Employee turnover: causes, trends, and retention strategies

Employee Turnover: Annotated Bibliography

How to reduce employee turnover. (2014). WSJ. Retrieved January 25, 2014 from:

http://guides.wsj.com/management/recruiting-hiring-and-firing/how-to-reduce-employee-turnover/

High rates of employee turnover are detrimental to the organization's bottom line. It is expensive to recruit and hire new employees. Hiring the right people in the first place is perhaps the best insurance policy to avoid high rates of turnover followed by offering competitive benefits packages. Employees should have clear career paths, supported with mentorship and performance reviews so they do not feel as if they are being stymied and are stagnating; accomplishments should be praised rather than merely assumed to be business as usual.

Jacobs, E. (n.d.). Tracking trends in employee turnover. SHRM. Retrieved January 25, 2014

http://www.shrm.org/Research/benchmarks/Documents/Trends%20in%20Turnover_FINAL.pdf

Employee turnover is widely considered one of the most critical metrics for HR given what it reveals about the current state of employee training and satisfaction and the information it provides for structuring these endeavors in the future. Employers must track trends to enhance recruitment and training programs. High rates of turnover can indicate critical organizational deficits whether they are voluntary or involuntary -- if voluntary, they may indicate alienating policies that cause high-quality workers to leave the organization; high rates of involuntary turnover indicates a poor match of employees with positions via recruitment techniques.

Krueger, A., & Rouse, C. (1998). The effect of workplace education on earnings, turnover, and job performance. Journal of Labor Economics, 16(1), 61-94. Retrieved from ProQuest.

This paper is a study of the Workplace Literacy Program and other grant-based programs from the federal government given to private industry to enhance low-income workers' skills sets. The study was designed to see if training programs can significantly enhance workplace retention and also improve employee career prospects and upward social mobility while proving profitable to employers. Ultimately, the study found that with the assumed discount and depreciation rate of labor and worker skills it would take up to 40 years for companies to reap the benefits of this training, indicating the reason so many organizations have been reluctant to avail themselves of such programs.

Morrison, R.L. (2008). Negative relationships in the workplace: Associations with Organizational commitment, cohesion, job satisfaction and intention to turnover. Journal of Management and Organization, 14(4), 330-344. Retrieved from ProQuest.

This quantitative study analyzed the relationship between personal relations in the workplace and employee satisfaction. It found that employees with at least one negative personal relationship in the workplace had significantly higher rates of turnover, less commitment to the organization, and were less functional on work-related team projects. This suggests that the relationships at work matter and underlines the need to foster positive social ties cannot be ignored if retention is to be enhanced.

Nunez-Smith, M. (et al. 2009). Health care workplace discrimination and physician turnover.

Journal of the National Medical Association, 101(12), 1274-82. Retrieved from ProQuest.

This article profiles a quantitative AMA study on the effects of discrimination upon high rates of physician turnover. Physicians who identified as members of historically-discriminated against groups were significantly more likely to leave jobs as a result of workplace discrimination. Discrimination was strongly associated with career dissatisfaction and career changes. This can be extremely detrimental to the profession in the future, given the need for more minority physicians to reflect the changing demographics of the patient population. More study is needed to see how to improve institutional climates to mitigate the impact of discrimination.