school, our competition was yeah. Yeah. And so we were training our competition. They had turned our greatest asset into a liability. That's competition. I don't feel bad about those guys. it's even more stupid on our part. Exxon was one of our major clients. And as they were going through training and everything, they would finish these modules, it would show up on their rate sheet, and Exxon would pay us more money if they had finished a couple of those modules. So we're getting more money, but our guy is not getting more, and this is mainly guys. and all we had to do was just say, Okay, Exxon's paying us a dollar, let's give thirty-five cents of it to the guy. He's happy, you know, and the next thing you know, he's going through this training. He's also being rewarded. what ended up happening, our turnover stopped immediately. Because no longer, when they got to tech school, they were now making more money than what our competition was or offering us. I had another company they were hiring the first 12 people in line. They had some manufacturing, some low-level non-skilled, semi-skilled. they needed 10 people. They'd hire the first 12 people online. Why would they hire 12 people? Because generally, at least a couple of people which wouldn't show up. I said, okay, we're gonna do put a little bit of selection in here and start asking some basic questions and very quickly we could see through. the ones that were not going to show up, that weren't going to pass the drug test, that weren't and so we we cut their turnover by 30% just by that one process. we were counting them as a turnover when they never saw the inside of the building beyond the HR department. there's lots of stuff like that. I don't want to get into a bidding road. And if I'm talking to some a candidate and all they're talking about is money, then I'm done talking to Okay. I'm gonna Mickey Anderson: Red flag. Yep. Clark Ingram: I'm gonna give you a wonderful environment. We're gonna do everything we can to live up to our values. We're gonna make sure that your manager doesn't treat you badly, and you're gonna leave for 50 cents more? how many good employees have I talked to that said, Clark, if you could fix this problem, I'd take a 50 cent cut and pay? If you could just eliminate this obstacle out of my way, I'll work here for less money. And I don't never save a month. Mickey Anderson: Heard that so many times too. specifically middle managers, a lot of times where they'll say, Hey, look, like I love my job. This thing is driving me insane. And I would take a personal reduction in salary to get that fixed, it's it's wild to me how they're identifying the key things that need to get fixed. And yet it it usually just gets filed away. filed away. Now on the HR organization relationship here, nowadays HR is starting to become a little bit, I would say, more respected. We're seeing more HR leaders at the leadership table as opposed to kind of filed away and out. But I think there's still a lot of work to do. From an organizational perspective, What do you think needs to change in terms of the way that we look at HR and leverage HR for our business and its growth? Clark Ingram: one of my my sad stories about that was I I know of an organization where the HR department is literally in another building rather far from everybody else. Okay, everybody else is over here and they're way over there. And to me, I want to be able to walk through the building. And one of my big things, Mickey, is I always wanted to have people in every department who could tell me what was going on. I don't listen to exit interviews. I mean, I've given plenty of exit interviews and I've never told the truth yet. I've always told you know whatever they wanted to hear. So now I want I want to have somebody in that department who's willing to just stop by my office real quick. And just say, okay, here's why that person really left. Okay, this is what the real dealer was. that helps a lot. for instance, I've been in situations where I was reporting to the CEO. There's been times I've reported to the COO. I've never actually reported to the CFO. And I don't think that's a great idea. as a ex-finance person saying that, but so much of what I'm doing is for the COO. those times when I reported to the CEO I spent 90% of my time dealing with the COO. And I think that's the way it is. the problem that I see a lot is HR people who are are not focused on an employee turnover up front. Because that has to be done up front. And I think that the other thing, this customer service thing of you know, that was another thing that happened in one of my other organizations is people would go in there and never get an answer. Never. And that that to me is just ridiculously bad. I think that the HR people honestly, they need to take on a little bit more of the burden. You know, in my book I talk about zero turnover. And I think this is really key to your question, and that is the what is the goal for customer returns in a manufacturing company? Zero. What is the manufacturing defects? Zero. What's the goal for patient falls in a hospital? Zero. Okay? So now are we going to get to zero turnover? No. We should have the same onus on us that everybody else has. for one thing, if you'll notice those best companies out there, they don't have a lot of turnover. They're way below industry standard. And that's the problem that I see. Too many people they're judging themselves against the industry standard. But wait a minute. Everybody else is judging themselves against much higher standards than that. And HR comes along and says, We're good because we're yeah, we're mediocre, so we're good. Yeah. No, that's not acceptable. Mickey Anderson: it comes back to those objective measures, When we're looking at HR, what are the objective measures that we should be looking at in terms of success, in terms of really evaluating performance there? And that turnover is so key. It tells you so much about an organization's culture right off the bat. Clark Ingram: the last five years, that company with the technicians at the very beginning, the last four or five years I was there, we did not lose a senior sick technician during the entire time. we were not overpaying them. we had figured out the things that they really cared about and we took care of. Mickey Anderson: Compensation's important, but there are so many other things that matter. And if you can look at it from a holistic perspective in the employee seat of what makes me really want to stay and give my best here, compensation's just a sliver of that. Clark Ingram: Mm-hmm. Mickey Anderson: there's so much more to look at. And I think it's really important that HR and leadership across the board really consider that and and work that into the day-to-day so that people are taken care of. we've got a leader who is starting to take a look at churn, starting to look at HR differently and wants to make some positive change in their organization. Do you have any advice for the listener that they can take and and leverage from today? Clark Ingram: One of my taglines is first stop the bleeding. if somebody comes into an emergency room, what's the first thing they ask? Is the person bleeding? And if they are, they focus completely on that first because anything else you do for them isn't going to work if you don't stop the bleeding. The same thing that I feel about losing people in turnover is that's the first step. That will tell you a whole lot of things. It'll tell you why people are not engaging and also tell you where the real problems are in your company. Mickey Anderson: Great advice. Clark, for the listeners who want to learn more about you and and check you out online, where should they head? Clark Ingram: Well, they can go to peopleprofits.com. They can also go to clarkingram.com. It'll take you to the same place. I've got my book, Churn C H U R N. it's on Amazon and all the other online booksellers and everything. My book is not a theory book, it's a how-to book. It's the process that I do and how it's different from HR. last I'm on LinkedIn, Clark A. Ingram and got a pretty fair presence there. Mickey Anderson: Fantastic. And listeners, please be sure to subscribe and follow Unleash so you don't miss another episode.