Hello, this is our Friday blog on tips for employee retention. Thanks for joining us again! This week we will conclude the series on employee retention tips and we’ll look at how you can assess retention strategies in your organization.
Making Accurate Assessments
After investing time and resources into improving retention, it is important to assess whether the interventions actually work and which interventions return the most on your investment. Reviewing back on strategies is just as crucial as implementation. Often companies fail not because of poor strategies, but because of poor execution.
Also, with the many different retention strategies that organizations take on, we need to distinguish the priority level of each strategy. If the same value is placed on each strategy, then you will have no starting point. By making an assessment of each strategy, you will be able to inform everyone needed of the strategic direction the organization is taking, allocate the resources needed to accomplish the task, and your retention strategies can start to show results.
One of the most challenging parts of managing retention strategies is evaluation. It can be an intensive, time-consuming process. But if done well, it will increase efficiency and contribute to your organization’s overall success.
When making an assessment, we are seeking to answer these questions: are the objectives of the retention strategy appropriate? Are the main retention policies and plans appropriate? Do the present results gathered confirm or collide with assumptions made for the strategy?
Here are some practical ways of making accurate assessments:
The Principles behind the Assessment
Make sure to continue assessing past and present employees regularly to gauge their satisfaction and intent to stay. Ask them open-ended questions to get additional feedback on whether interventions are successful. Follow-up with action and convey to employees that you recognize their concerns and that you aim to address them.
For an in-depth evaluation, we will start by looking at the criteria to measure our assessment against Richard P. Rumelt’s model. Rumelt is a professor from the Anderson School of Business at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has designed a comprehensive model that allows businesses to make accurate assessments on strategies. Rumelt’s model uses the following four criteria: consistency, consonance, feasibility, and advantage.
- Consistency: The retention strategy must not give inconsistent goals and policies.
- Consonance: The retention strategy must be adaptive in response to the environment and changes that occur.
- Feasibility: The retention strategy must fit within the organization’s available resources and not produce unsolvable problems.
- Advantage: The retention strategy must facilitate and maintain competitive advantage for the organization.
We will use these four criteria to assess retention strategies. A retention strategy that fails in one or more of these areas needs to be considered for reworking or discontinuing.
Steps to Assess Strategies
Step 1: Make sure to read and understand the retention strategy that is being assessed. Ask any questions that you need to before you start the assessment.
Step 2: Assess the strategy for consistency. Has the strategy been consistent in keeping with the objectives and goals of the organization and its employees? For a strategy to remain consistent, it needs to be clear and explicit for all parties involved. Often times, when confusion or conflict surround an issue, it can be a consequence of strategy that is inconsistent. A good indicator of whether the strategy is inconsistent is if problems in coordination and planning continue even with changes of personnel.
For example, let’s take the employer branding retention strategy. Is the employer brand consistent throughout all channels of communication and do all necessary departments thoroughly understand the employer brand that you want to communicate?
Step 3: Assess the strategy for consonance. When assessing for consonance, think of external trends that have affected or may affect the retention strategy and assess how well the strategy adjusts to these impacts. You will be able to gauge external factors that support the retention strategy and those that do not support the strategy. You can also use future changes in the economic and social environment to see whether the retention strategy will function with these impacts.
Using the consonance criteria on the retention strategy of flexible workplace practices would be especially fitting. Flexible workplace practices are vulnerable to external impacts and changes, which may or may not strengthen the strategy.
Step 4: Assess the strategy for feasibility. The organization’s resources such as staff and financial resources are usually the first constraint against a strategy. Financial resources are particularly the easiest to assess against the viability of a retention strategy. The determining factor will be if the amount of effort required for the strategy fits with all the available resources. The goal is to effectively assign the resources available and when dealing with staff it is important that they feel motivated and eager enough to contribute to the strategy.
Pay and benefits retention strategies will demand the most resources from an organization. By assessing feasibility, an organization can assess not only the pay, but also the extra benefits that it can provide.
Step 5: Assess the strategy for advantage. For retention strategies, assessing for advantage is significant as organizations want to make sure strategies are helping to create and maintain competitiveness and market position. How do current and potential employees value the strategies? Do they do enough to attract and retain employees?
Employee Retention — Where to Go from Here
We hope you’ve enjoyed our blog series on tips and tricks to help curb turnover and increase employee retention. For a more in-depth discussion of these and other important related issues, we invite you to click on the following links to:
Sign up for our free email program on employee retention
Download our free Employee Retention: How to Keep the Right People Working for You guide
Thanks for reading!
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