Find The Best Person For The Job - And Keep Them

The Age

Saturday October 21, 2006

Wendy Taylor

Staff retention is more than understanding what makes people quit. By Wendy Taylor.

IN THE wake of skills shortages, a highly mobile workforce and a buoyant employment market, many CEOs have elevated "staff retention" to a top priority. As a consequence, more HR teams are being expected to not only ensure staff are happy, motivated and performing at their peak, but that they are not scouting around for better offers.

It's a strategic responsibility HR people appear to be embracing. A series of Australian Human Resources Institute recruitment and retention workshops held in June were quickly sold out and will be repeated in November.

Lisa Halloran, director of Retention Partners and workshop organiser, established her business in 2000, well before retention became a widespread issue for organisations. She worked for more than 14 years in market research, industrial relations and HR manager roles before setting up Retention Partners.

The company, which she describes as heavily research-based, focuses exclusively on retention products and services and developing "robust retention metrics".

There are four dimensions of retention, Ms Halloran says: why people join an organisation, why they stay, what influences people to perform and what makes people quit.

Through understanding why staff have joined their organisation and whether their expectations have been met, HR staff can gain valuable insights into how their organisation is perceived in the marketplace and where their strengths are. Employers who are clear about the type of workers they want and know what makes their organisation attractive are not only more likely to employ the right people, but will recruit people who will stay, Ms Halloran says.

"We really try to focus our clients away from being an employer of choice and get them to look at how they can gain employees of choice," she says.

"We define an employee of choice as someone who has the technical and value attributes you are looking for and who is likely to stay and perform given the environment they will be working in."

Ms Halloran says organisations commonly think they know what staff like about them so are frequently surprised when their research points to other factors.

She says salaries and laptops are not necessarily reasons people stay with a company.

"People is always a massive retention factor. It's often about 'I work with great people,' 'I learn from a great person,' 'I have fun here,' " she says.

When the HR team is unclear about its strengths as an employer, it can exacerbate turnover problems, she warns.

"We had a call-centre client who said, 'This is a young person's job, we had better go out and find backpackers because people never stay here very long.' But there's an awful lot of people who would like the fact that they could turn up at 9am and clock off at 3 and that they had certain breaks and worked regular hours.

"So rather than putting in an ad for backpackers they would be better to outline clearly what they can offer to the market."

Ms Halloran says the reason people quit is the primary concern of most clients. The company started off doing exit interviews and it is still the service in highest demand.

"We do more exit interviews than anything else and I think that is because HR people understand them and they understand their value," she says.

But she says organisations will often gain more valuable information from focusing on what would make their current workers leave rather than exploring why their former employees left.

"It's a longer way of doing things if you have to wait until people quit to talk to them," she says.

Ms Halloran says turnover statistics on their own are rather meaningless and that not all staff are equal.

It's not whether an organisation is losing 12 per cent of staff or 22 per cent each year that matters, it's whom they are losing and why that should be the primary concern.

Echoing the message by Professor Mark Huselid, a keynote speaker at this year's AHRI convention, Ms Halloran stresses that HR has to identify and actively manage the "high-value high-performing" staff.

"You have to first identify your high-value people and teams and then treat them better than everyone else," she says. "Give them better shifts, give them learning and development opportunities, give them more guidance, more feedback and give them more praise."

Six years of research by Retention Partners suggests organisations most commonly lose people because of how they manage them: 70 per cent of people resign due to "organisational factors" and only 30 per cent quit for reasons over which organisations have little control. "The message over and over again is that employee turnover is largely a self-inflicted wound," she says.

She says that of the 70 per cent of staff that are "pushed" by their organisation, in 70 per cent of cases their decision is influenced by their manager's behaviour. "But we are not saying that managers make people quit; we are saying that organisations need to support managers in retaining people," she says.

"The key issue is that organisations don't set people up for success in a management capacity. It's about them ensuring managers understand the influence they have, building up their retention capabilities and then having KPIs (key performance indicators) in place that force managers to focus on retaining their high-value people."

The AHRI two-day recruitment and retention workshop will be held in Melbourne on November 23 and 24. Email education@ahri.com.au, visit www.ahri.com.au or phone 9918 9200 for more information.

© 2006 The Age

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