Challenge

This organization provides food, nutrition and dining services to the healthcare and senior living markets and employs more than 14,000 employees in more than 450 locations. After conducting employee engagement surveys, this client rolled out an employee engagement initiative in support of its Operational Excellence focus,  based on the best-seller Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em: Getting Good People to Stay by Beverly Kaye and Sharon Jordan Evans.

Solution

CSI partnered with the organization to develop and implement a comprehensive and systemic strategy to embed talent-focused behaviors into the organization’s culture in an effort to increase employee engagement, decrease turnover and impact operational excellence.

Our retention and engagement program, Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em® was delivered to more than 6000 managers throughout the company. The concept of Stay Interviews was introduced; a series of sustainers were developed and integrated into the strategy (Daily Doses, ThoughtProvokers, Talent Talks) and managers received access to the Love ‘Em or Lose ‘Em @ Work® portal to integrate engagement into their everyday and one-on-one experiences.  One company goal was to eradicate manager high risk (Jerk) behaviors across the board.  On-going coaching (group and individual) continues to be available to this company’s managers to support this culture shift.

Bottom Line

Employee engagement rates went from 43% prior to this initiative to 72% at the last report, five years later.  Turnover rates dropped 15% and as the organization reported, “we have no other significant change to tie this drop to except that we are doing this,” referring to the Love ‘Em initiative.