HR Blog | Employee Retention & Turnover Management

Get an Insiders View Into Your Company with Stay Interviews

Are your best employees here to stay? Ask them!

Don’t wait until an employee is leaving to try to convince them to stay. The stay interview is a powerful tool to get insight on a segment of your business where turnover is particularly high. Conduct stay interviews to find out what motivates your employees to work for you – and what could entice them to work somewhere else. According to a 2016 Deloitte Millennial Survey, 66% of millennials expect to leave their company by 2020 and 25% expect to leave within a year. According to Inc.com, the number one way to retain millennials is to know what matters to them – and they’re not the only ones. Whether it’s financial incentives, professional development or flexibility – find out what your more transient employees need, and show them you’re paying attention to their values.

Not Just Another Engagement Survey

Implementing a stay interview not only helps human resources keep a finger on the pulse of employee sentiment, but it also gives executives specific action items to reduce employee turnover in their company. A key component of a stay interview is that it’s rarely conducted by a human resources member. Anonymous and private, the process should have more in common with your exit interviews than any employee engagement survey. Once you’ve identified business areas with the poorest retention trends, conduct a stay interview by interviewing one group of employees from the low quota area to get a snapshot into what’s going on. Whether your target groups are large or small, semi-annual studies in focused areas are more than enough to yield worthwhile insights.

Making Stay Interviews Work for You

Remember: the two key goals of stay interviews are to find out why an employee would leave and to learn why he or she has chosen to stay. Start off your stay interview specifically asking employees to list what factors contribute to their high performance, what their reasons for potentially leaving the company might be, and if they have any suggestions that would make the organization stronger. Ask them about working with company leadership, ask about a bad day at work, and ask why they stay at the company. Make sure that your questions help you discover warning signs of resignation, find key levers to prevent resignations, and demonstrate that you recognize and appreciate their loyalty.

Conduct Your Own Stay Interviews

HSD Metrics’ HR outsourcing services utilize modern technology to capture and report data for immediate 24/7 access by our clients. We are more than just a vendor; we understand that hiring and training can cost both time and capital – two things that should never be compromised. To find out more about how stay interviews can help your business and start retaining your best employees, contact HSD Metrics today.

Human Resource Outsourcing for Financial Companies

In finance and financial services, trust and expertise are paramount – from senior executives to emerging talent. One of the fastest ways for a company to erode both trust and expertise is to lose control of its employee turnover. It not only leads to costly employee replacement, but it can also damage stability in the eyes of clients. At HSD Metrics, we leverage decades of experience working with finance and financial service clients to help companies understand turnover causes and increase management accountability. Our expert team members work with companies including Scottrade, Zurich Insurance Group, Prospect Mortgage, and Advance America to improve their retention rates by setting up comprehensive exit interviews for departing employees. These interviews generate data that document trends and identify resignation motives, which helps companies keep the high-quality talent that the financial industry demands. HSD Metrics’ extensive experience in interview design and analysis allows businesses to outsource their exit interviews and improve human resources processes. Start Retaining Quality Employees with ExitRight® Following am onboarding meeting to customize your input file, you’ll be ready to send our staff what they need to secure interviews by phone, web, and/or mail. Our expert-designed, professionally administered surveys guarantee anonymity, which results in candid, revealing responses. Additionally, the ExitRight Reporting Portal provides real-time, 24/7 access to aggregated data from exit interviews with metrics that include:

Filterable demographic data
Benchmarked data against external norms
Shareable reports
Drilldown data and commentary to the individual level
Additional robust text utilities
Instant notifications on sensitive subject matter

HSD Metrics can also help your financial organization refine onboarding processes and aggregate employee feedback. HSD Metrics equips your company with the necessary data to mitigate and provide the information your company needs to help reverse high turnover. We take away the burden of creating reliable surveys, delivering effective interviews, and organizing and interpreting data so that you can focus on retaining finance’s highest-quality employees. With HSD Metrics there are no long-term contracts, software purchases, or extensive training sessions required to start combating your company’s biggest personnel issues. To get the data and analysis that can help you improve your organization’s retention rate of valuable finance industry professionals, call HSD Metrics at 877-439-9315, or contact us online today.

Four Ways to Improve Employee Retention in Retail

Waste less time and money on expensive replacements by identifying trends in the staff you turn over.

Retail businesses large and small rely on hardworking employees to deliver great customer service and hold up a consistent brand image. Although they’re the backbone of the industry, employee retention in retail continues to fluctuate. Whether good employees are leaving because they aren’t feeling valued or they experience too many scheduling conflicts, there are steps you can take to retain your best employees and reduce turnover:

1. Evaluate your exit interviews

Is your organization providing departing employees with a comprehensive exit interview that results in actionable data? If not, your process may need to be revamped. Keep in mind that there are a few keys to giving an effective exit interview, such as providing brief and standardized surveys, ensuring anonymity and collaboratively analyzing data.

2. Add more incentives.

As a 2012 study from the Harvard Business Review points out, “Investment in employees allows for excellent operational execution, which boosts sales and profits, which allows for a larger labor budget, which results in even more investment in-store employees.” Employees, especially millennials, want to feel valued. Providing performance-based incentives, such as top hours worked during the holidays or perfect attendance awards, can boost company morale and help employees know that they are working for valuable recognition.

3. Rethink hiring criteria.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average retail sales employee earns about $22,000 a year, and it takes about 16 percent of a yearly salary to replace an employee. This means that every time an employer replaces an employee they lose about $3,500. Hiring the right person for the job may initially take longer than quickly filling the position or checking backgrounds and references, but saves both time and money in the long run.

4. Divest more resources for onboarding

Training programs can act as recognition incentives for employees while equipping them to perform at optimal levels. Training programs also help management understand their staffs’ strengths and weaknesses, which can help them identify where an employee fits best within a company. HSD Metrics can ensure comprehensive exit interviews are being given to departing employees, compile aggregate actionable data, and gather new hire feedback to help you beat retail industry norms for turnover. If you would like to start improving your retention rate, get in touch with us at 877-439-9315.

Exit Interview Tactics in the Hospitality Industry

Don’t let high employee turnover sabotage your efforts to build your business.

Second only to retail, the hospitality sector has the highest turnover amongst top employment industries. And as hospitality managers know, a low employee retention rate leads to low employee morale and extremely high training costs. The average hospitality employee is paid $14.59 an hour and works about 26 hours a week. Since it costs about 16 percent of an annual salary to replace an employee that is earning these wages, companies lose about $3,200 every time they replace an employee. Creating effective exit interviews will improve your business’ retention rate and help you meet your financial goals.

Focus on management

Poor management is a leading cause of employee turnover. When you have ineffective managers, it doesn’t take long for their direct reports to become unhappy. In a fast-paced environment, this employee frustration can quickly turn to increased turnover that impacts customer service. To combat this, ask exit interview questions that paint a clear picture of what the management system looks like so that you can head off small management problems before they become a crisis.

Examine performance recognition

Within the hospitality industry, 67 percent of the people that leave their jobs say it’s because they are pursuing a new and more interesting challenge. During exit interviews, ask questions that speak to the perceived ability for advancement and if departing employees felt they were valued and recognized. HSD Metrics’ ExitRight® software can help pinpoint these trends and interpret data automatically. ExitRight also aggregates data into concise, easy-to-read analytics reports that include benchmarked data and red-flag alerts.

Analyze demographics

Within hospitality, the restaurant sector has the highest turnover rate. One of the reasons for this is because it employs many teenagers and students. According to Restaurant.org, students make up 28 percent of the dining labor force. To combat this in your establishment, analyze demographics and take heed of any noticeable trends. Turn these trends into actionable tasks that improve your retention rate, such as hiring employees that have a broader scope of availability.

Cultivate Culture

Leverage your exit interviews to get an insider’s perspective of the company culture. Culture is incredibly important in the hospitality sector and it may not only affect employment, but also the way your customers view your business. Asking departing employees pointed questions about how the company culture affected their time with the company can help your business retain employees and customers. Happy employees yield happy customers. If you’re ready to start streamlining processes and get the most out of your exit interviews, call 877-439-9315, or contact us today. Our ExitRight software provides you with the tools you need to find out how to keep your most valuable employees while helping you save time and money in future hiring.

Four Ways to Keep Your Educators Motivated and Engaged

Teachers need more than a catered lunch to feel rejuvenated. Here are some approaches to truly motivate and engage your employees.

In every profession, burnout is a risk. Unlike other occupations, though, educators are particularly susceptible to disillusionment. Working in education requires long hours, extreme patience, and the ability to be thrifty with sparse resources. These skills can be easily exhausted, taking a physical and emotional toll. Keeping educators motivated is key to helping them maintain their mission-driven passion. Here are four ways to motivate employees and help them experience fulfillment in their careers. 1. Encourage employees to take part in professional development. If anyone understands the value of lifelong learning, it’s someone who has dedicated their career to education. Encourage all employees, including administrators, to further their skills, learn about new technology or participate in workshops. Most importantly, approve requests to take time out of the typical workday setting to embark in these efforts. Make sure your employees know that management deeply cares about their professional growth. 2) Give staff the recognition they deserve. It’s always motivating to receive recognition for a job well done. Management should set goals that make recognition a priority. This could be as simple as reminding faculty and staff members of the nobility of their profession, or publicly recognizing and rewarding outstanding employees on a weekly or monthly basis with a paid meal or gift card. 3) Give teachers autonomy in the classroom. Teachers, counselors and administrators enter the field to make a difference in their students’ lives on an individual level, not follow a set of rigid guidelines. Yet, teachers of all levels are increasingly constrained by testing. Trusting teachers by giving them the autonomy to teach creatively, while still fulfilling core requirements, is essential to keeping them engaged. 4) Empower your employees by helping them recognize their strengths. To effectively achieve educational outcomes, you need to provide your faculty and staff with the resources they need to excel. To do that, it’s imperative to understand, on an individual level, how they work most effectively. Getting to know staff members this well may seem like a large task, but there are many resources that can aid these efforts, such as personality tests and evaluations like Survey Right® Employee Engagement Surveys. To learn more about resources that can help you better motivate your employees, call us today at 877-439-9315 or contact us online to talk with one of our expert team members. We provide tools that will not only help you motivate and engage employees, but understand why they become unmotivated in the first place.

Exit Interview Tactics in the Education Industry

Trouble retaining promising educational professionals can be detrimental to your entire organization. Here are some strategies for solving your employee retention problems.

Having a learning environment that is founded on teacher stability is critical when forming lasting relationships between staff and students. In a 2014 Gallup Poll teachers were ranked last out of a group of 12 occupations in believing that their opinion was valued in the workplace. If your school or university’s employee retention rate isn’t where you would like it to be, make sure your employees’ voices are heard. Here are a few tactics to implement in your exit interviewing process that will result in effective exit interviews and outcomes. Focus on aspects of school or university culture. A school’s culture is imperative to the happiness and effectiveness of its employees and students. Every school or university has its own personality. What is your educational establishment known for? Aiming your exit interview questions around topics such as perception of fairness, benefits, pay structure, leadership training and job security allows for a strong set of base questions that will help you get to the bottom of why your employee retention rate isn’t where you would like it to be. See the bigger picture. Instead of focusing on an employee issue, search deeper for an issue within your institution. Identifying problems within your organization will help you thoroughly resolve a difficulty that perhaps multiple employees are struggling with. In your exit interviews, make sure there isn’t too much attention being paid to personal issues, such as job satisfaction, and that there is an emphasis placed on organizational issues, such as freedom, management style and the opportunity for promotion. Fact versus fiction. On paper, the benefits of being a teacher sound great: Summers off, workdays end at 3:00 p.m., long holiday breaks and casual business attire. In reality, standards must be met, teachers work hours after the final bell rings, salaries are low and students must receive individualized attention. This transition can be challenging for new teachers. When giving your exit interviews make sure to measure the level of respect that teachers feel, determine whether or not they have been given the proper training, make sure faculty feels supported, and track the progress of these key factors. ExitRight® software can help you identify, analyze, and observe common trends regarding exit survey results. ExitRight will send user-friendly reports as frequently as you would like them to track the progress of issues. Mentors and money. Research shows that 97 percent of teachers who grossed more than $40,000 in their first year of teaching and 92 percent of teachers who were assigned a mentor during their first year of teaching return the next year. Ask employee exit interview questions that inquire about these elements and document whether there is an effective mentorship program and salary system in place. As teacher retention and morale are boosted, students’ success rates are too. Are you ready to retain promising staff and faculty and help students receive the education they deserve? ExitRight provides your school or university with a clear picture of your organization’s wants and needs. Call 877-439-9315, or contact HSD Metrics online, to learn how you can get started today.

The HSD Metrics Blog

Get an Insiders View Into Your Company with Stay Interviews

Are your best employees here to stay? Ask them!

Not Just Another Engagement Survey

Making Stay Interviews Work for You

Conduct Your Own Stay Interviews

Read More

Human Resource Outsourcing for Financial Companies

Human Resource Outsourcing for Financial Companies

Read More

Four Ways to Improve Employee Retention in Retail

Waste less time and money on expensive replacements by identifying trends in the staff you turn over.

1. Evaluate your exit interviews

2. Add more incentives.

3. Rethink hiring criteria.

4. Divest more resources for onboarding

Read More

Exit Interview Tactics in the Hospitality Industry

Don’t let high employee turnover sabotage your efforts to build your business.

Focus on management

Examine performance recognition

Analyze demographics

Cultivate Culture

Read More

Four Ways to Keep Your Educators Motivated and Engaged

Teachers need more than a catered lunch to feel rejuvenated. Here are some approaches to truly motivate and engage your employees.

Read More

Exit Interview Tactics in the Education Industry

Trouble retaining promising educational professionals can be detrimental to your entire organization. Here are some strategies for solving your employee retention problems.

Read More

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