Researching to reduce turnover

June 14, 2006 · Filed Under For the love of HR, Slacking Off at Work, Stupid Employee Tricks 

Dr. Williams over at ERE says that the best way to reduce turnover is to look at past employee records and determine a pattern of traits that can help you avoid high turnover rates. There are several pitfalls that he addressed along with the obvious benefits of such a program that I am interested in talking about.

The benefits he goes over are of real value to any company. Reducing turnover has a true ROI if accomplished effectively as Dr. Williams states. It is an easy sell to the executive group.

What isn’t going to be an easy sell are a few questions they will have for your HR department like:

Who is going to do the analysis? Those sorts of skills aren’t as easily available in some organizations as others

Do we have a similar enough workforce to accomplish this? If you don’t, you’re done.

What kind of reduction are we talking about? It is untested and many companies don’t want to be testing grounds.

On top of those questions, I have to wonder what HR department has time to try something like this. Granted this could be a phenomenal success. On the other hand, there might be nothing significant that differentiates successful employees from the unsuccessful ones (or at least enough to enact positive changes). If you have more HR resources than you know what to do with and you have time to implement this sort of massive research and analysis project, you either don’t have a big problem (because you have adequate HR analysis) or you are missing the boat completely.

HR can make a proven, positive impact on the positions that are very similar: developing a world class training system, constant monitoring of new employees job performance and satisfaction and retooling the interview process in response. Better sourcing, reviewing of compensation, and even a change in management technique can make a more effective change in a company’s turnover rate than this sort of system (even if successfully implemented). If you have higher than acceptable turnover, you should be going through these basic, time tested and proven techniques before trying something like this. If you’ve had little success with the basics though, you should probably be looking at what you’re doing wrong before you spend resources on this because if you can’t nail the basics, I am doubtful you can implement this system successfully.

It isn’t that I think that Dr. Williams suggestion couldn’t be successful, it’s that I think the companies that could implement it effectively probably have little use and probably wouldn’t meet any ROI goal.

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