Business

How to Fight Back Against High Employee Turnover

Published

6 years ago

October 30, 2020

When building and growing an organization, few things are more frustrating or costly than high employee turnover. But with the right approach, you should be able to fight back, improve loyalty, and put your business back on the right path.

Common Causes of High Employee Turnover

Every business is unique, but high employee turnover can almost always be boiled down to a combination of the following factors:

Overworked. Employees are fine working hard, but there’s a fine line between high expectations and unrealistic expectations. As employees become overworked, they become much more prone to burnout. This creates friction and produces challenges with engaging employees and keeping them on board with the company’s mission and goals.

Toxic culture. The marks of a toxic culture include hostile interactions, lack of equality (in opportunity and/or pay), high stress levels, poor motivation, and poor morals. As the toxicity increases, so does the turnover rate.

Boredom. Employees want to feel energized in their work. Too much boredom can result in disengagement and (eventually) turnover.

Lack of opportunity. Employees want to know that they have the opportunity to get promotions and pay raises. If they don’t see other employees moving up the corporate ladder, they’ll become discouraged and look for better opportunities elsewhere.

Bad boss. There’s a saying that says, “People don’t leave their jobs, they leave their managers.” If you have a bad boss who is incomptenent, rude, overbearing, or insensitive, it’s going to hurt your cause. Employees might put up with it for a few months, but it’ll eventually push them out.

Strategic Ways to Reduce Turnover

There are plenty of legitimate reasons why employees leave – including a better offer, starting their own business, or pivoting careers. And there really isn’t much you can do about these factors. But then there are controllable elements. You’re in control over the factors above. Now’s the time to strategically change the way you approach your business. Here are some helpful tips:

Develop a Better Employee Experience

Whether you’ve documented it or not, your company has an employee experience. It’s essentially everything a worker learns, does, feels, or sees at each stage of their employment lifecycle. This includes five key phases: recruitment, onboarding, development, retention, and exit.

If you want to boost retention by reducing turnover, you have to take employee experience seriously. And by focusing on each of the five stages, you’re able to tailor the experience without compromising on the big picture. In other words, you can keep a consistent culture while still providing a unique experience to employees who are just now being onboarded and those who have been on the payroll for years.

Hire the Right People

You can do yourself a massive favor by hiring people who are a good cultural fit for your organization. (Otherwise you’ll face an uphill battle from the very start.) This is accomplished by clearly defining the role – both to the candidate and to your hiring team – and to implement a detailed due diligence process.

Terminate Toxic People

Don’t let toxic people stick around. The longer a toxic employee is in your business, the more likely it is that their behavior becomes contagious. Terminate people who don’t fit as quickly as possible. Not only does this eliminate the toxic source, but it also shows your remaining employees that you don’t put up with that kind of behavior.

Go Beyond Money

Contrary to popular belief, money is not the best motivator. While a pay raise or bonus can work, its effects are usually short-lived. Within a few weeks or months, the employee will begin looking for the next raise.

To motivate employees and make them loyal to the organization, you have to go beyond money. Find out what it is your employees really want. Good motivators include status, autonomy, flexibility, and verbal affirmation.

Create a Clear Sense of Identity

This tip goes hand in hand with the idea of developing a better employee experience. The goal is to establish a clear company identity so that employees have something tangible to hold onto.

In other words, if asked the question, Why do you like working for our company?, every employee should be able to articulate what it is that keeps them loyal to the business. The exact phraseology might vary, but most of the answers should land near the same target.

Build a Sustainable Business

There’s a lot that goes into building successful and sustainable businesses. But it’s nearly impossible to scale if you don’t have a stable team of people who are committed to your cause. Having said that, now’s the time to reevaluate where you stand and build a business that puts people first. In doing so, you’ll establish the foundational cornerstones needed to grow over the next few years and decades.

Business

Ipsos Helps Brands Understand How They Get Customer Experience Wrong & Why It’s Costing Them Millions

Published

4 weeks ago

June 26, 2026

Matthew Wiles

For brands looking to succeed in the modern business ecosystem, the customer experience (CX) is not something companies can afford to ignore. CX is a direct driver of revenue, loyalty, and growth for organizations.

Ipsos, one of the world’s leading market research firms, helps brands understand that failing to focus on the customer experience can lead to lost sales, which in turn can translate to not only millions in lost revenue but also lost trust and credibility in the market.

How brands still get CX wrong

“The customer decision and desire to do business with brands directly affect the bottom line,” says Brad Christian, Chief Commercial Officer at Ipsos – Experience Practice.

Customer experience may sound like a simple concept, but many brands still get it wrong. CX goes beyond surveys and feedback. Leaders who fail to connect feedback in a meaningful way to goals such as retention, repeat visits or purchases, advocacy, and operational performance fail to deliver on their service promises. The emotional and functional disconnect can spell trouble for brands. The most polished advertising campaigns cannot make up for a frustrating customer interaction or a promise that a business cannot fulfill.

According to Ipsos’s internal research, many customers today see service as too automated and impersonal. More than half report that their experience is worse than promised.

These findings don’t just result in disappointed buyers. They result in lost customers, negative feedback, and a long-term impact on the business as a whole.

“Brands have to manage the entire customer experience across each and every touchpoint,” explains Christian.

Poor CX can be expensive

Executives can often underestimate how expensive a history of poor CX can be. Global losses can reach into the billions while leaders wonder what went wrong. In an age of rapid social media communication, a single negative interaction can spell disaster for a company, leading to reduced customer spending or the entire loss of its most loyal customers.

Those losses are not just reflected in lost revenue, however. Customer acquisition and marketing dollars can also be lost as companies continue to spend money trying to retain their customer base, often skipping right over the experience part of retention.

Poor customer experience can be a deep operating problem that creates a domino effect, decimating businesses from the inside out. These poor experiences can impact not only present and future customer acquisition but also business leaders and employees.

CX matters more in today’s business landscape

The customer experience has always mattered, but it may matter more to brands trying to make it in a modern, ultra-competitive, digitally-driven business landscape. Good experiences encourage repeat purchases, boost loyalty, and increase the likelihood that customers will go online and recommend a brand to others.

“Customer experience isn’t an isolated function,” says Christian. “It’s ‌part of a larger system that ensures that brands measure and manage customer experience data and then act on that data to drive action where customer experience gaps exist.”

Brands also have to seek to understand today’s customers, who expect experiences that are seamless, authentic, and relevant. As more and more companies hop on the automation train, they will want to reassure their customers that the human element that many people consider important still exists.

At Ipsos, six drivers of strong customer relationships form the bedrock of the company’s CX platform, something that they refer to as the “Forces of CX”: certainty, fair treatment, control, status, belonging, and enjoyment.

Customers want to feel that if they have an issue with a brand, it will be handled and that their concerns will be understood. They don’t want the customer experience to feel like a battleground; they want it to feel fair and human.

“Customer experience isn’t just a nicer experience,” says Christian. “It ties directly to specific financial outcomes, whether that be increased sales, greater market share, or stronger brand loyalty.”

How Ipsos helps businesses deliver customer experiences that matter

Ipsos turns customer feedback into reliable, actionable, decision-ready information. The company goes beyond simple satisfaction metrics and implements voice-of-the-customer programs, journey analytics, relationship feedback, and quality research.

“Brands don’t just need data,” Christian says. “They need measurements as to how they are delivering on their brand promise and predictive modeling to tie financial performance measures to those measures to help them determine where to invest to maximize the customer experience and understand what financial impact those investments might deliver for the business.”

Ipsos measures the interactions that matter ‌most and shows brands how each interaction can affect retention, share of spend, and efficiency. For brands that are trying to reduce the guesswork behind CX, Ipsos helps them move beyond cosmetic fixes to achieve real, meaningful change.

Customer expectations can shift on a dime, influenced by society, social media, and even changing trends. Ipsos helps brands meet those rapidly changing customer expectations with hard evidence and comprehensive metrics.

Today’s brands need to understand how to get the customer experience right. Ipsos has the insights needed to drive home the deep importance of CX in today’s marketplace.