HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT, DEVELOPMENT & TECHNOLOGY - HRM Career News

While turnover is a fact of life in any organization, turnover rates differ greatly from one organization to the next. For example, some call centers operate with annual rates of less than 5%, while others see rates of well over 50% percent. (According to ICMI research, many call centers are in the 15% to 30% range.) An important first step in managing turnover is to calculate your annualized turnover accurately, so that you have a consistent basis for comparison and trending.
There are two figures you'll need in order to calculate annualized turnover - the number of agents exiting during each month, and the average number of staff during those months. (The average number of agents on staff during the month is often calculated by taking an average of the counts at the end of each week of the month; alternatively, you can take an average of the trained staff count at the beginning and end of the month.)

The formula ICMI recommends for calculating turnover is as follows:

Turnover = (number of agents exiting the job average number of agents during the period) x (12 number of months in the period)

For example, let's say your data is as in the following chart:
Using the formula, your annualized turnover rate comes out to just under 29%:
(20 104) x (12 8) = 28.8%

While knowing your overall turnover rate is valuable, we recommend breaking it down further, into internal/external and voluntary/involuntary categories. Internal turnover refers to employees that leave the call center but stay within the organization; external turnover refers to employees that leave the organization entirely. Voluntary turnover is when employees decide to leave, while involuntary separation occurs when management makes the decision to end employment (e.g., through layoffs or firing).

In the example we just used, the 29% annualized turnover rate might be categorized as follows:

TURNOVER COSTS AND BENEFITS

Turnover can bring both costs and benefits to the call center. Costs are often broadly categorized as follows:
• Recruiting and hiring costs, which may include the cost of advertising for new positions, the cost and time involved in interviews and background checks, any costs associated with search firms or placement agencies, and, potentially, relocation costs.
• Training and orientation costs, which include the direct cost of training, the cost of overall lower productivity from newer employees, and the cost of overtime if current employees must help cover hours.
• In commercial organizations the most severe costs can be those associated with poor customer service - lost sales, reduced loyalty and outright defections to competitors.

Turnover can also yield benefits. For example, if employees leave for other positions within the organization, the call center gains experienced advocates in other departments. Turnover may also reduce structural costs (assuming new employees are brought in at lower pay scales) and create the means for the call center to bring in new employees with needed skills and fresh insights.
The causes and costs/benefits will vary by type of turnover. For example, voluntary external turnover is more of a detriment to the organization than planned internal turnover. Do enough analysis to be able to estimate the relative impact of each type of turnover.

IDENTIFYING THE CAUSES OF TURNOVER

To manage turnover, you must understand what causes it. Common ways to identify causes include:
• Conduct a job and salary analysis vis--vis market conditions.
• Conduct group meetings with agents to discuss environmental factors, such as stress, management style, workload, etc.
• Review the orientation program to ensure jobs are being accurately represented to new employees
• Analyze exit interviews.
• Conduct regular employee satisfaction surveys.
Specific causes can vary widely (see the sidebar below), and identifying the top five to seven things driving turnover will be a huge step towards creating an appropriate prevention strategy.

RETENTION STRATEGIES

While there is no single formula for agent retention that is appropriate for all call centers, there are plenty of tried and true strategies that will greatly enhance the chances of retaining your agents and ensuring they perform at their best. Some of the most common areas of focus include:
Improve hiring and job fit. Hiring candidates based on the right job qualifications and behavioral competencies will improve your chances for a better job fit. If turnover rates are high, revisiting the hiring process should be the first step in improving retention.

Improve competitive pay and benefits. Ensure that jobs in the call center are internally and externally equitable. Even if you're budgets are tight, don't count this strategy out - it might be more practical and less expensive than meets the eye if you've really analyzed and identified the true costs of turnover.
Ensure that agents receive timely coaching and feedback. Encouraging the positive aspects of the agent's performance, modeling desired actions/behaviors and working with them to create feasible action plans that will enable them to achieve objectives are essential steps.

Provide opportunities for ongoing skill and career development. Agents who see their position as dynamic and evolving are more likely to remain committed to the call center. Create a skills-based pay program and, if possible, a compelling career path in the call center to encourage agents to continually expand their knowledge and capabilities.

Provide as much flexibility in work schedules as possible. Call center scheduling takes creativity and communication since both workload requirements and agent requirements must be accommodated as much as possible.
Improve supervisor training. It's often said that agents don't leave companies - they leave their supervisors. Taking steps to ensure that your supervisors have the skills and knowledge necessary to be the best managers possible can improve retention dramatically.

Provide recognition. According to much of the research on turnover, just saying thanks for a job well done goes a long way towards job satisfaction. This can be formal, e.g., through newsletters and announcements, and informal through everyday conversations.

These suggestions represent the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Other strategies can range from implementing a telecommuting program, to establishing a mentoring program, designing better incentive plans and improving facilities design.

FINDING THE RIGHT BALANCE

A certain amount of turnover is inevitable and acceptable - your challenge is to determine just what that acceptable level is. To do so, it's important to understand the full cost of turnover and compare it to the costs associated with staff retention programs. The key is to find the right balance: you don't want to spend more money retaining staff than it costs to replace them, but you also don't want to spend more money replacing staff than it costs to keep them.

Among the practical criteria to consider when seeking the right balance are:
• The maximum amount the company is willing to pay for these positions.
• Availability of a skilled labor pool to fill agent vacancies.
• The cost (money and time) of effectively training new-hires.
• The relative costs of lower quality and productivity when turnover increases.
• Organizational values and culture. In sum, there is much that can be done to address turnover and improve retention. Don't leave it to chance.

We don’t get the talent in market easily. You have to search it. The same is with HR talent. The role of HR is critical in every organization. Service and retail industry is growing and also the employment in various sectors and positions. The HR has become a key to control the total Human Capital.

Hence the market demand for HR professionals is also high. The job hopping is increasing across the positions in all sectors. I have seen senior level professionals leaving the organizations due to some reasons within 6 months or one year. I tried to find the reasons from one survey.

This survey is not absolute survey and needs to work more. The sample size for the survey was 150 HR professionals from various Industries and having the experience of 2-10 years.

Why HR professionals leave the organization? What are the key reasons for leaving?

Following are top 7 reasons.

1) Compensation and benefits: 49 percent HR professionals leave the organization for increased compensation. This reason is more dominant over any other reason.

2) Challenging job Profile and Learning new HR concepts: around 40% HR professionals responded that they see challenges in new profile and also the new learning in HR.

3) Freedom to take decisions: 34% Professionals leave the organization because they were not authorized to take the decisions. The decision was dominated by the superior. They feel that they were playing the role of just co-ordinator. These people may be ambitious people.

4) Politics in the organization: 32 % professional were fade up with the politics played in the organization. The definition of politics is person specific but still important to decide the career move.

5) Lack of HR vision: Professionals are not aware about the HR vision of the organizations. 29% professionals say that they leave the organization due to lack of clarity about HR vision of the organization.

6) Good employer brand: Around 25% professionals think that Employer Brand is also important factor while deciding the career move from one organization to other organization.

7) Relations with superior: Employees leave their superior and not the organization. This is true here. 21% professionals think this.

What specifically do we mean by employee involvement? In this article we define it as participative process that uses the input of employees to increase their commitment to the organization’s success. The underlying logic is that by involving workers in the decisions that effect them and by increasing their autonomy and control over their lives, employees will become more motivated, more committed to the organization, more productive and more satisfied with their jobs.

Employee involvement programs differ among countries. For instance, a study comparing the acceptance of employee involvement programs in four countries, including the United States and India, confirmed the importance of modifying practices to reflect national culture. Specifically, while American employees readily accepted these programs, managers in India who tried to empower their employees through employee involvement programs were rated low by those employees.
In these Indian cases, employee satisfaction also decreased. These reactions are consistent with India’s power distance culture which accepts and expects differences in authority.

Examples of Employee involvement Program: Now let’s look at the three major forms of employee involvement – participative management, representative participative, and quality circles in more detail.

Participative Management: The distinct characteristics common to all participative management programs is the use of joint decision making. That is, subordinates actually share a significant degree of decision making power with their immediate superiors. Participative management has, at times, been promoted as a panacea for poor morale and low productivity. But for it to work, the issues in which employees get involved must be relevant to their interests so they’ll be motivated, employees must have the competence and knowledge to make a useful contribution, and there must be trust and confidence between all parties involved.

Dozens of studies have been conducted are mixed. When the research is reviewed carefully, it appears that participation typically has only a modest influence on variable such as employee productivity, motivation, and job satisfaction. Of course, that doesn’t mean that the use of participative management can’t be beneficial under the right conditions. What it says, however, is that the use of participation is not a sure means for improving employee performance.

Representative Participation: Almost every country in Western Europe has some type of legislation requiring companies to practice representative participation. That is, rather participating directly in decisions workers are represented by a small group of employees who actually participate. Representative participation has been called ‘the most widely legislated form of employee involvement and the world. The goal of representative is to redistribute power within an organization, putting labor on a more equal footing with the interests of management and stockholders.

The two common forms which representative participation takes are works councils and board representatives. Work council groups of nominated or elected employees who must be consulted when management makes decision involving personnel. Board representatives are employees who sit on a company’s board of directors and represent the interests of the firm’s employees.

The overall influence of representative participation on working employees seems to be minimal. For instance, the evidence suggests that works councils are dominated by management and have little impact on employees or the organization. And although this form of employee involvement might increase the motivation and satisfaction of the individuals who are doing the representing, there is little evidence that this trickles down to the operating employees whom they represent. Overall, the greatest value of representative participation is symbolic. If one is interested in changing employee attitudes or in improving organizational performance, representative participation would be a poor choice.

Quality circles became popular in North America and Europe during the 1980s. Companies such as Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Xerox, Procter & Gamble, IBM, Motorola, and American Airlines used quality circles. Quality circles are defined as work groups of 8 to 10 employees and supervisors who have a shared area of responsibility and who meet regularly – typically once a week, on company time and on company premises to discuss their quality problems, investigate causes of the problems recommend solutions, and take corrective actions.

Labels: employee involvement, employee participation, Participative Management, Representative Participation