Ten tips for reducing employee turnover
- Find the presenting problem.
Do you know why people are leaving? Exit interviews can highlight specific issues, but even without exit interviews, you should be able to get a view from simply looking at the basic data. Is turnover high in one part of the organisation? Does it happen to a particular level of employee, or at a particular age? Does it happen at a particular time of year? This information will not give you all the answers, but it may well provide you with themes to investigate. Concentration of turnover in one part of the organisation might indicate managerial issues. A significant number of same-level employees leaving might indicate a lack of a career path or development opportunities, leaving ambitious employees no option but to leave to progress. Or are you simply not paying enough?
- Benchmark your compensation package
While people rarely go to work just because of the money, you can't live and support a family on organisational camaraderie alone. Have your salary levels slipped in the marketplace, making your competitors more attractive? Check you're at least in line with your local marketplace and the industry, and if you're not and salary increases are not an option, try to provide other benefits that will be valued by your people, for example child-care facilities, private health insurance or flexible working arrangements.
- Use intrinsic benefits
If your salary levels and benefits are not the prime reason people work for you, they'll probably be working for intrinsic benefits. Feeling that your contribution is valued, that your voice is heard and that you're working towards a goal which is more than just profit are all intrinsic benefits and they have nothing to do with money. Indeed, they are more powerful motivators than money, as they speak directly to employees' values and identity. Intrinsic benefits are low cost in terms of actual cash, but require management commitment and effort to develop the cultural environment in which they exist and flourish. A number of things hamper the development of intrinsic benefits and these include….
- Check that your managers aren't the problem.
If the management style in the company is on the micro level, if praise is not genuine and if no-one is thanked for their efforts, work can become just that – hard work. If managers can't seem to keep their staff, there's something wrong with the recruitment process, their management style or both. 360 degree feedback can often be helpful in identifying style issues, but it needs to be done carefully, and preferably not simply in one part of the organisation, otherwise it begins to look like a witch hunt.
- Look for evidence of round pegs in square holes
As mentioned above, employees may leave because the job wasn't what they were expecting. This might indicate that the recruitment process isn't making the job or person specification clear enough, or interview skills need updating.
- Make first impressions count
Research has shown that new employees develop their commitment to the organisation in the first three months of them joining a new company. This means that managing early work experiences is crucial. If your turnover data is showing that people leave again soon after joining, perhaps their experiences are bad ones. Ensure your induction process is thorough and takes place soon – within the first month - and includes essentials like where to buy sandwiches for lunch, where the nearest banks are within the first couple of days, the rest like when staff meetings are, etcetera. Better still, appoint a buddy to ease new people into the culture of the organisation.
- Engage and involve your people
A proper induction is one way to demonstrate you value new recruits. Another way is to involve them in the organisation by allowing them to give their views on how things are done. Often new recruits bring insights from other workplaces, other industries which may have huge benefits for your company. Ensure that, even if they prove inappropriate for your organisation, that you collect these insights and that they understand that their views are welcomed.
- Be aware of competitor activity
If you're losing key staff, there's a possibility that competitors are poaching your staff. And if you're convinced that you don't have rogue managers, that your compensation packages are roughly in line with the market and that your recruitment processes are working well, they're probably spreading rumours about you. In which case, it's helpful to know what they're saying about you so you can counter it, internally and externally. Work with customers and suppliers to pick up the gossip and use your PR and communication team to counter. If on the other hand, you know there are management and salary issues, these are just providing ammunition for your competitors to lure away staff you've trained and who have invaluable knowledge. A major reason to fix them.
- Be a company worth working for
Work is a large part of most people's self-image. When asked to introduce themselves, many people define themselves by their job – “I'm Bob and I'm a BT engineer,” or “I'm a teacher at St Joseph 's , ”. Most organisations want work to be important to their employees, but this is a two-way commitment. If organisations want their employees to care about their work, they have to be the sort of employer that these employees want to work for. This means, at the very least, a positive image to the outside world and preferably an image which has something behind it in reality. Which leads to our last point….
- Keep your promises
What you say about your company externally and internally, constitute your promises. If these promises aren't kept, people feel let down and disappointed and their feelings of trust in your word diminish. Working for an organisation requires a great deal of trust – on both sides – and when that fails, the consequences can be as damaging are the same as when adultery happens in a marriage. People want to leave and start afresh somewhere else. So be careful that the desire to create a wonderful image externally doesn't outrun your capacity to deliver on your promises internally.
Back
