Turnover Playbook, Part Three: Tailor Jobs to Employees - Imagine Better Solutions: Marketing, HR & Web Services

Turnover Playbook, Part Three: Tailoring Jobs to Employees

Turnover is a prevalent pain for businesses across many industries. It is costly for organizations big and small, because today’s cost-of-hire is expensive, especially considering time-to-fill position. Additionally, this cost only grows when you calculate it inclusively with burn-out rate of team members and cost of productivity loss.

Certain types of positions, managers and team dynamics create jobs that are prone to turnover. We are all creatures of habit, which is what causes the revolving door to keep revolving. Often times, you will see employees in these high turnover positions exit within 12 months of service. They tend to give 1~2 weeks notice with very little time and attention for transition, which can be detrimental to team members that already have a full plate of work around them.

Don’t forget to include that 2-4 weeks before these employees give notice, they were already on the job market reviewing or being reviewed by your competitors. This means an engagement issue and some degree of productivity loss of up to a month before this employee leaves your doors.

Let me tell you about Eric the Reporting Analyst. Eric is a high functioning performer that’s hardworking and has great ideas during team brainstorming sessions. He is a valuable part of the team. On October 15, 2018, Eric suddenly gave his 2 weeks notice. Here’s his story…

October 30, 2017 – Eric started at the company, excited for the new job
November 30, 2017 – Eric finished his training and takes work home regularly -> when the HR team should have checked-in
February 5, 2018 – Eric passed his 3 month probation and HR gave him benefits -> when the HR team should have made changes
March 19, 2018 – Eric’s manager told Eric he is indispensable and doing a great job
April 16, 2018 – Eric realized his long hours aren’t due to “still learning” the job, but doesn’t like to complain
June 10, 2018 – Eric told his manager he’s frustrated with his workload -> when the manager should have made changes to keep him
August 8, 2018 – Eric asked his friends to keep an eye out for jobs for him -> when the manager should have checked-in on Eric’s workload
August 29, 2018 – Eric got a few referral interviews and worked on his resume and cover letter
September 9, 2018 – Eric started actively applying to more jobs
September 15, 2018 – Eric signed up at recruiting agencies to search for jobs
Early October, 2018 – Eric interviewed for his next job and got a verbal offer
October 12, 2018 – Eric accepted written offer and started writing his resignation letter
October 26, 2018 – Eric’s last day of work with the company

Certain jobs require longer job search persistence, which means a guy like Eric could have been searching since July or earlier. When you add it all up with the cost of replacing Eric, that’s a growing and unmeasured cost. Employees searching on the job market are not as focused on targets or engaged on proactive fulfillment of duties. That’s why we need to ensure job satisfaction, and this could mean redesigning red-flag positions to tailor it to employees like Eric.

The Playbook, Part Three: Job Redesign for Job Satisfaction & Engagement

We believe that the nature of a person’s job – such as it’s requirements and relationships – can affect the person’s attitude and behaviours at work (including performance and satisfaction.) In positions where it’s off balance, you will see an increase in turnover and burnout, which can include:

Job dissatisfaction
Poor quality of work
Absenteeism
Grievances
Behavioural and social issues – ex: aggressive, agitated, upset or isolated

HR’s role in redesign is to create solutions to alleviate employee burden and re-balance responsibilities and relationships. We will re-engineer the job based on the results from work measurement, interviews, and analysis on all job dimensions (including skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy and feedback.)

Our options are typically at least one of these methods of alteration to the position – job simplification, job rotation, job enrichment, job enlargement and/or flexible job arrangements. Imagine HR has resolved countless cases of job design issues across different industries, so get in touch to learn more about how we can help, before you lose a great employee like Eric.

Tailor Jobs to Satisfy Your People with Imagine HR. We are here to help!

With Imagine HR, we partner with you to understand your business and analyze which strategic positions or teams are highest in turnover. We will interview stakeholders and collect all the data required to help us present you with solutions that help you make the right decision.

Time is money and you should stop wasting it on unchecked turnover. We recommend that you invest in your HR programs based on our AIR Model, which will effectively decreases your cost in turnover: