5 Warning Signs to Watch for Healthcare Employee Turnover
Has your hospital or healthcare firm been hit by the mass exodus of healthcare workers happening right now? If not, then you are the lucky one. That doesn’t mean that you should relax and wait until you lose your best staff. As we see from the exit interviews we conduct here at Retensa, someone is always waiting to hire them. As travelling healthcare boomed, turnover increased by double-digits across the US Healthcare industry in the last 2 years. Fullow along [...]
Infographic: Employee Wellness Survey
In the turmoil of the initial pandemic, employers naturally focused on resolving the major problems such as businesses closing, partnerships coming to an end, or market demand plummeting. Doing what they could to persevere, employers neglect the not-so-obvious issue…employee wellness during a crisis. Employers/Leaders/HR: Have you been able to take a step back and listen to your people (instead of the news)? Employees/Staff: Are you able to express your concerns with the company you work for? How did your organization alleviate [...]
The 5 Ways to Boost Employee Wellness in Stressful Times
Employee mental health now confronts every employer in every country like never before. Although its relevance increased in recent years, the current global health event forced employers to rethink the importance of understanding employees’ state of mental health and overall wellness. Right now[1], employees are experiencing significant change with perpetually elevated anxiety and stress. Extensive research indicates that happier employees increase productivity from 12% – 20%[2]. As stress increases, performance and product quality plummets. Most employers want their workforce to [...]
The 3 Signs You Can’t Ignore: Employee Mental Wellness Warnings
Employee mental wellness was always a workplace concern, but never a priority. Elevated amidst the global pandemic, COVID-19 created a universal sense of uncertainty that would not subside. This is forcing employers to evaluate work-life balance like never before. Those who work from home may face additional challenges such as isolation from their friends and coworkers, increased childcare and home-schooling responsibilities, adjusting to distracted workspaces, and taking care of older and/or immunocompromised friends and family members1. These unique circumstances [...]
5 BAD Ways to Recognize Employees Today
Today is Staff Appreciation Day. In a recent article, Harvard behavioral scientist, Dr. Ashley Whillans, mentioned that “what really matters in the workplace is helping employees feel appreciated”. Researchers found 69% of employees would work harder if they felt their efforts were better appreciated 1.When asked what leaders could do more of to improve employee engagement, 58% of respondents replied “give recognition” 2. When employees are valued, both fulfillment and productivity rises, and they are motivated to maintain or [...]
First Time Ever: Job Openings Exceed Job Seekers… What Happens Next?
If you were putting off an employee retention strategy until later, it just became later. The U.S. Department of Labor just reported that, for the first time ever, the number of job openings in America exceeds the number of job seekers. This is an unprecedented situation that is increasing turnover all over the country, and giving the upper hand to employees and job seekers. If one of your best employees quits today, the reality is: It will be HARDER to find [...]
Can you smell that? It’s your HR data rotting. Discover the 5th V of Talent’s Big Data.
Curving the 4 V’s of Big Data in HR: The People & Culture Perspective Can you smell that? It’s your HR data rotting. Every day we wait is a day that the value of fresh data spoils. The breakthrough in talent analytics today is transformative. If you are not mining predictive insights by now, your HR job is at risk. After 18 years of managing the famed 4Vs of Big Data, we discovered the most important V is not one of them. [...]
The War for Talent, still raging 20 years later. How do we win?
The future success of organizations hinged on their workforce capability, and how they attract, engage, and retain employees.
How Not to Do Exit Interviews: The Toll for Taking the Wrong Exit
Exit Interviews provide the most timely opportunity for an employer to receive feedback of an employee’s experience. Only when an employee quits, can we uncover, with accuracy, why they quit. It is a valuable window for an organization to view constructive feedback, as well as to ensure employees leave the organization on the best possible terms. However, if used incorrectly, feedback can result in a head-on collision, and bad publicity for the employer when not handled with care. Just ask [...]
The 3 Metrics That Turn Down Employee Turnover
The word turnover means more than a number calculation. Losing good employees is one of biggest drains on a company’s bottom line, yet organizations consistently overlook or miscalculate what it truly costs. A Cost of Turnover analysis that gets to the bottom of what really matters – what turnover costs, why it costs, and how to fix it — goes beyond simple multiplication and division. Through a better understanding of these 3 hidden factors, organizations can turn up the [...]
5 Signs You’re in a Dead-End Relationship With Your Employees and What to Do About It
Paul Simon knew, there must be “50 Ways to Leave your Lover”. But painful relationships are not confined to romance; they occur in today’s workplace, surfacing as disengagement and apathy in the daily grind of work. They also can be avoided. If we recognize the signs of a dead end employer-employee relationship and what workforce strategies employers can launch, we can bring the magic back. Bringing the Magic Back to Workforce Strategy Unless you’re from the future, you employ people not [...]
How to Keep the Love Alive in a Long Distance Relationship with your Workforce
The advent of remote work brings with it a set of challenges. As speed, flexibility, and collaboration become the bottlenecks of today’s workplace, a whole new set of norms exist now. Companies looking to build a high performance culture confront the challenge of sustaining employee motivation without face to face interaction. How can employers make sure their employees stay in love with their work and the company, despite being in a long distance, remote relationship? Employee surveys that measure [...]
4 Employee Retention Tools We Learned from Shark Tank
Popular ABC TV show Shark Tank is a prototype for what is possibly the world’s best recruitment process. While many viewers tune in for entertainment, witnessing the frenzy of action provides valuable insight on how to recruit and retain high performing employees. Here are four real-world retention lessons from Shark Tank. These expose some of the most powerful employee retention tools on land. 1: Selling the Opportunity In the absence of presenting value, the wall of sharks are impenetrable. Once the [...]
5 Talent Retention Strategies We Learn from Cinco de Mayo
While most people associate Cinco de Mayo with carne asada, mariachi music, and a zesty tequila, there is a powerful allegory about the employee retention strategy behind all the festivities. These five enchiladas of wisdom revealed by the underdog victory at the Battle of Puebla offers strong insights intro talent retention strategies. Talent Retention Strategies Hot Tamale #1: Know what You’re up Against When the Mexicans triumphed over the French, it was a major upset. Not only were the French an [...]
3 Reasons Employees Cheat on You, and How to Stop Getting Dumped in a Hot Job Market
Tough times can hurt a company’s health, but in a hot market just as many hearts break. As of Quarter 1 2017, global economic indicators remain positive and the job market is on fire, leaving employers worried about their talent growing hot to trot for a new stable. A recent article by Fortune revealed that 89% of employers cited retention as a critical priority (Schwabel, 2016). This article, the second in our Love and Surveys series, outlines two of [...]
Why Women’s Retention Has Failed (and the Truth on How to Improve Employee Engagement)
Women’s retention has failed. The question of how to improve employee engagement for women mystifies even the most progressive of organizations. Only 4% of CEO’s at S&P 500 companies are female.1 What gives? Countless programs have been launched, but clearly after decades of trying to close the leadership gap, caring and succeeding are clearly not synonymous. The politically correct leaders cannot refuse the suggestion to launch. Then, volunteers are gathered, and given scant resources. They are launched because it’s [...]
Beware the Ides of March: 3 Ways Your Company is the Julius Caesar of Employee Turnover
Leadership can be deadly. The unfortunate demise of Caesar, the Roman Emperor assassinated by his own senators, exemplifies how bad things can get when leaders ignore employees. If the following sounds like your organization, you may be bound for some employee turnover this Ides of March. Ignoring the Predictions Caesar’s death was foreshadowed by a soothsayer who predicted that the bright day would bring forth the adder. Still he chose to turn a deaf ear to how effective his leadership was. [...]
I Can’t Help Falling In Love . . . with These Employee Surveys
What makes human relationships successful? We know that the key to success in any relationship, personal or professional, is commitment – but there is more to it than just the word. Read on to learn about how commitment can be measured using intelligent employee surveys in this first installment of our Love & Surveys series. You can’t make your people fall in love with you, but you can know if they like you, or if they really, really like [...]
2 Gamification Hacks for Employee Onboarding Awesomeness
Time and time again, HR professionals struggle with employee onboarding. Programs designed to maximize employee performance and retention, no matter how carefully constructed, very often fall short of the mark. The real reason is not lack of motivation from the employee or lack of willingness from the employer. Instead, it is this flaw of our consciousness: the human brain’s tendency to forget. This blog will shed light upon how to improve employee onboarding using gamification. Employee Onboarding Hacks Whether or not [...]
How to Block the Competition from Poaching Your Sales Stars
When it comes to employee retention, salespeople can be quite a challenge. It is the Salesperson “Key Employee Retention Paradox”… When they are not performing, invest in training until they start cashing in the chips. Then when they do, the world discovers their success. Blink your eyes and they get poached, taking valuable relationships with them. With the cost of turnover for salespeople higher than almost every other position, easily 5x to 20x of the employee’s salary, retaining good employees [...]
5 New HR Titles that Promote Employee Engagement
Looks like they’ve done it again. Often the first to innovate, the technology sector has taken up the task of rebranding HR by giving it trendier titles. Here are our top five picks for names that we’ve seen some of the leading tech firms use to improve employee engagement and what they are really saying. 1. Person: Andrea Weber at IBM Title: Chief Happiness Officer Translation: “I’m your advocate.” While at some workplaces they are esteemed, HR people are commonly seen as [...]
How Google Makes Their Employee Surveys Fun (and how you can too).
Surveys give workers a say in what happens to them, often they are viewed as burdensome homework assignments from HR. Google has found a way to transform their internal employee surveys from a mundane task into something that motivates employees, increase self-awareness, and inspires positive action. Their method can be utilized by companies around the globe – here is how. Google and Employee Surveys Big Data and Artificial Intelligence play a key part in Google’s “gDNA” initiative, the organization’s self-study of [...]
Employee Turnover Means Rocky Road Ahead for Microsoft
For the tech giants, business combinations typically present great advancements and enormous challenges. On the talent side, managing employee morale through a merger or acquisition can be daunting
After the Election: The American Workforce – Are we Still a Team?
As the American President-elect was announced in the early morning hours, many predictions followed. Few are exploring the impact on the workplace. The line between work and life, blurring for the past 20 years, allow for the strong emotions we feel at home to impact who we are at work. Like many workplaces around the world, we have a diverse workforce at Retensa, including American and International colleagues who exist across the political spectrum. Our assumptions about the next [...]
If aliens are 1480 light years away, their employees are very happy
In case you have not heard, there is a star behaving oddly in a nearby chunk of our milky way. Let’s call it an “odd star,” since it’s known by twelve people as KIC 8462852, and may or may not be a “god star,” or one with highly intelligent life around it. The intelligent life debate and details of the situation are well covered by the Royal Astronomical Society, or reviewed by Time Magazine, and are not the focus in this [...]
Work-Life Balance: The Bottom Line
Today’s work force is riding a tidal wave of work-life trends as concepts like “mindfulness” and “nap rooms” become main stream. Many companies are redefining parental leave (for Dad’s, adopters, or non-birth parents), and volunteer days become the norm. The pattern here is making room for what happens in life, but 3 questions linger:
What to Do When Your Star Salesperson Quits
A company’s sales force is the most difficult to replace. Most devastating is when your salesperson leaves you for the competition. Your best employee will quit. Maybe not this week, or next month, but someday he or she will leave. The impact on your customers and staff and the financial cost of turnover are substantial. Studies show that employee turnover can cost a company up to 200% of annual employee compensation1. The cost of replacement has exceeded the cost of [...]
Five Questions to Ask Before Terminating a Poor Performer
Its 2 AM, you are up, you cannot sleep. Your mind is swirling with thoughts of your company’s performance and that one person who is not carrying his weight. What should you do? Begin by taking time to reflect on the following – Is there still value in this work relationship? Five questions to consider when formulating the answer: Do I think this person can improve their performance? If not… do I have a quantifiable and objective reason for terminating them? Unless [...]
Fact or Fiction: Star Employees Want Promotions
A common concern among prospective employees is whether there are opportunities to grow within a company. A company’s star employees are not necessarily those who try to climb the corporate ladder. Those who focus on their existing responsibilities, proving themselves as assets, are most likely the employees a company cannot afford to lose. Organizations that reward primarily through promotion may spur unhealthy competition between co-workers, and one-track mindedness. Instead of competing over resources to get ahead, employers should encourage [...]
How to Make an Offer They Can’t Refuse
“Candidates are not just looking for extrinsic rewards… They are also looking for intrinsic rewards. They want to enjoy what they do and feel good about it when they tell others.” – Chason Hecht, President, Retensa In September 2006, New York Enterprise Report published an excerpt from this article. The full version of that article is provided here. “Thanks, but no thanks.” Maybe the candidate did not reject your offer so blatantly, but even the most polite rejection may make you wonder, “What happened?” Good [...]
The Impact of Employees’ Health on The Employer
How can employers create a wellness program that improves employees’ health? “Americans don’t leave their increasing waistlines at home; they bring them to work. And those extra pounds are having serious ramifications relating to health care costs, productivity and morale.” – Robert J. Grossman, HR Magazine, March 2004 The number of people in the American workforce may be shrinking but the size of the average American certainly is not. According to a 2005 study by Trust in America’s Health, almost 65% – or [...]
The New Customer: Your Workforce
Pharmaceutical companies create consumer loyalty by promising to improve quality of life. The same approach is becoming adapted as one of the most effective workforce talent management strategies. “Firms that do not align employee and firm needs increase the likelihood that employees will leave and leave less talented employees behind to finish the job.” – Chason Hecht, President, Retensa The greatest impact on the cost of doing business in the past 20 years has been employee turnover. Losing top talent to the competition [...]
The Real Cost of a Poor Hire
Think about the last few hires that didn’t work out. On paper, applicants may possess the education, work experience and skills for the job, but polished resumes may not reveal hidden liabilities. The real cost of a poor hire is often lost production time, money, and a decrease in employee morale – all costly mistakes for any employer. “Your profits are walking out the door — literally. Every time you lose an employee, all the money you have invested in [...]
Build the Perfect Exit Interview, Build a Better Workplace
Done right, an intelligent exit interview strategy can offer you a wealth of information on your staffing needs. I know…you don’t do exit interviews. Well, despite the escalating cost of employee turnover, most companies don’t. The common reasons are: I already know why people leave People don’t give honest answers We don’t have the time I am not sure what to ask, or Who needs them? The people are gone anyway. Exit Interview Return on Investment “Turnover is a symptom, not a problem. Employers do not have [...]
Recruit to Retain: How the Hiring Process Can be Your Most Effective Retention Strategy
Hiring the right person for the job is crucial in a small business. Here’s what you need to know before, during and after the interview. “Would you hire all of your employees again?” Unfortunately, a lot of business owners would say no. Hiring right the first time is one of your most important tasks, and the last thing you want to do is hire the wrong person – or hire the right one who winds up leaving for a better [...]
Sustaining Performance During Mergers and Acquisitions
Involving both firms’ communication strategies before and during a merger will reduce financial and personnel losses. Managing expectations through a merger or acquisition can be daunting, especially when supervisors are unsure how the new organization will emerge.
Mentoring in the New Economy
Mentor relationships are beneficial to every employee’s career development, but some pitfalls have arisen. The current economic climate is producing uncertainty in many baby boomers about their own job security. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, “Moving on: Don’t trust anyone under 30; Boomers struggle with their new role as mentor,” many older workers and their junior counterparts are having difficulty forming rewarding mentoring bonds.
Talent Raids Are On: Preserve Your Human Capital
Talent raiders employ overt and underhanded techniques to steal your talent. How does a company prevent the loss of talented employees to its competitors? How does a company sustain and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace?
Supervisory Approaches Impact Voluntary Turnover
Leadership styles impact employees’ attitudes toward your company. Supervisors may not realize that they wield powerful influences on their employees’ attitudes toward your company. A lack of dialog in this relationship can influence competent employees to leave.
Work/Life Initiatives Impact Employee Retention
Work/life programs can be used as retention tools for organizations, but many miss out. Sometimes it seems 24 hours per day is not enough to tackle work and personal tasks. Sound familiar? Both employees and employers realize that, in the modern lifestyle, work and family matters have converged. Many firms have instituted hotlines, programs, or even software to ensure that these conflicts do not diminish the quality and productivity of employees’ work.
Employer Branding for Proven Marketing ROI
Brand Management is valuable in the labor market too. Corporations will spend billions of dollars marketing their products and services. The cost per client acquisition can be as low as $20 to $50. However, there is an audience that may be ignored: employees, with a cost per hire that may range from $20,000 to $50,000.
Ineffective Ways of Engaging Employees
Engaging employees in desired work-related behaviors: focus on strengths. In a recent survey the Gallup Organization found that 58% of respondents cannot say, “I know what is expected of me at work.” Clarifying how an employee’s position and performance relates to the organization’s goals allows employees to grasp how their roles directly impact the organization’s success.
Attracting and Retaining Human Capital: Developing Strong Leaders
Trust, between leaders and employees, is an often overlooked element of retention strategies. Employees’ trust in leadership is predicated on their faith that leaders will exhibit honesty and meet their expectations. If there is disconnect or friction between a leader and his direct report, that tension can lead to a host of negative consequences.
Corporate Governance: Ethics is a Boomerang
Ethical behavior is essential for attracting and retaining employees too. An organization’s reputation is based not only on its financial fidelity, but also its fair treatment of its workforce. Employees start learning expected behavior well before orientation and this process continues throughout an employee’s tenure.
Your Companies Have Merged. Which Executives Will Stay?
The success of Mergers & Acquisition is dependent upon retaining the right executives. The executive level focus is often overlooked because the drivers for a new corporate culture are based upon the collaboration and integration of both human resource structures, but if HR is colliding, they aren’t driving.
Linking Workforce Strategy & Customer Satisfaction
Maintain client trust and satisfaction by articulating the expertise of all your employees rather than specific people. The importance of maintaining a customer relationship should not depend on the customer’s fondness for one specific employee. Your clients must know that the quality of service is a result of the efforts of many people, not just their point of contact.
Avoiding Managerial Dysfunction in your Workplace
What supervisory behavior impacts voluntary turnover? Yes, your company’s organizational climate and productivity are significantly impacted by supervisory behaviors. Seasoned managers are assumed to be skilled, reliable, and knowledgeable. However, many are not able to translate those valuable assets into managerial communication or employee motivation.