HR Blog | Employee Retention & Turnover Management

The Analytics of Human Resources

Analytics has always had a place in operations such as marketing and sales, but its use in human resources is not as common. And it might not seem like there is a connection at all. How can you use data to understand people? Or to measure performance? Isn’t HR an inherently qualitative department, more about understanding people rather than using data and numbers? That’s usually the common idea around why data is not used in this capacity– it just doesn’t seem like there’s a place for it. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Qualitative and quantitative data aren’t mutually exclusive. The combination of the two is what creates a truly optimized Human Resources function with a genuine understanding of what the department is able to accomplish. Moreover, it’s a fundamental component of attracting, developing, and retaining talent within your company. Here are some of the key components:

Demographic data

Understanding the makeup of different demographics is key in building out improved diversity and inclusion programs. The likelihood is, you’ll have this data in a lot of different forms, but are you really able to see it all in a comprehensive way, or to see it contextualized with feedback and other department info? Demographic data can help you better understand department functions alongside other vital operational and performance data to construct a truly holistic view of departments and their functions.

Pay

Retention is a term used a lot when it comes to HR, but do you really strategize for it? Pay tends to be one of the contentious issues, and having operational data on hand can make negotiations, promotions, and hiring a more optimized process. By seeing data against other key performance points, compensation becomes easier to design. Plus, seeing this data against other data such as job duties, role responsibility, and overall satisfaction can help identify how to better structure compensation and bonuses in a more streamlined way.

Engagement

Engagement can be one of the harder components to define and track, but it can give so much insight into how departments are functioning from an operational and performance standpoint. Measuring employee engagement will likely depend on your own internal structure and culture, but it is incredibly important to have a balance between qualitative and quantitative data for this benchmark. Quantitative data can help in understanding trends and sentiment initially, while qualitative can be deployed to get more specific and contextualized feedback in order to design enhanced engagement programs.

Performance

Performance is another metric that tends to be considered as more qualitative, but there is room for data here as well. Having some form of quantitative data allows for easier benchmarking and better discussions between managers and employees. While the actual evaluation session may be more of a discussion, the data allows for a general idea of whether employees are able to develop and sustain change to improve. And again, identifying trends can be extremely helpful in further developing the performance review process and creating a sustained improvement for meaningful feedback and discussion.

Applicant Tracking

Ultimately, these different metrics are not just for use internally, but also for crafting strategies for recruitment and hiring. Having these clear analytics on-hand allows for more transparent discussions during interviews so that candidates feel comfortable throughout and can make decisions faster based on actual performance and engagement metrics. Moreover, applicant tracking allows you to see how current recruitment and hiring is going – how many candidates go through the process, what is the dropoff rate like, and where does that tend to happen? Identifying gaps like these can help optimize processes and ensure that talented candidates don’t slip through the cracks. This is just a small window into what people analytics can accomplish and the insights that can be generated. To learn more about how data can help fuel a more advanced HR operation and what your business can accomplish by implementing an analytics-based approach in your organization, please contact us.

5 Exit Interview Metrics Your Business Should Be Tracking

What Exit Interview Metrics Should Your Business Be Tracking?

Every business is different, and only you can decide which metrics will best enable positive outcomes. That said, most businesses will benefit by tracking the following 5 exit interview metrics:

1. Employees who have retired

You need to know not only how many employees retire each year, but also the age at which they retired and associated costs to your business. For example, a recent study from Prudential Financial found that it costs businesses on average $50,000 for each worker who delays retirement by one year—this is because older workers cost more than younger ones. Businesses for whom delayed retirement creates an unsustainable financial drag might consider things like retirement incentive programs.

2. Employees who left to pursue educational opportunities

Obviously, when businesses include educational and training incentives as part of their benefits packages, employees seeking those opportunities are less likely to leave. The question for businesses is the extent to which this is a problem. If for example, you have a large cadre of recent college graduates among your workforce, the odds they’ll want advanced educational opportunities increase, and adding educational benefits might be a reasonable solution.

3. Employees who have moved on to another job

You need to track this metric in part to determine how many, if any, of those employees you could have retained if they’d been offered better opportunities for career advancement within your company. To decrease employee turnover due to better job offers, an increasing number of businesses are implementing career mapping strategies both to help themselves achieve long term goals and to show employees how staying with a business is in their long term interest.

4. Employees who were terminated

If an inordinately large number of employees are being terminated for poor job performance, you need to know why. It could be one or two managers lack the required leadership and mentoring skills and need additional training. On the other hand, the problem could exist in your HR and recruiting teams who need better strategies to align new hire skills with company needs.

5. Employees who left for “other” reasons

This can’t become a miscellaneous “dumping ground” of anything that doesn’t fit one of the other categories. Here, too, you need to identify recurring themes that suggest solutions for your business. For example, an increasing number of American workers have concerns about work-life balance issues and are looking for flexible and remote work options. Knowing that this is an issue for your business might mean better incorporating those opportunities into your business model. The negative impact of employee turnover on your business can manifest itself in several important ways. The most obvious is financial. According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), for example, the cost to replace an employee is anywhere from 90% to 200% of that employee’s annual salary. Since on average workers in the U.S. make $46,800 (this based on Bureau of Labor Statistics 2018 4th fiscal quarter figures), that translates into a cost to businesses of between $42,100 and $93,600 per employee. Obviously, the higher the level of an employee, the more that worker’s loss will impact a company. Additionally, there are also indirect costs. For example, businesses should consider the more difficult to assess costs associated with disruption to your business, things like onboarding new workers and compromised relations with customers and vendors. Finally, and although it’s difficult to quantify, there are costs associated with diminished employee morale, particularly when many workers leave at the same time.

Fixing The Attrition Issue

To mitigate turnover costs, businesses need to implement proactive strategies designed to reduce attrition. Those solutions begin after companies better understand the reasons employees leave. “Getting to the bottom of it” necessitates first understanding the difference between voluntary and involuntary termination. In other words, you would want to implement one set of solutions for employees who are terminated for poor job performance (such as better hiring and screening procedures) and a different set for talented rising stars who leave for jobs that offer more career advancement opportunities. Second, you need to acknowledge that you have more control over the loss of some employees than others. For example, if someone moves on because they clash with an ineffective manager, you can retrain or replace that manager. If on the other hand, someone leaves because he or she wants to be closer to family in another state, there’s probably little you can do about it.

Quantifying Employee Turnover

Understanding these and similar distinctions as they apply to your business will enable you to draft a more effective set of questions to ask employees during exit interviews. The answers to those questions should provide valuable insights to improve your overall workplace culture and be measurable. In other words, you’ll want to ask the questions that generate trackable metrics (if for example, you’re assessing the effectiveness of a given manager, you might ask an employee to rate the manager’s performance on a sliding scale of 1 to 10).

Conclusion

The metrics you collect from exit interviews are only as good as the priority your business attaches to them and the uses to which they’re put. From the outset and throughout your analysis, it’s critically important to keep your eye on the prize—your goal should be to find ways to improve your company’s profitability and productivity. That’s where we can help. To learn more about the ways we can help your business design a data-driven approach to exit interviews, gain valuable insights and improve the engagement and retention of your employees, contact us today.

4 Strategic Ways to Keep Remote Employees Engaged

The good news is that employee engagement among U.S. workers is on the rise. The bad news is that even with a recent uptick in engagement, only 34% of employees describe themselves as engaged at work—which means of course that more than half say they’re disengaged. Additionally, more than 13% of employees describe themselves as “actively disengaged,” which means in simple language that they’re unhappy doing their jobs.

Why Employee Engagement Matters

The problem for American businesses is that employee engagement is closely aligned with other metrics— those with the potential to do serious harm to business viability. Chief among these is employee attrition. With an average cost to replace an employee who leaves at approximately 150% of that worker’s annual salary, prudent businesses need to pay close attention to employee attrition metrics like the following from Medium:

On average, more than half of all workers are thinking about leaving their jobs.
Businesses lose more than 25% of new employees within their first year.
More than 70% of employees who leave do so to pursue career advancement opportunities.
Businesses that offer flexible work options (like remote work) reduce turnover by more than 25%.

The impact of engagement on employee retention is just one of the reasons striving for a more engaged workforce is so important.

What Can Employers do to Boost Remote Employee Engagement?

According to one recent analysis, more than 70% of employees now work remotely at least part-time. Because those workers are not “in the office” every day, they require special attention to ensure their continued engagement. Creating a remote employee engagement plan isn’t a one-size-fits-all proposition. Every business is different, with different engagement challenges and different flexible work options. Only you can decide which strategies will work best for your company. That said, most companies will benefit from implementing best practice strategies like the following 4:

1. Provide an “enabling infrastructure.”

That’s how Deloitte refers to the tools that help employees succeed. Those tools could be anything from conducting meetings through a video hosting service to using task management software and chat services. The point is, the easier you make it for your employees to do their jobs remotely—and succeed—the greater the odds they’ll enjoy coming to work and remain with your company.

2.Give them the training they need to excel

Effective training comes in many forms. It could be assigning a skilled mentor (particularly effective during onboarding) or coach for remote workers. The point is to link remote training opportunities to a long-term career advancement plan—mapping out the ways in which new skills are an integral component of each worker’s future with your business.

3. Know who they are

Because remote workers see you face-to-face less frequently, it’s critically important to cement your ongoing relationship with them—to know who they are. The simplest (and arguably the best) way to know who your employees are is to ask them. America’s workforce is increasingly diverse; knowing what your employees believe and care about will go a long way to boosting engagement. It’s also important to conduct occasional employee surveys to learn what kinds of programs and benefits your employees care about most.

4. Celebrate their accomplishments

Promotions and bonuses are a tangible sign that you value your remote employee’s achievements, but announcing those accomplishments at public events signals that you also consider them important contributions to company culture and community. Be sure in organizing these events that you consider all your remote employees’ contributions significant—again, the point is not only to demonstrate appreciation for individual accomplishments but also to promote a feeling of community and belonging for all employees, including those who work remotely.

Conclusion

The strategies you implement to boost engagement among remote employees should never be gratuitous or half-hearted. Your workers look to you to model behavior, and they pay close attention to the ways in which you engage with them. That said, if you care about the success of your business, you should also care about the success of your workers—the two, after all, are inextricably connected. To ensure you’re making the right moves when it comes to the critically important matter of enhancing engagement, you might want to get some expert help (the stakes are that high). To learn more about the ways our employee survey platforms and data-driven approach can help your business improve employee engagement, experience, and retention, give us a call at 877-439-9315 or contact us today.

10 Smart Strategies to Enhance Employee Experience

For years, business owners and HR managers have focused on improving employee engagement — and with good reason. Employees who aren’t engaged (and most aren’t) are more likely to move on to other jobs, and the average cost to replace one of those workers is from 90% to 200% of their annual salary (this according to PayScale). Increasingly, however, forward-leaning companies recognize the need to track a more complete set of metrics, one which encompasses the totality of interactions workers have with the businesses for which they work. Basically, to achieve their goals, businesses need to focus on improving employee experience.

What is Employee Experience?

To maintain talented employees, businesses need to focus on every major aspect of those workers’ experiences in the workplace. That includes, among other things, benefits packages, company culture, training programs, and their physical work environment. These are the factors that not only induce workers to stay with a business but also help them succeed in their jobs and add to your productivity and profitability. As Josh Bersin writing for the Society for Human Resource Management (SRHM) notes, positive employee experience is critical to achieving other, mission-critical business goals:

“Over the last several years, companies have become highly focused on improving the work experiences of employees…Why the emphasis on this area? It’s simple. As we enter the eleventh year of economic growth around the world, CEOs and business leaders are heavily focused on productivity improvements, organizational transformation, and the development of new digital business models. Success in these areas is not possible if employees are having a hard time getting their work done.”

How Can Businesses Enhance Employee Experience?

Taking prudent steps to improve employee experience will both help you more effectively (and cost-effectively) keep your current workers and enhance your ability to acquire new talent. Doing so means leveraging best practice strategies, including the following 10:

Map out each employee’s journey through your business. Every worker comes up against key inflection points in their time with your business — things like onboarding, training, and advancement opportunities. You need to be aware of what those critical moments look like from the employee’s point of view and work to make them as satisfactory as possible. Start by defining what good outcomes look like at each of these critical stages, then work towards achieving those outcomes.
Keep communications helpful and transparent. A good communications strategy starts from the top, but it should be defined from the bottom. In other words, the communication medium is not as important as understanding the organization through the eyes of the employees and empowering employees to openly communicate. A sound internal communications strategy should boost morale, advance a sense of community and persuade your employees that you care about their welfare and concerns.
Create a positive first impression. Much has been written about the importance of effective onboarding, and with good reason. According to the Harvard Business Review, about one of every three new employees considers moving to another job in their first six months. To create that all-important first impression, design onboarding programs customized to individual positions, job responsibilities, and accountabilities.
Head off potential problems at the pass. To enhance employee experience and prevent problems from festering, interview your employees periodically to identify and resolve those problems. Collecting data across the entire employee lifecycle is important. The insights you gain will help you retain talented workers and identify ways to improve company culture.
Help your employees get and stay well. Wellness programs can help your business save on healthcare costs. Equally important, they tell your employees you care about their physical and psychological health. Smart wellness programs include things like individualized health recommendations and family leave benefits — the best are designed in collaboration with employees. Before you settle on the specific elements of your wellness program, survey your workers to find out which appeal to them most.
Ask your employees what benefits matter to them. Your workers won’t necessarily agree with you on what makes up the best benefits packages. Before spending a lot of time and money creating new benefits, take the time to ask your workers what they care about most.
Don’t ask for feedback if you don’t intend to act on it. Nothing will hurt your relationship with employees more than asking for their advice and then ignoring it. That means you need to be thoughtful about the feedback you ask for. Employees tend to care less about being asked for their opinions than that you take those opinions seriously and incorporate them into action plans.
Provide career advancement opportunities. According to a recent study from the Harvard Business Review (HBR), the opportunity for promotions and advancement are more important to a positive employee experience than salary. It’s not enough to offer vague statements about advancement — you need to show each employee a clear career advancement path within your organization, and of course, couple that with associated job performance requirements.
Reward your employees for strong performance. You should never miss an opportunity to tell your employees that they’ve done a good job. In fact, you should formalize a process for employee recognition, implementing periodic employee appreciation events. Be sure to include recognition from third parties — this includes customers, vendors and members of other departments.
Help your managers manage. The fact that an employee has the skills to perform their job doesn’t necessarily mean he or she can manage others in theirs. Effective management is a learned skill, which means you need to provide effective and ongoing training to make sure your managers have strong leadership skills, skills like active listening, the delegation of authority, and helpful evaluation of performance.

Conclusion

Making the right moves to improve the experience of your employees can be a game-changer for your business — but it can also be both confusing and complicated, especially if this is your first go at it. Fortunately, there are experienced agencies who give you the guidance and advice you need to succeed. To learn more about the ways our employee survey platforms and data-driven approach can help your business improve employee engagement, experience and retention, contact us today.

Why Businesses Should Outsource Employee Exit Interviews: 5 Reasons

Having to hold an exit interview might be the most daunting of tasks for direct supervisors and managers. This could be due to the employee holding a grudge, wanting to quit or that the supervisor or manager doesn’t want to be involved. Thankfully, you no longer have to worry about all this. Whatever your reason for wanting to avoid the exiting process, including the interview, there are people like us who are happy to take this off your plate, save you the trouble, and provide you with useable data to help improve your business.

What is Exit Interview Outsourcing?

There are a number of reasons why an employee may choose to leave an organization, but it is difficult to understand their reasoning behind this decision unless we ask them. An exit interview is an avenue where the employee can discuss their reason for resigning and/or express their displeasure about specific issues. From the information gathered, a company can pinpoint its weaknesses and more accurately determine how to retain its employees. Outsourcing exit interviews provides the Human Resources team with insightful hard data to present to senior management who often want answers. This process reduces the burden on the HR team by producing legitimate feedback from exiting employees and leads to an improved company culture overall. As a company, you may wonder what benefits there are in outsourcing employee exit interviews. Here are the top five reasons why you should consider it.

Why Businesses Should Outsource Exit Interview Services

Creating a team of people whose job is to conduct exiting interviews is not only time consuming but can cost an organization a great deal of money. Outsourcing is, therefore, a welcome, more affordable alternative that helps handle the exiting process on your behalf. Here are some credible reasons why you should outsource exit interview services.

Outsourcing allows exiting employees to be fully transparent about their employment experience without fear of burning bridges within their professional network.
It is the best way of gaining comprehensive information from exiting staff without interviewer subjectivity or bias.
Outsourcing exit interviews helps save time; time which would have otherwise been spent by the HR department drafting reports and holding exit interviews.
It creates a positive reputation for the company. Outgoing employees appreciate the fact that their opinions and experiences are still valuable even as they leave the organization. This creates a more positive lasting impression of the company for individuals who may find their way back to the organization in the future.
Exiting employees have a safe place to be heard, which helps employers preserve their company’s brand. Allowing exiting employees to vent may reduce the likelihood of those past employees posting negative reviews on online platforms potentially tarnishing the company’s reputation.

It is difficult enough conducting employee exit interviews on your own. But it’s even harder searching for a credible employee exit interview outsourcing organization to partner with.

Why Partner with HSD Metrics

At HSD Metrics, we understand your precarious position. We pride ourselves on having worked with several leading organizations, both local and international. Our services are unique and tailor-made to suit your needs as a company. We assist you in identifying problems within your organization and helping you figure out how to combat and avoid these irregularities in the future. Our solutions are suited for companies looking to;

Improve and streamline their HR departments and processes
Retain their employees
Increase the level of productivity

What Our Exit Interview Process Entails

First, we schedule a meeting where we have in-depth discussions to identify what the client needs from us. We then prepare a list of questions that we will use during the interview process that will provide our team with consistent, insightful data. Some of the tools we use during this process include software such as Grapevine and PeopleStream among others. What we do entails:

Contracting our experts to conduct the exit interviews
Asking questions expressly set to accommodate everything discussed during the preliminary meeting
Assisting you in analyzing any problem areas
Preparing a comprehensive report with the analysis and full feedback on what we gathered

Wondering why HSD Metrics should be your go-to? Some of the benefits of procuring our services include helping you to;

Prevent employee resignations in the future
Reduce costs associated with conducting employee exit interviews
Build a better, more cohesive relationship with your employees
Increase the level of productivity
Save time which you would have spent conducting interviews, recording and analyzing data
Access regular updates and round the clock customer care services

Our clients appreciate that HSD Metrics is a cut above the rest. There is an extensive set of advantages that clients access by partnering with us. Our main goals are to conduct successful employee exit interviews and provide solutions that will work for you. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your business.

Is It Time to Rethink Your Company’s Exit Interview Process?

There are good reasons forward-leaning businesses care so much about employee engagement and retention. For one thing, when experienced employees leave, companies experience disruption in the quality service they provide. For another, when attrition is high, the morale of workers who remain tends to drop. Finally, employee attrition hurts the bottom line—according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), for example, the average cost to businesses of hiring one new employee is more than $4,000.

How Deep Is Your Attrition Problem?

Simply stated, your business will suffer from the loss of even one talented employee—but to fix the problem, it’s important to view employee attrition in the aggregate, to know how serious your attrition problem is—and to get a bead on why workers are leaving. The first step to understanding your attrition problem is to assess how your business stacks up against others in the same industry. For example, Zenefits states that the average attrition rate across all industries is 17.8%–but it’s significantly higher in hospitality (almost 27%), and lower in utilities (8.8%) and insurance (12.2%). Of course, businesses with attrition rates substantially higher than the average are especially at risk. However, every business, including those whose attrition rates buck national trends, has a vested interest in understanding why employees leave, and what they can do to fix the problem.

Why Are Your Employees Leaving?

An employee who tells you that they are leaving because another company offers better career advancement opportunities likely isn’t telling you the whole story. In fact, most people leave their jobs for more than one reason. For example, the employee who leaves to advance his or her career might also believe your business isn’t responsive or doesn’t especially care about his or her future. The top reasons for resigning cited by employees in exit interviews range from anemic corporate culture to poor relations with the boss (or with coworkers), insufficient challenge on the job, boredom, little or no job flexibility and the lack of autonomy and authority. But the decision to move on isn’t typically attributable to any one of these in isolation—more often, it’s the result of multiple factors. That makes getting to the bottom of your employee attrition problem more challenging and calls for a more nuanced approach to exit interviews—one driven by accurate data collection and analysis.

What Is The Purpose Of Exit Interviews?

In the absence of such data-driven analysis, exit interviews are little more than perfunctory, providing limited information businesses can use to improve engagement and retention. Properly designed and executed, exit interviews should tell you, specifically, why workers are leaving, provide actionable data for change, uncover engagement issues and establish a foundation for a strategic plan to increase both employee engagement and retention.

Why Is Execution Is Critical?

Every business is different, with different HR issues and challenges. That said, each must determine how most effectively to time and execute exit interviews—in other words, each must assess how, when and by whom interviews should take place. For example, some businesses are more successful in performing in-person interviews, while others get more traction (and typically higher completion rates) by providing an online interview option. Similarly, it might be effective for some companies to interview employees close to the time of their leaving (this because the experiences which led to resignation are still fresh), while others find it useful to wait several weeks, this giving former employees time to reflect on their reasons for leaving. The types and quality of data you collect should help you determine which execution strategy is best for your business.

What Data Should Your Business Collect?

To begin, the exit interview process should be grounded in a continual improvement model. Each iterative analysis, in other words, should provide insights that inform the questions which provide the most useful data. Best practice suggests that, initially, you should ask exiting employees at minimum the following 10 questions:

What is the main reason you decided to leave? (Are there other reasons you’re moving on?)
What changes should we be making to prevent more employees from leaving?
How effective was your training?
How important were benefits in your decision to leave?
Did we provide enough opportunities for promotion and career advancement?
Was your salary a principal reason for your decision to leave?
Would you describe your relationship with your manager as excellent, good, fair or poor?
Would you describe your relationship with your coworkers as excellent, good, fair or poor?
What did you like most about your job?
What did you like least about your job?

Conclusion

Too often, companies invest substantial time and human resources in exit interviews only to leave the results of those interviews gathering dust on a shelf in the human resources office. The data you collect, in other words, are only as good as the uses to which they’re put. It’s critically important in addressing your engagement and retention issues that you conduct a robust analysis of exit interview results, collect the right data, share results with key stakeholders (including C-suite executives), work towards the continual improvement of the exit interview process—and commit to fixing the problems within your organization which induce your workers to leave. That’s where we can help. To learn more about the ways we can help your business design a data-driven approach to exit interviews, gain valuable insights and improve the engagement and retention of your employees, contact us today.

The HSD Metrics Blog

Demographic data

Pay

Engagement

Performance

Applicant Tracking

What Exit Interview Metrics Should Your Business Be Tracking?

1. Employees who have retired

2. Employees who left to pursue educational opportunities

3. Employees who have moved on to another job

4. Employees who were terminated

5. Employees who left for “other” reasons

Fixing The Attrition Issue

Quantifying Employee Turnover

Conclusion

Why Employee Engagement Matters

What Can Employers do to Boost Remote Employee Engagement?

1. Provide an “enabling infrastructure.”

2.Give them the training they need to excel

3. Know who they are

4. Celebrate their accomplishments

Conclusion

What is Employee Experience?

How Can Businesses Enhance Employee Experience?

Conclusion

What is Exit Interview Outsourcing?

Why Businesses Should Outsource Exit Interview Services

Why Partner with HSD Metrics

What Our Exit Interview Process Entails

How Deep Is Your Attrition Problem?

Why Are Your Employees Leaving?

What Is The Purpose Of Exit Interviews?

Why Is Execution Is Critical?

What Data Should Your Business Collect?

Conclusion

Blog Post Categories

Follow Us

Solutions

Company

Follow Us

ExitRight® Employee Exit Interviews

Customized Exit Interview Surveys.