The 2017 Best Employee Retention Strategies Review

We’re 3 months in to 2017. 2016 was a pretty giant s*** show. This year is also starting out very shakily. As March will become April and before you get real deep into your product launches, repositions, new value props, etc here’s a round-up of the most interesting and most prominent management ideas in employee retention strategies for 2016.

I read dozens of articles and spent countless hours so you don’t have to, from Harvard Business Review (here, here, here), FirstRound (here, here) Gallup (here), Medium, Deloitte (here, here), Pew Research Center, New York Times, etc. I’ve highlighted their key findings, summarized them, and laid them out like a gift, so you can craft your strategy using the best practices, resources, and case studies out there. Let’s get started.

Step 1. Your employee retention strategies should start from the start

Like everything, retaining employees is a process. It doesn’t start when you get word that someone wants to leave. It’s got an arc, starting with talent acquisition through to employee engagement and ends, eventually with exit interviews and offboarding.

“The absolute worst time to have a conversation about someone leaving your company or team is when they have already decided to leave”. James Pratt, Reflective Management.

Talent Acquisition — Start Retention Right at the Hire

The reason that the right employee retention strategies start right at the hire is because obviously if it’s the wrong fit from the get-go, even if that person is brilliant, it’s a doomed partnership to begin with.

Let’s look at 3 companies who stand out with smart hiring strategies.

1. Location Lab boasts a 95% employee retention rate and has never laid off a single person.
2. Facebook is known for creating positions for people with talent.
3. Pal’s Sudden Service has only had seven general managers leave the company in 33 years! Annual turnover among assistant managers is 1.4 % and for front-line employees, turnover is just one-third the industry average.

Case Study 1: The Right Hire through Referrals

According to Location Lab, “Referral rate is a great leading indicator of retention”.

About 60% of their employees have referred another person that is also working at the company. Over 40% of their new hires are referrals, some are even referred by people who no longer work at the company.

So what did Location Lab do? They also have a quite rigorous hiring process that includes:

• honest and personable job descriptions,
• training of interviewers (not interviewees),
• and interviewing for values and potential over hard skill.

You can read more about their comprehensive hiring process here.

Case Study 2: Facebook Finds Detractors, Let’s employees pick their own teams

Facebook has a different and equally refreshing take on the hiring process. Although they want to hire the best and the brightest, they also make it a point to be on the lookout for those who show signs of detracting from the team. To screen for these types of detractors Jay Parikh, Global head of Engineeering at Facebook, cautions to

“Look for empire builders, self-servers, and whiners in the hiring process — and don’t hire them”.

They also add additional criteria to screen for the ability to calibrate to a team environment. They ask questions like:

• “Describe your responsibilities as a leader.”
• “Can you tell me about four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved?”
• “What does office politics mean to you, and do you see politics as your job?”
• “Tell me about a project that you led that failed. Why did it fail and what did you learn?”

“After these questions, a successful candidate should clearly demonstrate that their priorities are company, team, and self — in that order.” Jay Parikh, Global Head of Engineering at FB

When the interview is said and done, Facebook employees use a clever hack to discourage “group think” / conformity, that we’ll talk about in the next section. In hiring, feedback for each interviewee is written and logged by all interviewers (and is visible for everyone involved in the hiring process) but interviewers can’t see others’ feedback until they’ve submitted their own. Doing so, stops group think about a particular candidate. The result is an honest opinion of the interviewer and not the feedback the interviewer thinks his or her boss wants to hear.

In terms of purpose / fulfilment — FB encourages engineers who join the company to choose their team, basing the decision in part on where they believe they will have the most meaningful impact, and in part on organizational needs.

Case Study 3: Keeping Part-Timers in High Turnover Industries through Learning

You should stand up and take notice of Pal’s Sudden Service, like HBR did in their cover story piece. This fast-food chain averages about 18 seconds at the drive-up window and 12 seconds at the handout window to receive the order, which has won the prestigous Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award awarded to the likes of FedEx, Cadillac and the Ritz-Carlton.

When they hire, they hire for attitude and train for skill. The 26 locations employ roughly 1,020 workers, 90 percent of whom are part-time, 40 percent of whom are between the ages of 16 and 18. They have developed and fine-tuned a screening system to evaluate candidates from this notoriously hard-to-manage demographic — a 60-point psychometric survey, based on the attitudes and attributes of Pal’s star performers, that does an uncanny job of predicting who is most likely to succeed.

Among the agree/disagree statements:

• “For the most part, I am happy with myself.”
• “I think it is best to trust people you have just met.”
• “Raising your voice may be one way to get someone to accept your point of view.”

Pal’s understands that character counts for as much as credentials, that who you are is as important as what you know.

Hiring is the first step you can take to ensure the right people walk through your door. If someone leaves because of their boss, that’s a failure in the company’s hiring process — an employee didn’t get enough exposure to their boss during the process, or alternatively, if there’s a history of employees leaving and their boss was the bad hire in the first place.

If your employee retention rate is really taking a blow, perhaps it’s time to revisit the meat and bones of your organization — the culture.

Continue reading and check out step 2 +3 at duuoo.io where this post was originally posted.