Fortune Favors The Brave - Tackling Employee Retention

Enter new HR roles, workflows, and the Retention Management System

By now, there is a prima facie understanding of the combined impact of the pandemic-driven hybriwork movement and the great resignation. Obscured is the profound impact on the HR function and wholesale changes to how HR conducts business. The transformation of HR is happening for better or worse, and business as usual won’t be returning. There is no morepressing example than employee retention.

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Move from surveys and intuition to talent data-informed insights with AI

Though valuable since they’re a proxy for employee voices, surveys are self-reported, reactive, anonymous, aspecific, and typically not actionable. Ironically, they’re often a source of employee resentment, given the lack of specific follow-up actions

Talent meta-data derived from Enterprise Systems coupled with AI exposes specific, behaviorally accurate, and actionable insights. These insights enable HR and management teams to zoom into an individual employee’s experience or see a group of employees with similar challenges. Timely retention actions are allowed by identifying early signs of burnout, stagnation, and disconnection. Moreover, retention support is directed to high potential, critical, key collaborators, leaders, or diverse employees.

Move reactive resignation responses to proactive retention actions

Exit or stay interviews are canonical examples of ineffective approaches that are generally reactive and often occur too late to be effective. Exit interviews are notorious for their inaccuracy as misaligned incentives prevent exiting employees from being forthcoming about the “real” reasons for their voluntary departures.

Contrast this to a cutting-edge Retention Management System where talent risks are exposed in real-time, addressed with quantitatively effective recommendations and actions. For example, an employee that’s lost several peer collaborators and experiencing impending disconnection is supported through a regimen of management one-on-one and skip-level meetings to ensure organizational re-connection

Move from programmatic employee initiatives to personalized employee care

Often to achieve scale, the most evolved HR organizations are reticent to abandon programmatic employee retention approaches though they’re largely ineffective. Such organizations attempt to stem attrition with broad-based “one size fits all” initiatives such as career development, total rewards strategies, employee engagement, experience, and community efforts. It’s not to say these efforts aren’t beneficial. They’re helpful, just ineffective in addressing attrition. Consider an employee that’s disconnected from their manager, has low focus time, and stagnating. None of those above initiatives will address this employee’s unique set of needs at the specific point in time where help is needed. The talent acquisition analog is particularly apt as employees are generally recruited one at a time predicated on their unique skills, experiences, work-life preferences, and growth objectives. Why should employee retention be any different?

Make Employee retention an Enterprise priority

Evidenced by a cascade of Board driven retention mandates and the formation of CEO-led employee retention task forces, it’s clear that retention has become an organizational priority. It’s no wonder as attrition costs can range in the tens of millions of dollars, impacting top-line revenue, culture, reputation, brand, and even market capitalization.

The time is now to solve employee attrition with retention mandated HR teams. Adopt new retention workflows, and a Retention Management System that supports data-driven insights, proactive retention recommendations with follow-up actions, and personalized employee care at scale.