ROBERTA BHASIN is the author of Mastering Management-A Guide for Technical Professionals which is published by Miller Freeman Inc. She also conducts seminars and speaks on management for technical professionals.

Turning turnover around

It’s in business magazines, Sunday papers, national news magazines—in today’s high tech economy it is hard to find good employees…and it is even harder to keep them. If yours is a large part of a large company, chances are you have not only read these stories, you have got some to tell yourself. And if yours is a small part of a smaller company, turnover isn’t just the most recent of pesky management problems. It could affect the survival of your company, because, if you don’t have the employees to manufacture the product or provide the service, your customers can literally tap the globe to find a competitor who does.

Experts say a turnover rate higher than 25% indicates problems beyond the normal life changes, career changes, and other factors that cause employees to leave. So, your first task is to determine the size of your problem, and what it is costing in terms of lost time, lost productivity, replacement costs, and repetitive costs of orienting and training new employees. The latter can be particularly high if your business, like so many others today, depends on technology.

Your next task is, obviously, to figure out who is leaving, when, and why? Are you losing your older and more experienced workers? Do you have a position you can’t seem to keep filled? Do younger workers sign on…and then just as quickly move on? Is the turnover seasonal? It is not difficult to gather this data, but it is something employers frequently forget to do in their haste to find replacements. All you have to do is ask.

FINDING THE PROBLEM. Your human resources (HR) organization can help you with some trend analysis with regard to when people leave and who they are.

HR can also help with exit interviews, which are key to getting information about the working conditions in your operation as well as the skills of your supervisors. Face it: You may not always know what’s really happening on the mill floor. You might want to do some of these interviews yourself, or if turnover is particularly acute, you might also consider turning to an outside agency. These interviews need to be wide ranging, asking about satisfaction with compensation, benefits, safety, interpersonal communication, supervision, appropriateness of job assignments, equity, and so on.

They can help you ferret out whether the departing employees have simply gotten "better offers" down the street, as most will say, or whether there is more to it. As Arnold Sanow, author of Entrepreneur Boot Camp says, "Money is important, but you can get a job anywhere today. Why stay where you’re not appreciated?" Writing in a recent Atlantic Monthly article, management guru Peter Drucker goes further, suggesting that good wages, good benefits, and stock options will buy the loyalty of technical workers, in particular, for only so long. A continued thriving economy, he says, depends on raising the social status of today’s technicians. These are "gold-collar" workers who have traditional blue-collar skills plus the computer savvy that makes brains as important as their hands.

SLOWING DOWN TURNOVER. Once you’ve got a handle on the reasons for turnover, you’ll need to figure out how to slow it down. For larger organizations, some suggest forming cross-functional, multilevel teams to address the issues raised in the exit interviews. By involving people who actually work in the environment that seemingly has grown less and less attractive, as well as the managers and supervisors who have the authority to make changes, the team can develop practical solutions to the problems. In smaller shops, a formal team may not be practical, but getting input from current workers is critical.

Some solutions are easier than others:

• New employee information, if it has been inadequate, can be shored up with formal orientation programs, buddy systems, and mentoring. Training—and retraining-- can be improved, using in-house or external resources.
• Safety problems, similarly, are easily dealt with. Improve the lighting, fix the troublesome machinery, enforce the rules, and implement the suggestions you get from current employees.

Other solutions are more taxing:

• A job that you just can’t keep filled may be poorly designed or obsolete.
• The description used to craft the want ad may not reflect the actual requirements—resulting in under- or over-qualified new-hires.
• You may have a problem supervisor who is driving valuable people away.

Regardless, doing your homework will help you come up with as permanent a solution as possible to your turnover problem. Implementing the practical suggestions of both current and former employees will go a long way, as well.