Many business enterprises are currently facing several issues that oblige them to undergo specific transitions every time. In certain situations, the management can devise solutions to the problems and ensure their successful implementation. However, in most cases, the human resource management faces various issues and cannot effectively sustain a proper stream of work activities in the business. The ultimate repercussion of such a scenario can be threatening to the organization because the performance can end up declining in the long run. When such situations arise, either the internal or internal organizational consultants must take the initiative to examine the problems that thwart the organization’s progress, identify the best solutions that can be applied to resolve the issues and implement the best strategies for success. Therefore, it is essential to delve into a typical organization that has ever found itself in such a situation, its distinct problem, the methods of collecting data, data analysis, and the recommended solutions, as well as the implementation including the evaluation of the proposed strategies.
Problem Identification
Organization Description
In the past couple of years, I worked in a retailing organization, which received purely manufactured goods, packaged the products, and finally supplied the products to different market niches. It was such a large organization with many stores located in different geographical regions that are far away from each other. My organization has several departments like management, finance, packaging, logistics, supply, and marketing, as well as sales departments. Interestingly, all the aforementioned departments worked in consultation with each other and they were committed to similar objectives to enable them to satisfy the needs of the customers.
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The manufactured goods were first passed through the supplies department. Thereafter, they are packed in boxes of varying quantities that could suit each of its customers depending on their preferences. Following packaging, it was the responsibility of the logistics department to load the goods on their trucks and transport them along the distribution channel to the various market niches based on demand. Indeed, when I first entered the organization, I was a new member among the many new employees that the organization had just hired. I was employed after a thorough evaluation of my credentials. However, no interview was conducted during the hiring process. In the course of my career at the organization, I realized that many organizations resigned from the organization, month after month, and a new group of employees was hired after every short period just the way our recruitment process took place.
Organizational Problem
From the foregoing, my organization faced a particularly major issue, the rapid and high rate of employee turnover. The issue has several consequences including the dire need to fill the vacant positions as fast as possible to maintain the organization’s productivity. Additionally, it greatly reduced morale in the workplace and the staff that remained following massive resignations was overworked to meet organizational needs. Also, a high rate of employee turnover is costly for the company because it consumes colossal amounts of financial resources annually. A plethora of research has proved that the problem affects many other companies worldwide and not only my former organization. For instance, approximately 91% of Millennials always expect to retain their jobs within a period of less than two years although the average tenure has been 3.5 years.
I learned that employee turnover is such a serious problem in any organization. The situation often results from employees’ dissatisfaction with the job, leading to many of them being employed after every month while others leave in that after a short time. Usually, it seems unusual for any company to start recruiting a new group of workforce month after the other like the organization under discussion used to do. I also learned that the approach that the organization adopted when hiring its employees was might have contributed to the hiring of the wrong teams. Precisely, the organization failed to put the right people in the right place because of the failure to evaluate the different levels of competence among the workforce. Most of the staffs that resigned the job often began by rampant absenteeism rates followed by resignation.
Notably, the rapid and elevated rate of employee turnover implies that my organization lost a very large workforce in comparison to the total figure it recruited annually. Researchers prove that the greater the rate of turnover among employees of any firm, the increase in the rate at which the organization is negatively affected. However, it is always beneficial to the organization when it loses the poor performing and underperforming employees. Conversely, it is costly to the same company immediately the rate of employee turnover upsurges abnormally and the situation can negatively affect its performance in the long run. According to Ahn (2015), higher employee turnover results in a dismal performance in the organization. The real cause of the declining performance can be the reduced levels of experience across the organization in all its departments as compared to when there are at least half of the “old” employees remaining every year. The employees with little experience in the organization produce poorer results as compared to the experienced workforce that understands what exactly they should do. Indeed, the availability of limited know-how decreases the efficiency of productivity, specifically in the assigned tasks. As job efficiency reduces, the situation negatively impacts the satisfaction ratings of both sales and services that the company offers across its various departments.
The increasing rate of turnover experienced in the workforce reduces the morale of workers who might have retained their job positions in the organization and generally weakens its operations. Note that the excessive turnover like the one that occurred in my former organization disrupts the workplace and results in plummeting employee morale. The impacts can be detrimental to the organization. Mostly, higher employee turnover is an expense that some organizations would rather do without. Additionally, maintaining a workforce with a declining performance is another expense because the overall attitude of employees is negative and this can be costly in the long run. Such a situation requires a strong organizational culture, which involves the collective ethical morals and standards of the staff that is committed to work as a team and engage in consultations amongst themselves to attain collective goals. As the employees vanish frequently, human resource management cannot effectively motivate the remaining personnel and successfully share the long-term dream of the same enterprise.
Furthermore, when co-workers and their allies quit their jobs, the workforce that stays embarks on thorough consultations with each other to know the newly recruited colleagues. The process of familiarizing themselves with each new member is a practice that diminishes the overall self-esteem in the organization. Such a high rate of employee turnover requires extraordinary efforts and focus to fix because it has the potential of adversely affecting the organization’s daily operations and overall productivity. Managers will as well end up being exasperated with the continuous state of affairs whereby they have to recruit a team of workforce every month and annually. The frustrations increase because as the newly hired employees continue to perform poorly due to underequipped knowledge, expertise, and talents, they less contribute to the overall production.
The higher the employee turnover rate, the higher the expenditures because the organization will be forced to allocate colossal financial resources to ensure the proper management of the newly employed individuals. The increased costs originate from the expenses that the organization incurs when conducting nearly monthly and annual interviews to meet its personnel demands. The management also spends huge quantities of both temporal and financial resources when employing a new wave of workforce and conduction orientation and training in the form of probation to equip them with the required expertise. When an organization finds itself in such a situation, it hires a business adviser to rejuvenate the firm’s efforts and restructure its operational strategies with the ambition of curbing the turnover furrow (Bierema, 2014). The turnover is a serious problem that costs most organizations a long period, huge assets, and financial resources.
Needs Assessment and Diagnosis
A consultant can gather facts about the turnover issue through various techniques. For instance, the professional can initially leverage questionnaires to acquire useful statistical evidence. It is vital to prepare two types of questionnaires. The first type should be specifically designed for current employees while the second for those that previously resigned and quit the jobs. Those prepared to be answered by the current workers should contain queries like What should make you quit the job? Why did your colleagues leave the job?
The management should ensure that it reaches the former employees who had quit the job and left their details. The questionnaires can be delivered to them via emails. For example, questions can be as simple as: why did you leave the job? Other than the questionnaires, the management can leverage other methods as well and they may include interviews and employee records. The two latter methods are regarded as secondary methods. The data so obtained should be analyzed comprehensively. One of the best methods for data analysis can include spreadsheet and some statistical data analysis techniques including the mean, mode, and median, as well as the standard deviation. The analytical methods will reveal figures that are vital in decision-making processes, especially in areas that need changes to be made and the best approaches to implementing those modifications.
Proposed Strategies for Reducing High Turnover Rates
The best suggested way for diminishing the high turnover rate in the organization and improve the rate at which it retains its employees involves the critical evaluation of the hiring process. The evaluation will enable the management to identify and change a few things that result in errors. For example, the HR can recheck the cultural fit of the job candidate as a hiring strategy to ensure that the right person is placed in the right place to reduce the overall errors and increase organizational productivity (Hee and Ling, 2011). Organizations that maintain cultural consistency often retain a greater percentage of the workforce because a large part of the workforce will not consider quitting their jobs.
Several scholars have argued that approximately 46% of new business ventures often shut down in utmost one and a half years. One is the cause of such a failure is the cultural fit that the organization may fail to achieve when hiring (Smith, 2012). Ideally, the organization must conduct research and tests to obtain the necessary data about the education, veracity, ethical work standards, as well as individual trustworthiness of the employee. By so doing, it is easier to determine if they truly deserve the job and they can fit and successfully blend with the organization’s culture. This implies that during interviews, the HR should determine the levels at which the potential employees’ personalities mesh with the overall organization’s environment and workplace culture. However, the timely evaluation of the firm’s cultural suitability must be conducted, particularly during the initial stages of the three months that the individual will be on probationary. Indeed, this method is accurate and is not subject to any chances of resistance.
Additionally, the procedure of recruiting the workforce should include testing duration to determine the entrants’ levels of suitability with their tasks and obligations at the job. The trial period is paramount in identifying the dependability of the freshly recruited members. Still, trial reduces the rate of employee turnover as research ascertains (Singh and Loncar, 2010). Researchers have always argued that following the probationary period of approximately three months, an organization will experience 95% employee retention. The probation period ensures that the organization shares its values, expectations, and dreams with the employees and if the two are concurrent, it is a sign that they are appropriate for an extended stay at their respective job positions. However, the approach will consume a lot of resources to facilitate the assessment of employees in the probationary period because some will not be entitled to a job following the three months. Alternatively, the organization can adopt another strategy, allowing for flexibility in all the tasks that the new employees do to help in moderating the turnover rates. Noteworthy, when workers’ schedules are flexible, it motivates them because they will feel valued and they will see to it that the overall management identifies and respects their desires. Singh and Loncar (2010) claim that at least 75% of working adults in the United States are more interested in flexible jobs when searching for greener pastures and another 39% resign voluntarily because of inflexibility. Therefore, considering the work-life balance of employees in combination with leisure time and housing allowances is crucial for improving the overall private lifestyles of the workforce.
Further, the organization should adopt the concept of the onboarding program every time it conducts the contracting practices. Smith (2012) confirmed that companies that implemented the same program in the first three probationary months reduced turnover by 31%. Onboarding is vital because it can introduce the newly hired employee to the organization’s culture and future prospects; hence, giving them an overview of what the job position entails. Generally speaking, the onboarding process ensures the compatibility of the new hire to the organization and ensures prolonged investment. Other than the onboarding process, the organization should implement strategies for maintaining the current employees and this can majorly be attained by ensuring flexibility in the work environment (Profileinternational.com, 2016). The organization should consider the personal lives of employees so that they can even work following life-threatening conditions like delivery.
Evaluation of the Proposed Intervention Strategies
This section depicts the plan that should be implemented to assess the development plans that a business venture puts in place to restrain its rate of employee turnover. The developmental strategies will be evaluated after every month for three months that the new hire will be on probation. I maintain that conducting surveys would be the best performance appraisal measure. However, the surveys may comprise a questionnaire, observation, and interviews. As said before, the questionnaire should find out the reason as to why an employee may decide to quit the job. The queries presented in the survey forms will help the HR to identify situations in which the new hire would wish to quit the job and the possible reasons for the same. Three months is such a good time that the organization can make constant observations on the new employees and both managers and supervisors can as well take part in the observations. The supervisors will easily identify the employees that are not gaining knowledge and those that slowly fit into the organization’s culture. Similarly, they will easily identify employees who are committed to their work and recommend them accordingly for possible permanent employment after the end of the probationary period. However, the managers should conduct interviews monthly by questioning employees about their roles in their respective positions. The same process should include an assessment of the flexibility of the jobs and accurately identify those who fit into the organizational culture. Notably, the same evaluation strategy will be employed to assess the existing employees that have taken quite a long duration in the business enterprise.
Finally, a firm’s progress is a vital idea of every organization since it provides solutions to emerging problems in the workplace. All organizations experience issues, which thwart their progress and overall productivity and performance. The problems should be identified as early as possible and solutions provided before the organization incurs enormous losses. The organization discussed in this context hired and lost employees at an alarming rate. I noted that the way in which any business venture hires a team of personnel could be the major cause of the increased turnover rate and reduced productivity. Therefore, it is paramount to delve into needs assessment through the collection of accurate and reliable data and analyzing the same data to locate where the actual problem lies in the organization. The data analysis process will aid in making the right decisions, especially when a consultant needs to evaluate and recommend the best intervention strategies that can prove fruitful.
References
Ahn, T. (2015). Locus of Control and Job Turnover. Economic Inquiry, 53(2), 1350-1365. doi:10.1111/ecin.12173
Bierema, L. (2014). An Introduction to Organizational Development. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.
Hee, C. H., & Ling, F. Y. (2011). Strategies for Reducing Employee Turnover and Increasing Retention Rates of Quantity Surveyors. Construction Management & Economics, 29(10), 1059-1072. doi:10.1080/01446193.2011.637569
Profilesinternational.com, (2016). Pre-Employment Screening Test | Profiles International. Retrieved 13 April 2016, from http://www.profilesinternational.com/employee-assessment-products-overview/step-one-survey-pre-employment-screening-test/
Singh, P., & Loncar, N. (2010). Pay Satisfaction, Job Satisfaction and Turnover Intent. Relations Industrielles / Industrial Relations, 65(3), 470-490.
Smith, N. (2012). Why Attitude Beats Aptitude When Hiring. Business News Daily. Retrieved 13 April 2016, from http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/1860-hiring-attitude-high-performers.html
