YOU SHOULD TRACK EMPLOYEE RETENTION; IT’S VALUABLE DATA

“You can’t improve what you don’t measure.”

-Peter Drucker

How good are you at keeping valuable people?

When people leave are they working with the company to leave it in a good position?

Are their often hard feelings?

How long do they stay?

What are their reasons for leaving?

Is there a trend in those reasons?

If your retention is stellar do you use it in your advertising and interviewing to attract great people?

Are managers accountable for average tenure in their teams?

If you know the answers to those questions it is because you track tenure metrics with discipline. Retention is every bit as important as hiring, if not more since now you are invested!

HOW

1. Create a google form you fill out when you hire someone. Answer why you hired the person.
2. Create another Google Form for employees who are fired, laid off, or quit. Answer why and what happened. Break down reasons for leaving into categories such as (unethical, low performance, poor teamwork, etc)
3. Create a live dashboard (Dasheroo, for example) with your Google Form data which tracks how long they have worked here and collates and numbers the reasons for turnover. This enables you, at a glance, to review your retention, identify management problems, expectation setting weaknesses, and advertise accurate tenure if it is indeed great. If it is not, well, knowing is the first step. Get after it.P.S. Don’t tell candidates that “Some people have been there for X impressive years” if that is not the average. Any smart candidate knows there are masochists in every company and yours may be no different. Tell them the average tenure and average reasons for leaving. Be honest. This is great motivation to seal up issues!