Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Do You Make Lemonade Out of Employee Attrition?

How to Gain Maximum Value from Voluntary Employee Turnover
By Lara Sanders Fordis, Senior Research Director, Insightlink Communications

Even at organizations committed to employee engagement, employees still decide to leave. Of course, you hate to lose your best talent and “top performers” to competitors, not to mention the laborious replacement process that lies ahead. So how can you make something positive come out of attrition in the short- and long-term, while you simultaneously scramble to fill the gap?

An exit system like InsightEXIT gets the job done and even automates the process so you can focus on other tasks. Meanwhile, for every departing employee surveyed in a systematic way by InsightEXIT, you’ll move you another step forward in your efforts to:
Understand the factors that drive employees to leave
Identify problem supervisors who could lead to repeat turnover
Identify other barriers to job satisfaction
Save money by reducing human capital costs related to future turnover
Evaluate how well the expectations set when new employees join your organization are met in practice
Increase retention and reduce employee turnover
Increase employee satisfaction, engagement and morale
Increase employee productivity
Manage and mitigate the risks of employee departures
Move towards becoming an "employer of choice" and a place that voluntarily exit employees could recommend to others
Of utmost importance is whether your organization could have done anything could to avoid it the departure. At Insightlink, we deliberately measure preventable vs. non-preventable losses. Preventable attrition generally stems from employee dissatisfaction, poor management and a perceived lack of advancement opportunity. Non-preventable attrition includes attrition due to spouse relocation, career changes and other factors over which an organization has essentially no control.
You can probably guess where the lemonade comes from and where savvy HR professionals should invest their energy – focus on the factors that contribute to preventable attrition. InsightEXIT makes it easy with a system that puts in your hands the ability to drill-down by any variable, including job type, department and supervisor.

Need tips and suggestions to help you maximize the benefits of conducting your exit surveys? Insightlink’s Exit Survey Best Practice Guidelines include information about exit survey content, setting up an exit system process, what to communicate to your employees and how to interpret exit survey data. Designed to maximize the effectiveness of InsightEXIT, you’ll see why companies of various sizes turn to Insightlink for solutions.

To find out how Insightlink can help you make lemons into lemonade -- when you’re ready to explore how your organization can benefit from systematic exit surveys -- go to http://www.insightexit.com