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Managing Turnover & Retention Effectively

Back to blog homepage for: Strategic Employee Recognition: by Derek Irvine

A couple of recent articles in Human Resources Executive Online touched on the importance of employee loyalty and retention.

In “Managing Turnover’s Disruptions,” Tom Starner emphasised the costs associated with turnover and how to minimise them. Interestingly, the referenced research found that the negative impact of employee turnover on customer service could by mitigated through smaller work teams who were able to more quickly introduce new workers to the company’s culture.

Why is this true? Smaller work groups tend to foster more horisontal loyalty between team members to reduce turnover, while indoctrination into company culture aligns the employee more quickly with objectives and values.

And this alignment is critical to ensuring you are doing “The Right Kind of Retention,” a second article form HRE Online. As the author, Kenneth W. Thomas, points out, not all retention is equal. Do you really want to retain those employees who are staying because they have no other options but don’t really care about their work, your customers or your company?

Kenneth also introduces the key intrinsic rewards for employee, including sense of meaningfulness, choice, competence and progress. These align with Dan Pink’s intrinsic rewards categories of autonomy, mastery and purpose. This is where strategic recognition feeds these intrinsic motivators by communicating the meaningfulness of employee efforts, celebrating achievements of high levels of work and acknowledging progress.

What are you doing to alleviate the effects of employee turnover (voluntary or involuntary), to bring people into your culture more quickly, and then reinforce their intrinsic motivators?

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Editor's Welcome

 

Hello! And welcome back as we enter 2012, with a busy year ahead of us all. With talk of double-dip recessions, a possible partial or even full break-up of the Eurozone and unemployment rates set to hit nearly 9%, topics such as organisational streamlining, staff resilience and talent management are likely to be on many an HR professional's lips over the next 12 months.
 
But to lighten the gloom here in the UK, we also have the Queen's Diamond Jubilee and its attendant public holidays to look forward to at the start of June. Followed by two weeks of Olympic Games from 27 July to 12 August and the Paralympics from 29 August to 9 September, each generating their own excitement, but also issues to work through for hard-pressed HR departments trying to sort out the multifarious staffing issues in advance.
 
So with an interesting but challenging year to come, HRZone promises to be with you, supporting you all the way and providing our usual insightful blend of news, analysis, community blogs and expert comment to help you sort the wheat from the chaff. As ever, we love to hear from you too so feel free to either post your words of wisdom to our blog section yourself or, in the case of longer, more in-depth ‘expert voice’ articles, drop me a line with any ideas to cath.everett@siftmedia.co.uk.....
 
Cath Everett
HRZone Editor 
 
 
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