Many discussions regarding the different generations are taking place in the workplace currently and one of the employers’ concerns is that millenials are not staying in jobs as long as other employees. (A recent survey by Deloitte, the 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey, found that around two-thirds of millennial employees have expressed a desire to leave their organizations by 2020).
The reason for the employers’ concern is that to replace an employee can cost a company between 9 and 12 months’ salary of that particular employee. The Centre for American Progress reported that losing an employee can cost between to 16 and 213% of an employee’s annual salary.
Josh Bersin has said that a new employee can take two years to become as productive as an existing employee.
We have also looked at why employees would be wanting to leave their jobs and I found these statistics scary.
- 80% of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions – Harvard Business Review
- 36% of executives feel that a bad hire is due to poor skills match & unclear performance objectives – Robert Half
- Another common reason is a culture misfit.
- 50% of workers feel if they are not appreciated they will look for another job
- 42% of companies do not give clear performance objectives & job titles
- 40% of employees who do receive adequate training will quit their jobs
It is all very well analysing these statistics but from an HR point of view what can be done to improve the bottom line because these are direct costs to the company.
I have chatted to a number of people and these are the following things that could be done to improve the employee turnover in an organization.
- Employee Satisfaction Survey – this is a simple, inexpensive tool that can be done either via email or simply through a Smartphone app. The results if managed can be incredibly useful and one of the people that I chatted with said that they had even incorporated the results into the middle management’s appraisals and linked results to their incentive bonuses.
- Understand the culture of your own organization and ensure that job candidates are screened to ensure that they will fit into the company culture and be managed & motivated correctly.
- Conduct exit interview to understand what has made an employee so dissatisfied that they want to leave. This has been an extremely effective HR as well as fraud prevention tool.
According to the State of the Industry: Employee Wellbeing, Culture & Engagement in 2017 produced by Workforce and Virgin Pulse 96% of companies believed that recruitment and employee retention was the top priority in HR initiative for 2017.
If you would like to chat more about these findings please do not hesitate to contact me.
Jenny Reid
082 600 8225
jenny@ifacts.8bitdigital-testing.co.za