Vana Prewitt in Employee retention LO23420 built on what Chuck
Wallace asked about employee retention...
Vana took a skills and change perspective and it got me thinking about our
experiences with turnover in retailing where it wasn't so much skills as
environment...
I worked for Murray Pepper at a 28-store company called Home Silk Shoppes.
He engaged me as a consultant to improve productivity and customer
service. What was most interesting was his historical manager turnover
rate of 9%, which Steven Covey even discussed in his presentation at the
National Retail Merchants Association back in 1979.
Sure the managers had the soft and hard skills needed to do their jobs --
that should be a given. But Murray also tailored goals and objectives
WITH each of his managers, provided very excellent feedback about the
store's performance, routinely challenges the managers with "special
promotions" and had a variety of contests and incentives based on what the
stores could DO.
All of these programs were customized with the involvement of the manager,
who would then take the challenge back to their people and work with the
employees to see what could be done to meet the goal (rather easy) and to
exceed the goal (which had a much larger financial incentive tied to it).
The involvement of the managers was key to this working. And the managers
felt a high degree of ownership of both the store and the results. It
spilled out in many ways in their hiring, their store personnel policies
and employee involvement and all that.
I came in to improve customer service, so we were VERY careful to overlay
a positive feedback system based on the store's average sale and its items
per sale, which we felt correlated very highly with custoemr service. If
they developed rapport and sold more, the perception would be positive.
We also encouraged the cashiers to look at the customer purchases and make
recommendations about other items that would correspond.
All of these efforts helped the company to increase its average sale from
about $10.15 to about $16 over a year, with concomitent increases in
service quality.
Looking back, it was the positive working environment and the access to
the senior leadership that seemed to be the biggest factor in the high
manager satisfaction and low turnover. Salaries were good, but not
exceptional. But people felt satisfied about their accomplishments and
the sincere recognition of their efforts.
My next job was also in retail; the store manager turnover was 258%
annually and the working environment was not all that hot. Within 18
months, through a wide variety of career development, realignment,
positive feedback, contingent reward and an employee ownership program
that I have previously discussed in the list, we moved store manager
turnover down to 68% (and half of that turnover was from catching the
managers stealing from the company!).
We tend to make this turnover analysis stuff so complicated, it seems.
RECRUITMENT is complicated. But retaining employees seems to be focused
on providing them with an opportunity for personal growth and learning,
the feeling that their efforts are recognized and appreciated, and a
fundamental fairness in how they are treated.
It is about listening, understanding, and actions. It is not about "doing
something" but about being human and human beings.
In my 20+ years of consulting, it seems that some companies understand
this implicitly, some company cultures can adapt themselves to this kind
of framework, and some seem completely incapable of doing anything to send
the message that they value human capital.
In the words of one company president of the latter group, in a management
retreat where he was asked to share his thoughts on employee involvement
and organizational development, he said to all his managers:
"That is like asking the vegetables how to design a refrigerator."
Think they had any turnover?
--For the FUN of It!
Scott J. Simmerman, Ph.D. Performance Management Company - 800-659-1466 mailto:Scott@SquareWheels.com
Developer of "The Search for the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine" for developing teambuilding, leadership and collaboration <http://www.squarewheels.com/>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>