BUSI 443 Week 8 Discussion Board Forum 3 Example

Discussion Board Forum 3: Retention Management

BUSI 443 Workforce Planning and Employment, Discussion Board Forum 3 Thread and Reply

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The forum prompt and the classmate are composites; the textbook and the research cited are real.

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Heneman et al. (2015) present retention management as a deliberate process: measuring turnover, analyzing its causes, distinguishing avoidable from unavoidable turnover and designing interventions where the organization can make a difference. Most retention efforts begin by asking why employees leave. I want to argue that organizations should also ask why employees stay, because the answers point to different and often cheaper interventions.

Turnover research has long focused on leaving. Hom et al. (2017) reviewed one hundred years of turnover theory and research, following the field from early models centered on dissatisfaction and the availability of other jobs to later work on the shocks that prompt departures, the costs of turnover for organizations and the forces that keep people in place. One of the most important of those forces is job embeddedness.

Mitchell et al. (2001) introduced job embeddedness as a set of influences that keep people in their jobs: ties to coworkers and groups, a sense of fit with the work, the employer and the town, and what leaving would cost the person. Embeddedness predicted who stayed over and above how satisfied or committed people were. People stay not only because they like their jobs but because leaving would cost them relationships, a good fit and benefits they value. Embeddedness also explains why some dissatisfied employees stay and some satisfied ones leave.

Consider a distribution center losing 45 percent of its associates each year. Exit interviews blame schedules and pay. Those issues matter, but an embeddedness view suggests additional steps: pairing each new associate with a peer mentor to build links, posting schedules early so associates can fit work around family life, offering tuition support that grows with tenure to raise the sacrifice of leaving, and supporting associates' involvement in local community events.

Asking why employees stay also reveals what the organization already does well. A short stay interview with associates who have been there two years could uncover strengths worth protecting and expanding.

The center could measure the results the same way the chapter recommends for any retention program: track turnover by tenure group and by shift, separate avoidable from unavoidable departures, and compare the first-year turnover of associates who had a peer mentor with those who did not. If mentored associates stay longer, the program pays for itself quickly, since replacing an associate costs far more than a few hours of a mentor's time each week. Over a year, these comparisons would show which steps strengthen embeddedness and which only sound good.

Reply to Taylor

Taylor, your proposal that the restaurant group raise hourly wages by a dollar to reduce turnover is reasonable, since pay is often the first reason employees give for leaving. I would add evidence that pay is only part of the picture.

When Griffeth et al. (2000) pooled the turnover research, the best predictors of leaving were how satisfied and committed people felt, how their job compared with other options and whether they already intended to quit, while pay and related factors had smaller direct effects. Employees may cite pay because it is easy to name, while the decision to leave also reflects how they feel about their supervisors, their schedules and their prospects.

Heneman et al. (2015) recommend diagnosing the causes of turnover before choosing remedies. Before spending on a raise across all locations, the restaurant group could compare turnover by location and by manager, since large differences would point to supervision rather than pay. A raise combined with better scheduling practices and manager training might produce more retention per dollar than a raise alone. Stay interviews would also give managers a regular reason to talk with their people about what is working, which in itself builds the relationships that keep employees from looking elsewhere. If the survey shows that schedules matter as much as pay, the group could post schedules two weeks ahead at every location before deciding on the size of a raise, and then compare turnover after six months. Would the group be willing to survey current employees about what would keep them, not only what would make them leave?

References

Griffeth, R. W., Hom, P. W., & Gaertner, S. (2000). A meta-analysis of antecedents and correlates of employee turnover: Update, moderator tests, and research implications for the next millennium. Journal of Management, 26(3), 463-488. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920630002600305

Heneman, H. G., III, Judge, T. A., & Kammeyer-Mueller, J. D. (2015). Staffing organizations (8th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.

Hom, P. W., Lee, T. W., Shaw, J. D., & Hausknecht, J. P. (2017). One hundred years of employee turnover theory and research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), 530-545. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000103

Mitchell, T. R., Holtom, B. C., Lee, T. W., Sablynski, C. J., & Erez, M. (2001). Why people stay: Using job embeddedness to predict voluntary turnover. Academy of Management Journal, 44(6), 1102-1121. https://doi.org/10.5465/3069391