Employee Retention - Hiring the Right Fit

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) just published some data that sheds some understanding on employee retention. The first question is "who is ready to work?" Their findings are that the five most important skills for a new employee are:

• Professionalism
  
• Teamwork
• Oral Communication
• Ethics and Social Responsibility
• Reading Comprehension

You might note that knowledge of a specific field of study did not make the top 5.

The second question relates to retention directly. SHRM asked employees what were the most important things that influence their job satisfaction. The findings in rank order are:

1. Benefits
2. Compensation or Pay
3. Job Security
4. Flexibility to balance life and work issues
   
5. Communication between employees and senior management
6. Feeling safe in the work environment (up 14% since 2002)
7. Management recognition of employee job performance
8. Relationship with immediate supervisor (HR Directors rank this 1st)
   
9. Autonomy and independence
10. Opportunities to use skills and abilities.
    

The implication is that while the literature has documented that having a positive employee relationship with their supervisor is critical to employee staying on the job, concerns over benefits and good medical care may be actually creating dissatisfaction. The lesson to organizations is to ensure that they do not allow their benefits packages to diminish to a level where they become de-motivators for employees. I was blessed to get to tour the UPS facility in Louisville Ky last month. I was impressed with the mechanics of this huge system of getting all these packages to where they needed to go. But what impressed me the most was UPS's benefit packages.. how they took care of even part-time employees. Well Done UPS! Your employees know what Big Brown Can Do for Them!