All Posts Tagged With: "employee retention"
10 Steps to a Successful Workplace
This list of 10 steps to building a successful workplace comes from the Business and Professional Women’s Foundation:
- Flexibility: Offer telecommuting, shift exchanges, and compressed work weeks.
- Diversity: Diversify by race, age, gender, orientation, disability, religion.
- Equity: Promote equity in pay and access to positions and promotions.
- Sustainability: Reduce carbon footprint by working “greener.”
- Care giving: Allow for flexibility and compassion.
- Wellness: Provide sick days to allow the sick to be sick.
- Multigenerational. Promote a diversity of generations.
- Social spaces: Engage consumers through social media and revenues grow 18%; don’t, and revenues drop 6%. Read the study.
- Retention: Provide mentoring, professional development, career advancement planning, and continuing education.
- Practice: Everyone, top to bottom, follows policies.
The article in which this list appeared (“The Work-Life Tip Sheet: 10 Steps to a Successful Workplace,” by Deborah Frett, Huffington Post, October 22, 2009) quotes a Harvard Business Review article that cites a study from the University of New Mexico (patience, we’ll get there) that measures the stock market’s response when a Fortune 500 company announces a work-life program: The stock goes up 4.8%. Just on the announcement. And then, when you actually implement the program, employee satisfaction typically improves, which bumps up customer satisfaction, which increases revenues, which can also boost the stock price.
That’s a pretty good business case for creating an organizational culture that values employees—a core value of the Baldrige model.
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23Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedEmployee Satisfaction Pays — Big Time
I’ve seen this story several places and it shows a correlation few understand. In the early 1990s, Sears was losing as much as four billion dollars a year on $50+ billion in sales. It used the employee-customer-profit chain to assert that revenue creation starts with employee attitudes and satisfaction, which affects customer satisfaction, which affects revenue and profits. It made this assertion believing the correlation to be true, and then it set out to prove it.
Nearly three-fourths of its workforce was part-time and turnover among this group was high. To understand why, Sears began surveying employees about their attitudes and satisfaction and correlating the results with customer satisfaction results and financial data. They got their proof.
According to the data, a five-point improvement on their employee attitude scale produced a 1.3% improvement in customer satisfaction, which, in turn, boosted revenue by 0.5%. On sales of $50 billion, that’s an increase of $250 million a year!
And the benefits don’t stop there. More satisfied employees work for Sears longer, which reduces turnover and lowers the costs associated with finding, hiring, and training new employees. More satisfied employees also recommend the company to family and friends, which increases sales.
In other words, Sears discovered that working on employee satisfaction had an impact on both ends of the money stream: It increased revenues and reduced costs.
The Baldrige Criteria ask (5.1c2) how you relate workforce engagement assessment findings to key business results.…
13Aug2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
