Taming Turnover at Barking Hound Village
“This program transformed our business and took our senior team, including me, to the next level. Retention is way up and I can feel the positive energy when I walk into a store. I am finally able to focus on the future of our business rather than putting out fires everyday.”
- Matt Fishman, CEO of Barking Hound Village
The Challenge.
Reducing turnover and improving engagement
Barking Hound Village, an Atlanta-area dog daycare and grooming business with six locations, faced paralyzing turnover of nearly 200% per year with an estimated $600K annual cost to the business.
Stymied managers spent excessive amounts of time trying to fill staffing shortages and were often forced to perform frontline duties themselves to keep stores running.
Staff had low morale and unfavorable appraisals of their direct managers and owners.
Constant challenges fueled by turnover frustrated owners and kept them from expanding the business.
Our Work.
Develop senior leaders and redesign employee experience
Leveraging our proprietary leadership assessment, we identified the biggest roadblocks to engagement and retention.
We collaboratively designed a four-month program to both improve leadership capabilities and structurally optimize employee experience.
Our program focused on key markers of meaningful work – Contribution, Community, and Challenge. It included a series of skills-based workshops for the senior team, individual and group coaching, and consulting around organizational design and employee experience.
Transformative Results.
Seismic shifts across stores in just four months
17% decrease in turnover
15% increase in overall job satisfactions
52% increase in Employee Net Promoter Score
30% increase in appraisals of leadership
While the initial survey comments were largely focused on ineffective leadership, toxic work environment, and struggling operations, there were was no negative feedback on any of these topics in the post-project survey.
This speaks to major improvements in leadership effectiveness and the culture of the organization.