Retention

[Redlass]

It is partly because of the industry I'm in (hospitality) that we talk a lot about turnover and retention. I recently read an article where the researchers said that the downturn in the economy really hasn't changed the importance of businesses finding ways to increase retention.

They wrote:

Retention is THE issue, regardless of economic conditions. There are seven reasons why:

• There are not enough workers to go around – and won’t be for the next 15 years.
• Workers’ attitudes and expectations have shifted—permanently.
• New employment options lure the best and the brightest.
• Finding a new job has seldom been easier.
• The cost of losing talent is high, no matter what the economic conditions.
• In times of uncertainty (e.g., downsizing), the risks for losing or disengaging top talent are especially high.

In the new economy, talent is a key differentiator.

Complete article at:

The complete article is:http://66.89.55.104/synergy/emailmgm...&b2=192&b3=192

Does turnover cause a problem where you work? Do you think it is abnormally high or that it would be worthwhile financially to lower it?

[pluckyduck]

Excellent issue, and one of my bugaboos. I think layoffs are very shortsighted and should be avoided at all costs. Remove the human factor, laying somebody off is not a fun thing to do, and talk just business. If you can't grow a business during a downturn, you should be preparing to take advantage of the upturn when it happens...and you can't take advantage of the upturn if you are shortstaffed or staffed with a bunch of people whom you just hired and don't know anything.

Of course, if your company allowed itself to get bloated in the first place, layoffs may be necessary during a downturn. "Rightsizing", !ugh

Retaining good employees, through thick and thin, is the only sensible plan.

I read today that Microsoft is laying off 60 employees from its televsion division and I think to myself ... there is nowhere in Microsoft to absorb 60 employees? What's up with that? How does that make sense?

Never let anybody good get out the door without a fight no matter what.

Andrea

[magenta321]

UG! I am in hospitality as well.

Five years ago, the hospital I worked at had a work redesign program. "Efficiency Experts" were constantly lurking and making everyone feel uneasy. Lots of money was spent to figure out who the unnecessary employees were. The employees were let go. Now, just about every department is understaffed. Now there are "hot jobs" at the hospital, where if I refer you, I get $1500 when you stay six months, and another $1500 if you stay for more than a year. You also get the same bonus. So that is an extra $6000 per new employee in those "hot" categories. And you can bet, unfortunately, that the head hunters from other hospitals are always calling here (my mom is in a field where there are shortages).

I take myself as an example as well. I was not doing highly technical work, but I was doing a lot of work, all of which was crucial, and I was doing it very efficiently. The reasons I left were feeling underappreciated. I felt underappreciated because 1. my hours were cut, but the work load was not, 2. other people were still getting overtime, 3. I had no benefits, 4. I was lied to about a pending raise and swindled out of six months worth of retroactive pay. For all these reasons, and all of the hurt I felt, I left.

On the grand scale, I was one employee. On another scale, I was a body. Anyone could have eventually learned my job, and no one believed I was going to be a lifetime employee anyway.

My mother still works where I worked. I still talk to a lot of the people there. One per diem person left because he didn't want to work if I wasn't going to be there to help him. Moral was down, because as people realized that I was treated like shit, they realized that they were too, only they were stuck, since they were planning on being lifetime employees. The thing that pushed me over the edge was when they cut overtime for me. However, now that I've gone, several people are getting overtime to fill in the gaps I've left. Productivity is down as well. Organization has gone out the window. My department has gone to hell, and I love it. Oh, and the other person who did my job quit shortly after I did. Now they are really up the creek. And, although I did not have the world's most difficult job skills wise (you needed to know a few computer programs that are industry specific, and you needed good people skills, organization skills, etc), and although the pay was good, I will bet $1000 that they don't get my position filled before the year is out. Don't take that the wrong way. It's not that it doesn't NEED to be filled. It will just take an act of Congress for them to cut through all the beaurocratic red-tape to get my old job posted.

They screwed themselves over, and now I am working for their competition, who is glad to have me, because I am organized, efficient, good with patients, learn quickly, and damnit, they stole me from the competition

And I was only too happy to screw-over my former place of employment.

[mjfrombuffalo[$]]

My agency has been moaning and bumping our heads against the wall about this issue for three years now. Annual turnover has been at 48% for the past three years with no sign of stopping. While mine is a very well-known agency, we depend upon state/city funding for our programs and the funding has not allowed us to offer competitive wages without cutting services to clients. In fact, the state and city have given us more and more mandates over the years but no extra money to pay for these mandates... which means the bad workers who were at least keeping pace are messing up royally, and the good workers are getting burnt out trying to meet all these mandates. The social worker and child care positions are demanding and yet a teenage resident of a group home can make more money per hour working at The Gap than the child care worker who is in charge of caring for the child.

We are so limited as to what we can offer materially, so we try to make a good working environment but the regs sometimes get so overwhelming that no matter what administration does, the workers are outta here. You can love your job, but the love doesn't feed your family or pay your rent.

mj

[pluckyduck]

Does turnover cause a problem where you work? Do you think it is abnormally high or that it would be worthwhile financially to lower it?

I was so busy ranting about layoffs, I didn't answer the question.

No, we don't have a retention problem, I'm very happy to say. We've had a bit of a "turnover problem" in the last few years, but that's been from us showing folks the door, not them quitting. (I'm speaking of my division and the company as a whole.) There were some spots of time it was so bad, that we were keeping 1 in every 4 people we hired. (No lectures about our screening process, please, we're doing the best we can.)

People don't quit. The only people I've lost in the last five years were folks who had decided to make major life changes - all four decided to move out-of-state for various reasons.

Now, the people who stay do bitch about stuff. Not enough money, no dental plan (don't get me started, I want a dental plan), yada - but they don't leave.

It must be my sparkling personality !queen .

Andrea

edited to add: it is so painful and expensive and just plain hard to find good folks I can't fathom laying somebody good off because of an economic downturn. Talk about a waste! Hang on!

[Redlass]

When our company got a new CEO several years ago, he went through and laid off half the company not because we were in terrible financial condition (in fact, we were in substantially worse condition when he left three years later), but because that was just what you did when you took over a company. He was then able to hire in a bunch of "his people" or, at least, people who hadn't been hired by his predecessor. It took us years to recover from this. We still have not recovered from the intellectual drain. There were people who knew things about our company that no one else knew. That's gone now. We have questions pop up all the time that no one in the company can answer. Many of us watched helplessly as we began repeating mistakes from the past--and when we raised an objection, we were told that we were "resisting change."

After the layoffs happened, we continued to have extremely high turnover because the people who were not laid off, suddenly realized there was no job security and began looking elsewhere. For a company as small as we were, it was devastating.

It took years for the turnover to peter off and it has in our office. Now about the only position in which we have really high turnover is our switchboard operator.

I was just somewhat surprised that with layoffs happening, that people were still concerned about turnover. It would seem to me that layoffs automatically lead to continuing turnover and that natural turnover would be a better solution to the problem.

[frazzledspice]

If companies want loyal, dedicated, experienced employees, they should think harder about retaining their workers who are over 50.

Although many studies have lauded the characteristics of older workers, companies haven't seemed to have gotten the message.

Of course, society as a whole should value older people more, but that's another story.

I don't feel very old myself, even though I'm over 50 (I think of "old" people as people who are older than me, and so do other people I know.)

But I have seen talented, capable, bright, energetic people in their late 50's struggle with allegedly good job markets too often to think that older people aren't discriminated against. These are people who work out and have put in 60 hour work weeks for years, who have an active social life, who keep current in their fields and are receptive to new ideas. I guess they need face-lifts, tummy tucks, and resumes that start their job histories ten years later, too.

[Redlass]

I wonder if retention vs. new hires is a problem with older employees.

I would be inclined to think that an older employee who has been with the company for a long time has value within that seniority. He or she has intellectual capital that the company should be willing to pay for.

On the other hand, I have found that as I grow older, the job market narrows considerably for me because of what I demand in pay. When I was just out of college, I jumped at a chance for a job in my career field and never bothered to ask how much I was going to get paid (or even if I would get paid). I was ecstatic when I learned I was going to get $17,000 a year. Now, I would reject a job that paid twice that.

Granted, I have more experience, knowledge, and skills than I did as a kid still in school, but I also recognize that I'm of more value to the company that I've been with for 9 years than to a new company--primarily because of the intellectual capital concern.

So while I agree that age discrimination is a very real, and very serious concern, I wonder if one aspect of it comes from pay demands. I would also think age discrimination is a greater problem when searching for a new job than when facing concerns of retention. I don't really have any sort of data to back up that conjecture, though.

[frazzledspice]

People often find when looking for new jobs that companies won't hire them for less than what they were earning in their previous jobs, because they think the new hire will be discontent and keep looking.

And older employees have built up more seniority, which is why it is so much more painful and difficult when they do lose jobs.

I heard Silicon Valley computer tech people in their forties say that no one would hire them because they preferred to hire foreigners on work visas with lower salary demands (all the while crying to the US government that they couldn't find any American employees with simliar qualifications.)

Anyone I've ever met who has been unemployed for a significant amount of time has always said they would have been delighted to take a job offering $10 or $20 thousand less at some point, just to have a job (or perhaps to avoid moving.)