What can be done to improve staff retention?

High staff turnover levels will be affecting your firm's financial performance.

With the keen interest companies have in cost reduction, it is often surprising how little attention is paid to the issue of staff turnover. And how accepting organisations can be of a cost that is frankly controllable.

Given the current vacancy and staff turnover levels in many organisations, staff retention really should be on the management agenda at all levels. If action is not planned, it has the potential to become an ever bigger issue.

Unless you do something positive about it now.

What is the Financial Impact?

We have developed a Financial Impact Model which enables our clients to assess the impact of losing and replacing staff on corporate profitability. This is most accurate when using specific company figures, but still gives useful input at a more generalised level.

Our work shows that the typical financial impact of losing and replacing individual members of staff is strikingly high, especially for those more highly paid, and therefore more critically important staff. But also the very staff who are most mobile and ambitious.

For example;

For those on a salary of £15,000, we measure the impact at £2,700 per person. For people earning £25,000 the impact is £6,000 each. At £50,000 it is £27,000.

Whilst the impact is over £60,000 per person for those earning £100,000.

You only need to lose a very few of these more highly paid staff members and it will eat heavily into your profitability!

Of course this is an oversimplification. Indeed, some level of staff turnover is both expected and required. But what level? What cost is acceptable? And, assuming that it is lower than the current level, what can be done to improve staff retention so that the optimum level is achieved?