Caught on the HR Side of Retention

Here’s a rambling from just this afternoon. An HR director told me she had done all she could to reduce turnover among licensed social workers but continued to lose 25% of them each year. She estimated their cost per exit to be $10,000, and losing 50 each year culminated in an annual expense of about half a million dollars. My first thought was “Does the CEO of your company know this? Does your CEO, or CFO, know that reducing turnover by 20% is worth $100,000 to your company each year? Not just once, but each year?”

And if the economy hadn’t helped cut turnover, wasn’t it likely that quits would rise even higher in the new year?

Her real problem became clear. She had interviewed employees on why they stay or why they left, she had asked managers to attend training programs, she had re-thought onboarding and other HR programs…and she was tagged as the sole provider of solutions.

Our discussion led to the Rethinking Retention Model(sm) and ultimately the Certified Employee Retention Professional program (CERP). Candidates in the CERP program are required to implement a shared model whereby the responsibilities of HR and executives are clear. Whereas HR provides new, retention-driven processes for hiring, training, onboarding, and other traditional roles, executives must place a dollar cost on turnover and drive retention goals and consequences from top to bottom.

So a new type of retention discussion is happening in that organization now, and it’s likely the HR director will participate in the CERP program in order to share retention responsibility with her management team rather than struggle with retention on her own.