Talent Retention

Written by: Stephen Grassi

This blog post is based on the Hotel-Industry.co.uk article “Staff Retention: A Guide to Talent Retention” by Caroline Cooper.

Understanding

“Understanding people’s aspirations can … put you in a better position to retain your valued team members.” Caroline Cooper opens up her article by acknowledging the fact that employers must understand their employees if they wish to keep them with the company. Cooper states that better understanding between employees and employers can be gained through regular meetings, such as performance appraisals. This gives the employee the opportunity to talk about issues such as his career goals or things in the workplace that might be bothering him. This gives the employer the opportunity to better understand the employee and help him achieve his goals while also achieving the goals and strategies of the company.

Support

Even when employees are performing well, they need support. Management cannot assume that if you just leave employees alone, they will continue to perform at a high level. While it is true that employees should be left alone from micromanaging meddlers, employees should not be left completely alone. Employees need organizational support in order to perform well. This support can be emotional support, such as recognition for a job well done. It can be on-the job support of giving employees the tools they need to get the job done well. It can also be support of the employee’s long term career goals by offering advanced training and pushing employees to fulfill their potential. By supporting an employee’s long-term well-being, the employer can improve the retention of its employees.

Security

The economic crisis of the past few years has left the job markets very volatile. Many companies have had to lay off employees amid this recession. In order to retain your top talent, Cooper contends that you must make them feel secure in your organization. There is always risk involved with taking on a new job with a different employer, so offering extra security to your top talent can help ensure that they will remain with your organization. Keep your employees informed about management’s business decisions and keep lines of communication open so that you can establish and preserve the trust of your employees. This will help prevent your top talent from jumping the ship to other organizations.

Recognition

Recognition of performance was touched on briefly when talking about support, but it was not further explained. Recognizing the accomplishments, contributions, and successes of employees is a key way to keep job satisfaction high among employees. This recognition can come in many forms. It can be as simple as hearing a co-worker say “Good job!” or “Thanks for your help!” It can also be something more tangible, such as bonuses, raises, and promotions within the organization. Recognition is essential to motivating employees and keeping morale high. By using employee recognition to accomplish these two functions, it is very likely that retention of top talent will be successful.

Responsible Employer

Employers must recognize that all employees will eventually leave the organization. There is nothing an organization can do to change this. Therefore, Cooper admonishes employers to recognize this fact and take steps to deal with it. Keep lines of communication open with employees so that you can know about organizational departures in advance and plan for them. Have succession plans. Let employees know when higher-level positions are available and promote from within whenever possible. These steps will help build a strong positive culture and a good reputation, which in turn will help the organization in its long-term quest for success.

Conclusion

Retaining top talent is something that all organizations wish to accomplish. The steps outlined here will help organizations reach that goal. Understand your employees’ needs. Be supportive of employees and help them accomplish their professional goals. Ensure that employees feel secure with their jobs. Be quick to recognize the accomplishments of employees. Finally, organizations must recognize the reality of situations and be ready to deal with those situations. All of these assessments are in alignment with Human Resource Management (the text) by Mathis and Jackson. In chapter 5, the text offers up several issues that are key to talent retention. The text states that management factors, work relationships, rewards, and career training and development are all factors that intersect with the statements by Cooper. If the steps outlined by Cooper and the text are followed, they will help an organization retain its talent.

“Staff Retention: A Guide to Talent Retention”

Caroline Cooper

Hotel-Industry.co.uk, March 2012

Article URL: http://www.hotel-industry.co.uk/2012/03/staff-retention-a-guide-to-talent-retention/

The Intangible Costs of Human Resource Outsourcing

Written by: Rachel Wells

This blog post is based on the Human Resource Management International Digest article “The Intangible Costs of Human Resource Outsourcing” by Mandy Sim.

Outsourcing

When we think about attracting and retaining top talent we rarely think about HR professionals. Somehow finding the best people possible to perform an organization's HR functions seems to get overlooked. And wanting to retain the HR professionals that an organization does have never prevails over a cost savings. Outsourcing of transactional functions of human resource management has become more popular over the years. The text defines outsourcing as the process of “transferring the management and performance of a business function to an external service provider” (57). While the text emphasizes that outsourcing can save an organization a lot of money, and it can also allow in-house HR to function more strategically, Mandy Sim believes there are dangers to outsourcing HR functions.

Dangers to Outsourcing

Mandy Sim is a professor at the Nottingham University Business School in Malaysia. In her article she outlines several different dangers that could arise from the outsourcing of HR functions. Sim first says that major organizational change can be more difficult to achieve if HR functions are outsourced (3). This happens because when outsourcing occurs there is little communication and interaction between employees and HR. Trust is then lost. When trust is lost between the employees and HR, it becomes very difficult for the workforce to accept major organizational change.

Secondly, Sim says that there is a danger of outsourced recruiters giving prospective employees inaccurate information about the job. When an outsourced recruiter has not experienced the job first hand, the information given to the candidate about the client company and the job itself is most likely not correct. This can cause an employee who accepted the job based on inaccurate information to leave quickly. Another round of expensive recruiting will then be needed, and employee turnover will increase.

Thirdly, Sim says that outsourcing HR functions can lead to HR staff not being trained in the outsourced areas such as payroll, training and development, and recruiting. When HR staff moves into managerial positions, they might lack critical knowledge and skills.

Sim also points out that there is less flexibility when using an outsourced company for something like payroll, which the text identifies as a common HR function to outsource. Most outsourced payroll companies charge on a per-transaction basis. Extra charges can occur when you have an increased labor force during certain times, which is common in manufacturing, or wish to have an additional pay period one month. Also, when requesting changes to payroll on short notice it is more common that mistakes will occur. If mistakes are made on the payroll, employee problems can increase. Sim believes that high levels of employee dissatisfaction, low morale, more grievances, low productivity, greater frustration, higher turnover and even law suits may follow (4).

Conclusion

Even though outsourcing reduces an organization's costs, there are many non-financial costs associated with it. An organization should consider carefully all outcomes before deciding to outsource some or all of its HR functions. If an organization is set on outsourcing HR functions, Sim suggests a shared service center where all transaction-based activities are centralized in one place. For recruiting, the text suggests recruitment process outsourcing (RPO). RPO is used to outsource placement of advertisements, initial screening of resumes, and initial telephone contacts. Once these activities are done, the organization's HR staff takes over the rest of the recruiting activities. For training, the text supports the use of computer software vendors to help employees obtain technical certifications on their software. Such certifications provide items for employees to put on their resumes and benefits employers.

For someone like me, who hopes to become a HR professional, this article really made me think about some of the challenges I might run into in the future. It might become standard for organizations to outsource some of their HR functions, but I sure hope it doesn't become standard to outsource all of them. Or else I might be out of a job.

Sim, Mandy. “The Intangible Costs of Human Resource Outsourcing.” Human Resource Management International Digest 18.6 (2010): 3-4.

Employee Voice & Employee Retention

Written By: Jeffin Johnson

Dr. Spencer

My second blog will discuss an article written by Daniel G Spencer. Dr. Spencer is an associate professor of business at the University of Kansas. He received his Ph.D degree in organization and management from the University of Oregon. His current research interests include turnover, absenteeism, and processes of resolution of employee-organization conflict. 

His article was published by the Academy of Management in their monthly journal, and portions of his paper were also presented at their 42nd Annual Meeting in the state of New York.  In his article, titled “Employee Voice and Employee Retention”, Dr. Spencer presents the results of two studies he has conducted in efforts to reveal a relationship between employee opportunities to voice dissatisfaction and voluntary turnover. 

Introduction and Foundation

Dr. Spencer initiates his article by stating that “The relationship between the job satisfaction and employee turnover has been one of the most widely studied but least understood relationships in organizational behavior literature.” He continues on to say that the most prominent studies from the past focused on the number of alternatives dissatisfied employees had and the nonwork-related factors that affected their decisions.

                 

                     Dr. Mowday

Dr. Steers

Richard M. Steers and Richard T. Mowday (University of Oregon) were the first academics to suggest that there may be a relationship between employee voice and employee retention; however, Dr. Spencer goes on to state that although Steers and Richard were the first to verbally acknowledge this relationship (in 1981), it has been heavily implicit in the works of an European economist named Albert Hirschman a decade earlier. Hirschman’s concepts are gaining increasing attention in the organizational behavior arena and his concepts are also the theoretical foundation for Dr. Spencer’s studies.

Study One

Objective

Determine if there is a direct relationship between the amount of opportunity an organization gives its employees to voice dissatisfaction and the organization’s rate of employee retention.

Hypothesis

There will be a significant and negative relationship between the total number of voice mechanisms for employees that an organization has and the voluntary turnover rate among the organization's employees.

Methods

First, a systematic sample of executive directors of hospitals in the north central United States was drawn from the American Association membership directory. Second, Dr. Spencer sent them questionnaire packages with a request to forward the questionnaire to their hospital's personnel directors. Out of a sample of 278 hospitals, 129 of them completed and returned the questionnaires for a response rate of 46.4%.

The questionnaire asked whether or not each hospital’s register nurses were subject to the following employee-retention practices:

• Grievance procedures
• Suggestion systems
• Employee management meetings
• Counseling services
• Ombudsman services
• Non-management task forces
• Question & answer programs
• Survey feedback 

Each hospital was also requested to supply the rate of voluntary turnover for its registered nurses for the previous 12-month period.

Results

Table 1 presents the mean and standard deviations of the study’s variables. Dr. Spencer concludes that “All the correlations between variables and turnover were in the predicted direction with the exception of the positive correlation between wage rate and turnover.” He provides a detailed explanation for the correlation in the footnotes of his article. 

Table 1 (Click to Expand)

Study Two

Objective

The first study did not weigh the quality of the hospitals' voice mechanisms; as a result, a second study was necessary. The second study examined the relationship between the number of mechanisms offering employees the option to voice their issues, and the employees' perceptions of its effectiveness.

Hypothesis

A high number of employee voice mechanisms will be positively related to high expectancies of problem resolution among employees and high levels of effectiveness for the organization's problem resolution procedures.

Methods

Four hospitals that participated in study one also allowed Dr. Spencer to survey their nonsupervisory registered nurses. As the objective stated, the survey’s goal was to assess the registered nurses’ perception of the effectiveness of the available voice mechanisms.

Results

Dr. Spencer concludes that all the correlations were again in the expected direction. More voice mechanisms can lead to higher levels of expectancies for problem resolution in an organization. Table 2 (Table 4 in the article) paints a clear picture of study 2 and its results. 

Table 2 (Click to Expand)

In conclusion, the results of these studies conducted by Dr. Daniel G Spencer sheds light on the importance of providing employees with venues to share their concerns and complaints. Although it may be time consuming, in the long run it will save you more time and money since your retention rates will be higher. In other words, the more time and money you devote to cooperating with and accommodating your current employees, the less time and money you have to spend finding and training new ones. 

Source Citation

Spencer, Daniel G. "Employee voice and employee retention." Academy of Management Journal 29.3 (1986): 488+. Academic OneFile. Web. 27 Mar. 2012.

Document URL
http://go.galegroup.com.huaryu.kl.oakland.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA4402406&v=2.1&u=lom_oaklandu&it=r&p=AONE&sw=w

Gale Document Number: GALE|A4402406