Ryan Englin on Contractor Cents: Stop Blaming Your Employees for Turnover

I went back on Ryan Englin on Contractor Cents with Ruth King to talk about why turnover is a system problem, not a people problem.

Ruth and I first talked a couple of years ago, back when everything I did was pointed at hiring. Every contractor in the country was saying the same sentence. "I can't find good people." That sentence is still being said today. What changed for me is what I've seen working with companies all over the country since then. Retention is the bigger problem. And it makes the hiring problem worse, because every time someone walks out the door you have to drag someone new in.

Fix retention and hiring gets easy. You need fewer people. You get to be picky. Picky is the whole game.

Ruth made a great point in the conversation. When you're not desperate, and somebody really good walks in the door, you just hire them. No agonizing. No settling. The companies winning right now raised the bar and refused to lower it. The companies losing right now hire anybody who can fog a mirror and figure it out later.

Here's the part owners underestimate. Hiring anyone with a pulse changes your culture. Ruth nailed it. If you hire anyone who fogs a mirror, guess what your culture becomes. And then the same owners call me complaining that their good guys aren't performing anymore. Of course they aren't. They're working next to people they don't want to work next to. Your best tech didn't sign up to babysit. He signed up to do the work. Hand him a bad fit and you drain his energy and his productivity at the same time.

People don't leave jobs, they leave people

Ruth asked me what I mean when I call turnover a system problem. Here's my answer.

You've heard that people don't leave jobs, they leave bosses. I've never met a single person who argued with that. So if it's true, then people don't leave for money. They leave because they don't believe you have their best interests, their career, or their family in mind.

And here's the twist. Most owners in the trades genuinely do care about those things. I know they do. They just have no system to communicate it. Caring silently is the same as not caring at all, because your people only experience what you actually say and do.

So build the system. Day one, you tell them why you want them on this team. Day two, you tell them their family goals matter here. Day 40, you tell them their career matters here. Day 700, you're still saying it. Reinforcement on a schedule beats good intentions every time.

The first 90 days belong to you, not the new hire

The first 90 days are the honeymoon. Too many companies put the honeymoon on the new tech and then blame him when it goes badly. That's backwards. He's in a new environment with new leaders and a communication style he's never seen. He's doing the best he can.

I walked Ruth through how we break those 90 days into three phases. Think like we think. Do like we do. Win like we win.

Most contractors are decent at the middle one. They teach the equipment, the routes, the process. They skip the first phase entirely, which is how we make decisions and how you belong here. And they skip the last phase, which is how we put points on the scoreboard. If your new hire doesn't know what winning looks like, he stumbles every day. That's miserable for him and expensive for you. This is exactly what the onboarding piece of the Core Fit Hiring System exists to solve.

Imagine watching a game where somebody threw a sheet over the scoreboard. The players would play a completely different game. They'd hate it. We do that to our people constantly and then tell them, "no news is good news." What does that even mean?

Annual reviews deliver feedback 11 months too late

Ruth and I got into performance evaluations, and I told her what I believe. Performance reviews and pay raises are two different things. Disconnect them.

Telling someone in January that they were bad at something for the last 11 months is the wrong time to tell them. They already felt it. They woke up every Monday with butterflies and no idea why. Give feedback in real time and the review stops being an ambush.

We built FieldCon for this. Quarterly evaluations, roughly four minutes of prep for the manager and the same for the employee, scripted down to the agenda so managers who were never trained on this still run a good conversation. The employee assesses. The manager assesses. The system finds the gaps between the two, and the gaps are where the real conversation lives. It surprised me in beta testing how many employees rate themselves lower than their manager rates them. Then it sends coaching nudges so leaders follow through on what they promised, instead of showing up 90 days later saying "you didn't do the thing you said you'd do." We're a team. Act like one.

We also run nine-question pulse surveys, because disengagement erodes customer satisfaction and profitability quietly. And while everyone talks about quiet quitting, I asked Ruth the harder question. How much quiet firing are we doing? How often do we make someone's life miserable because we won't have the tough conversation?

It's fixable. All of it.

If you liked this, I go deeper on the first 90 days and building the kind of bench that lets you stay picky on Titans of the Trades.