Welcome to the third video in the series. We've been talking about the strength of your team and your employee turnover and how this might affect your business. If you want to understand whether or not you've got a management problem that's creating other problems you've got to understand what's going on with your team.

In the first two questions I walked you through the initial part of how to evaluate your employee turnover.

But after you have an understanding of who's left you and why, what comes next? In this this video we're going to take a look at your current team.

We want to take a look at your team’s age.

No! Not their birthdays! That has nothing to do with it.

We're interested in how long they’ve been together and how long they’ve been doing things your way as a team. When teams have been together for a good amount of time they tend to communicate better and pick up on each other's cues.
Things tend to flow more easily.

The length of time your team has been together has a big impact on the quality of your product; your client’s satisfaction; and the efficiency of your processes regardless of whether or not you have the most efficient or best process around.

A good rule of thumb here is that it takes a person about two years to master their role in a given business. People who have similar prior experience in another company can master the role in your business faster, but there's still a bit of a learning curve…

The reasons for this are twofold…
First, the processes and culture in your business are unique to your company. So there’s a break-in period for someone to get used to how you do things.

Secondly, there are things that happen and problems that pop up.
Some of these things don’t happen very often. They happen so infrequently that the first time they happen it literally takes a person hours to figure out how to deal with it. But the next time they see it, it’s a fifteen minute event because they mastered it last time.

Bottom line: I want to know how much mastery you have on your team.

As a bonus to this, I want to get a feel for how engaged your team is, do they feel at home in their work.

If I were walking around in your business, one of the things I would look for would be personal effects belonging to your employees. Things like pictures and knick-knacks. It may seem like a little thing, but it tells me a story about how engaged your employees really are, and how long they intend to stay with you…

The least engaged employees often have no personal effects…
The one caveat to this is of course new employees. It takes a new employee a few months to settle in and get comfortable.