Ryan Englin on Remodelers On The Rise: Turnover Is a System Problem

I sat down with Kyle Hunt on Remodelers On The Rise to talk about why turnover is almost never a people problem, and what replaces the performance review in the trades.

Kyle gave me three topics and about ten minutes each. We spent the whole hour on the same root cause.

Turnover is a system problem

Every owner I meet has a Tommy. Tommy is the project manager everybody works around. Tommy is the reason people quit. And the owner will tell me Tommy is the problem.

Tommy still works there because you tolerate it. You tolerate it because you have no system to manage him.

Here is how it happens in the trades. You grew up with tools in your hands. You moonlighted, then went out on your own. You hired your friends and your family and it worked because everybody already knew what you wanted. Then you hired somebody you didn't know and expected them to operate like family. They made a mess of it. Not because you failed to communicate. Because you never documented it.

I ask owners a simple question. What would Kyle do? Write that down. That's the start of a system.

The mentality we inherited is "no news is good news." If I haven't yelled at you today, you're doing fine. That is a terrible way to onboard people and a worse way to keep them.

Pulse surveys and the best friend question

We run pulse surveys every 90 days. Eight questions, scale of one to five. There is no good score and no bad score. We're looking for progress quarter over quarter.

Companies that come back with fives across the board are usually the most broken ones, because everybody is afraid to be honest. Companies that come back with ones and twos panic and tell me their people hate them. No. Their people trust them enough to say what's really happening. You fix what people tell you. You can't fix silence.

One of my favorite questions is a yes or no. Do I have a best friend at work? People with a best friend at work are six times more likely to be engaged. So build a buddy program. Build a mentor program. Manufacture the friendship. Engaged people are productive, and productive people drive profit.

The other system most small companies skip is a real job description. Not the one ChatGPT wrote off something you pulled from Indeed. Write what a carpenter actually does, in plain English, no lawyer language, no HR language. Then walk through it with them and ask what makes sense and what doesn't. When people have clarity on your expectations, meeting them gets easy. That clarity is exactly what a Core Fit Profile delivers before anyone even applies.

Accountability is not micromanagement

I put Kyle on the spot and asked him to define both words, because everyone defines them differently and everyone carries a bad experience with one of them.

Micromanagement is about control. Do it my way, make no mistakes, be a robot I push buttons on. My baby, my business, my way.

Accountability is about outcomes. More specifically, agreed upon outcomes. I cannot hold you accountable to something you never agreed to. Agreed upon outcomes are never a problem, because we agreed on them.

I have never met an employee who wakes up wanting to fail all day. But plenty of people don't care about outcomes they never had a voice in.

Your people need to know how they put points up on the scoreboard. Nobody plays hard in a scrimmage. They play hard when somebody keeps score. So tell them the score. Stop saving it for the review. I've had people tell me they walked out of a review and learned they'd been messing up one thing for eleven months. That information mattered eleven months ago.

My rule: if a person cannot self-service their own KPI on their phone right now, it isn't a good KPI or you don't have a real system. Fix it.

Why performance reviews fail

We tied reviews to raises, so now it's pay day in everybody's head and nobody hears the performance conversation. We never trained leaders to have the conversation at all. One 200-person client pushed all reviews to three people in the C suite, then added seven more, and still hit March with nothing done.

House train a puppy and you correct the couch chewing in the moment, not six months later. Do that with people.

I wrote a five-page review process. I don't believe it was ever completed once. So I built FieldCon to put the words in the manager's mouth, record the conversation from a truck cab, and surface the one place where the leader and the employee disagree. Average review runs 17 minutes.

The close I gave Kyle is the one I give everybody. Nobody leaves for money. Ever. They leave because they don't feel cared for. They don't tell you because they don't trust you. They don't trust you because they don't feel cared for. Become the employer of choice and they fight to stay. It is fixable.

If you liked this, I go deeper on hiring systems and building a bench in Hire Better People Faster and on Titans of the Trades.