Four Perspectives on MEE™: Who Benefits Most?

When half of the workforce is declining or surviving in the workplace, the instability that comes with it affects everyone.  

In fact, we’ve found that 60-90% of turnover happens within the first year of employment at an organization.  

The pain doesn’t simply come from the direct costs of replacing team members that leave believing that they can have their needs met better elsewhere. It is really felt in the lacking or half-hearted participation in the day-to-day environment that limits the potential of the organization, and everyone involved.  This problem affects people at all levels of the organization and within almost every industry.  

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Some industries are being hit much harder than others. The industry leading the national average quit rate is leisure and hospitality. Industries also being hit hard by high rates of turnover include:

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• Trade
• Transportation, warehousing and logistics
• Utilities
• Food services
• Professional and business services
• Private education and health services
• Health care and social assistance
• Retail trade
• Manufacturing
• Government
• Construction

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And even though everyone experiences it differently, it is critical that the solution attacks the problem in a unified and systematic way.

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Let’s explore four important perspectives within an organization and the benefit that building a Meaningful Employment Environment brings to each of them.

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• ‍Executive Leaders:  
  • ‍For leaders in executive positions, economic and industry pressures, and  performance measures have major impacts in how strategy is built and deployed within the organization.
  • The competition for attracting, developing, and retaining high quality team members is getting more difficult every day.
  • Demographic and societal shifts empower workers with more choice and higher expectations.  
  • Company turnover is also costing many organizations millions of dollars that are felt, if not seen, in the financial performance of the organization.  
  • This is further amplified by real challenges to meet strategic objectives based on the tactical issues that come from the perpetual loss of talent.

• ‍Operations Leaders:  
  • ‍Operational leaders feel instability in a very loud way when they have to sacrifice time that should be spent leading the team doing the work.  
  • When a frontline supervisor is entrenched deep in the day-to-day work rather than coaching a team member, the turnover looms large.  In this scenario, filling open positions should be exciting, but it becomes rather draining with repetition due to all of the constant interviews, paperwork and onboarding.
  • Leaders can feel the effect on morale, as well, when they have to schedule increasing amounts of overtime to make up for lower productivity from being short staffed. In addition to this, they themselves often don’t get the attention or development that they need to grow and thrive.

• ‍Human Resources Leaders:  
  • ‍In Human Resources, getting team members on the bus is a big part of the job. Turnover wouldn’t seem as problematic on the surface.  However, much like other departments, HR has strategic goals to improve as well.  
  • If the team is indefinitely at a deficit for talent, beneficial programs for developing people, especially leaders, aren’t able to get the attention that they deserve.  Make no mistake, filling leadership roles, whether by promotion or external hire, is significant.  
  • Without the ability to focus on upskilling and onboarding these roles properly, HR leaders (HR Directors and HR Managers) have to feel the ripple effects of bearing an additional load on administrative and people-oriented tasks that equipped leaders should be able to handle.  

• ‍Frontline Team Members:
  • ‍Often neglected in this conversation is the impact of workforce instability on the frontline team members who stay with the organization.  
  • These team members feel the disruption most of all, as they pick up additional work (and sometimes shifts) to cover for the inexperienced newcomers that are constantly coming in.  
  • New team members are more likely to create quality issues or have troubles with existing processes which can create a lot of frustration for more experienced workers who have to correct and coach in an expanded way.  
  • Just like everyone else, frontline team members desire to grow and thrive at work.  This becomes very difficult when their leaders are not available to give them the attention that they need to get properly developed and upskilled for new roles and promotions.  
  • A loss of trust is inevitable when they can’t form the relationships needed with leaders and have to deal with continually less people-friendly policies that get implemented because of the lack of experience and stability where the work happens.

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The case for solving the workplace instability issue is clear.  Everyone benefits from a team that is committed and participates in making the workplace better.  A Meaningful Employment Environment, guided by dignity and meaningful work, is the most effective way to meet team member needs and create an employer of choice.  

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Our next series of blogs will describe TrailPath’s systematic approach to building MEE™ using the NxtPath™ technology platform.  We will discuss how each of the four roles above experiences a learning and participation journey through this technology that will address their own desire to grow and thrive, while better connecting them with each other, to produce organizational stability.  Next time, we'll review how we PLAN by creating a path for this journey.

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‍About the Author:

Clint McCrystal is a leader in product development for TrailPath Workplace Solutions, a people and organizational development company. TWS offers a disciplined learning and business management system focused on building Meaningful Employment Environments™ where both people and organizations thrive. Prior to joining the TWS team, Clint developed people and processes as an operator, instructor, and consultant for multiple supply chain companies.

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About NxtPath^TM:

NxtPath is a Workplace and People Development Platform with the framework and technology needed to connect team members, leaders, and the organization. NxtPath is the way to build a Meaningful Employment Environment™ by driving improved organizational decision making, scaling leader behaviors, and increasing team member participation.

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NxtPath is leveraged by forward-thinking organizations looking to develop leaders and create a thriving workforce for 2024 and beyond. Organizations benefiting from NxtPath most are in industries with high volume of frontline workers including but not limited to: Logistics, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Retail, Distribution, Hospitality, Restaurant, and Construction. C-Level Executives, Human Resources(HR), Operations (OPS), and Operational Excellence (OpEx) are making the decision to leverage NxtPath in order to get ahead of the competition by addressing workforce challenges head-on, building a more stable and dependable workforce.

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