My best HR management idea: Simple changes reduce turnover rate
April 16, 2008 by Sam NarisiPosted in: Assessing the right candidate, In This Week's E-Newsletter, Interviewing, Latest News & Views
It can be tough to keep good workers on your staff. Here’s how one HR manager got more employees to stay on board.
The turnover rate at our company was too high.
Our recruitment program for young professionals was unsuccessful – retention was the problem. A competitive salary just wasn’t enough to keep them on staff. The real culprit was today’s changing workplace.
Our new employees wanted different things than their predecessors had. We needed to find out what those things were and make sure we were providing them.
Dug deeper
We started talking to newer employees to find out what they looked for in a company and what was important to them.
We also used exit interviews to ask these young workers who chose to leave the company why they were doing so.
Our findings: There were simple things we could change to keep the younger workers at our company.
Relaxing the atmosphere around the office was cheap and effective. We loosened up policies on lateness and the dress code and started hosting happy hours and activities. A flexible schedule was also high on the request list, and we began to provide that.
The small changes have made a big difference. Since we started, our turnover rate has dropped 60%.
(Kay Harris, HR manager, American Quarter Horse Association, Amarillo, TX)
August 15th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
Amen! Too often, a new employee will find themselves weeks into a job just knowing the tasks at hand and not their impact on the operation of the company. But one step further, sometimes more experienced employees need a boost also! While this is especially true of those who are experiencing a sag in the quality of their performance, ALL employees need to know how they are valued and not just that they are! Problem: getting managers and supervisors to spend their time complimenting and engaging their staffs versus looking for reasons to be critical about them. We teach: If you think of enough of a candidate to hire him/her, then think enough of them to keep recruiting them after the hire!
August 27th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
You probably could completely eliminate turnover if you allowed telecommuting and let people write their own job description. What could go wrong?