Although certain levels of attrition are regarded as healthy for an organisation to feed innovation and fresh thinking, conversely high attrition will affect customer service and profit margins as outlined in the 2008 Harvard Business Review “Managing the Impact of Employee Turnover on Performance”.
Regrettable or unwanted attrition can be reduced in the recruitment process through the alignment of the assessment and selection criteria to the skills, behaviours competencies and capability needed within the role requirements, underpinned by a standardisation of the recruitment process. Hiring to “what good looks like” to enable future organisational performance and productivity.
The recruitment process is one part of the puzzle, onboarding, training and how we define career pathways all have a significant impact. Further insight into how stability around shift patterns enables retention and drives sales growth is outlined by the Harvard Business Review and provides food for thought in not only retail but also Health Care.
More-stable scheduling increased sales and labor productivity The results were striking. Sales in stores with more stable scheduling increased by 7%, an impressive number in an industry in which companies work hard to achieve increases of 1–2%. Labor productivity increased by 5%, in an industry where productivity grew by only 2.5% per year between 1987 and 2014. Our estimate is that Gap earned $2.9 million as a result of more-stable scheduling during the 35 weeks the experiment was in the field. Given that out-of-pocket expenses were small ($31,200), our data suggest that return on investment was very high. (If stable scheduling were adopted enterprise-wide, transition costs might well entail the costs of upgrading or replacing existing software systems.)
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