REDUCING EMPLOYEE TURN OVER TO A COMFORTABLE MINIMUM

 

In one of our previous articles, we spoke about employee engagement in general and another publication was narrowed to building passion at work through engagement. This time around our focus is based on reducing employee turnover. It is an evident fact that once employees are not engaged, they won’t have passion and love for their jobs and once there is no passion for the work they do, there is greater likeness that they will leave the organization. To avoid repetitions, points like competitive salary, good team working atmosphere and others will be left out in this write up since they appeared in one way or another in the other publications.

High employee turnover can be a significant problem when we come into the business world. several research carried out on economic activities suggest that it can cost up to one-fifth of an employee’s yearly salary to search, educate and recruit a fitting replacement. In situations where this turnover rates are too high, this represents a considerable high cost for the company that cannot be recovered easily. Fortunately, by practicing smart hiring strategies, improving working environment and making sure that your company is well organized, make it absolutely possible to reduce employee turnover to comfortable minimum.

To improve the working environment, it is important that employers rebalance the work load of employees. Tasks that are stressful, monotonous, or pretty difficult will cause employees to start looking for different jobs with lighter workloads when compared to the present one.  The simplest method to make an employee to start looking for other attractive jobs is to over work the employee to the point of fatigue through overtime. More so, this will equally be costly, since employees with very long or stressful jobs will need higher salary than those with normal duties and hours.

In implementing Human Resource practices, it is important that the hiring process be more selective. Business experts will generally agree that one of the best methods to keep low turnover is to ensure that the employee hired matches with the job to begin with. Recruiting employees who have the right qualifications for particular jobs which demand such skills and expertise will give greater performance, and importantly they will be more satisfy in their new role. The most outstanding type of criteria that should be review before employment includes skills, intelligence, personality and commitment.
 Regular conduction of employee’s reviews should be implemented. To find out why an organization is suffering from high employee turnover, one of the best reasons can be gotten by asking the employees. Organizing frequent reviews in which the employer meets and talks with the employees about their likes and dislikes concerning their jobs can be a big step in making employees feel valued and acknowledged about the job they do. An HR agent can be hired to do this if managers can’t handle this.

Apart from conducting reviews, it is necessary to conduct exit interviews as well. Companies with open and great working environment and even very friendly atmosphere have to let people go. Once this happens, managers should take the opportunity to do this with the employee being dismissed before he eventually leaves for good. Research has scored that most employees are more honest at exit interviews. Questions for exit interviews such as what was your favourite or least favourite part of the job, things that make it difficult for him to perform the job properly and how they could be solved in future, and to evaluate the company generally like what it needs to developed upon, should be directed to the employee at the time of exit interview.  

High turnover at times may not be a problem to the whole company but to a particular department. This may be a problem to a particular manager who is causing the high turnover. Such managers with high turnover should be kept. Instead of dismissing such a problematic manager, it is advisable to make available to him a short course on management and if this does not help, then a replacement can be carried out for the position.

Employers should consider having alternative tasks for unhappy employees rather than dismissing them. Employees who can’t do well in a particular role in a company and can perform better in other domain should never be fired. Firing such an employee will make the company to endure more costs of finding and training a new recruit. To avoid hurting feelings, be aware of how a new role is presented to an employee. Telling an employee that he didn't do well in this job and that he will do well in this other task may be harmful to the employee’ moral rather than telling him that you have found a new role for him in the company. Be careful of the language being used because this can make the employee see this new role either as promotion or demotion.

Furthermore, managers should never be afraid to dismissed harmful employees. There is an old cliché that says “sometimes, to save the hand, you will have to lose the fingers.” any organization that seeks to keep turnover at lowest, must get rid of any exceptionally problematic employee. This sort of employees can be very harmful to the company for many reasons such as contaminating the other employees with bad ideas. Be vigilant with what the philosophy of work place negativity can cause.

Lastly, to keep the best talents in an organization by reducing turnover, managers should constantly appreciate employees for the work they do even when they don’t meet expectations. Employees should equally be offer the option of cross-training. It is beneficial to both the employee and the employer once employee acquired new skills as he can easily switch in case of vacancy.

Finally, managers should listen. Money may be one of the least ordinary reasons for turnover, but low pay is an exception most at times to this. Listen and find out from employees why they leave. Allowing employees to leave the organization without any efforts to tame it will eventually make that become a culture of the organization.

As a way of conclusion, it should sound as a note of warning to all business owners, that low turnover may come as benefits in some aspect; a near “no-employee turnover” is actually unproductive. In filtering out old company standards, turnover is necessary at times to bring workers with fresh and new ideas.