Three New Strategic Roles Defined

Driving Change: Three New Roles Defined

While breaking down the barriers between the existing HR functions that impact talent management is in itself a profound success, leading organizations are also formalizing a number of proactive activities that add true strategic power to talent management.

By creating a formal workforce planning role, organizations are empowering staffing departments, training departments, and operations departments to take the guesswork out of how it will happen, and they are managing using robust forecasts that scientifically demonstrate the correlation between workforce utilization/composition and organizational capability and capacity.

To further support strategic talent management, workforce planning is coming online with two other proactive roles. Employment branding is becoming more mainstream as organizations recognize the need to make themselves more visible and attractive to top talent, and to motivate existing employees. Retention efforts are formalizing not just to stave off the need for hard-to-find replacement talent, but also to support knowledge management and knowledge transfer between several generations of talent.

Each of these new roles is outlined here:

Vice President/Director/Manager of Workforce Planning

This role will be responsible for developing systems that ensure that the organization has an adequate supply of talent to support planned business objectives in both existing and new markets. (Note the emphasis here is not to run statistics and create reports, but rather to ensure an adequate supply of talent.)

Specific responsibilities for this role include:

· Overseeing the creation and management of all strategic HR goals, management practices, organizational policies, and talent management systems to ensure the organization has the capability and capacity to secure an adequate workforce when needed.

· Participating in organization-wide strategic planning and operations-planning sessions to provide input on workforce-related touch points.

· Projecting the organization's supply and demand for talent on a moving one-, three-, or five-year basis (timing dependent upon industry).

· Identifying gaps in projected supply and demand for talent and developing strategic and tactical plans to acquire the labor needed to meet objectives.

· Marshaling the cooperation and integration of HR deliverables.

· Establishing and maintaining the business case for organizational change needed to retain a position as the "employer of choice" among key internal and external talent constituencies.

· Analyzing data from all internal functions to determine the relationship between talent availability or utilization and productivity, or the occurrence of sentinel events. (A sentinel event is any unexpected occurrence that results in a severely negative outcome.

Vice President/Director/Manager of Employment Branding

This role will be responsible for developing systems that identify and manage how the organization is perceived by both internal and external key talent constituencies to ensure that the organization develops and maintains a dominant position in relevant labor markets as the employer of choice. (Note that the emphasis of this new role is not on employment advertising but on understanding and managing perception among key constituents.)

Specific responsibilities for this role include:

· Developing and implementing an employment branding strategy that ensures key constituents continue to perceive the organization as an employer of choice, thereby simplifying talent retention, motivation, and attraction.

· Marshaling internal management practices and people programs to ensure that the employment experience delivered is one capable of sustaining projected talent needs.

· Overseeing the creation and integration of employment branding messages in all public relations, media relations, marketing communications, community relations, special events, and recruitment advertising campaigns.

· Identifying and developing storylines around company management practices that can be repeated internally and externally through employee referral campaigns, public speeches by executives/managers, news stories, and select awards program applications.

· Periodically assessing employment brand internally and externally to ensure alignment between current strategy and labor market conditions.

· Establishing and maintaining the business case for organizational change needed to develop the required employment brand.

Vice President/Director/Manager of Retention

This role will be responsible for developing systems that identify mission-critical talent stores within the organization and a stable of tools and approaches that can be used on a one-to-one basis to retain them. (Note the emphasis here is not to develop organization-wide approaches that treat employees equally, but rather to provide differentiated treatment to top performers in key roles that have been characterized as critical to the success/failure of organizational objectives.)

Specific responsibilities for this role include:

· Overseeing the development and implementation of talent management methodologies to identify mission-critical roles within the organization based on objective assessment versus speculation.

· Overseeing the creation and deployment of tools and approaches on a case-by-case basis to ensure the retention of key employees.

· Analyzing internal data from all functions to identify relationships between organizational practices/events and turnover.

· Developing and administering knowledge management and transition processes for planned turnover.

· Developing and maintaining systems that monitor and report on managers' abilities to develop and retain top performers.

· Establishing and maintaining the business case for organizational change needed to drive retention efforts.

Conclusion

It's a brave new world, one with few barriers to competition, which is why barriers to strategic talent management must be removed. Existing barriers include isolated HR functions, lack of strategic mindset, and lack of infrastructure to power true strategic talent management. Removing these barriers isn't easy, but is a necessity for survival in a global economy. Many professionals in HR are not adequately equipped and will not survive in a modern HR function. Organizations cannot let those incapable of transitioning become barriers themselves.

It is time to step up to the plate. It is time to embrace new proactive activities. It is time to stop talking about being strategic and actually be strategic! Enjoy the future — it your turn to be the corporate hero.

Retention Problems Begin During the Hiring Process

In most organizations the recruiting function is entirely separate from the retention effort, yet the design of the hiring process has a dramatic and direct impact on future turnover. More than one-third of the factors that drive future turnover have their roots in the recruiting, hiring, and on-boarding process.

Recruiting Factors That Impact Future Retention

If you're interested in reducing turnover, here are some of the hiring-related factors that impact future retention:

1. The source where you found the candidate. Employees who make referrals have a personal interest in the individuals they refer succeeding on the job. As a result, the employee making the referral has a tendency to mentor or guide that individual and will intervene to help the candidate if he or she gets frustrated. Sources of recruits who don't have that mentoring connection, like large job boards, almost always produce hires who quit at a much higher rate. Look at each of your early turnover cases and see which of your sources have above-normal turnover rates.

2. Their average tenure in other jobs. Calculate how long, on average, any "serial quitters" stayed in their last several jobs as an indicator of how long they are likely to stay in this job. I am not saying you shouldn't hire people who change jobs frequently. They might be top performers who are simply in high demand or who work on projects with relatively short lifecycles. However, you should estimate their likely tenure, then mark it on your calendar, and then later, actively "re-recruit" them around the time they are "overdue" for change and are likely to begin looking for a new job.

3. Hiring candidates who are focused on money. Every candidate has his or her own set of motivators for taking and remaining in a job, and a significant percentage of people are motivated primarily by money. Money is the offer component that is the easiest to compare between firms, but it is also a factor that can change fast. Individuals whose primary motivator is money tend to be at the top of the turnover pyramid because they frequently "jump" to a new job as soon as a higher monetary offer comes in. No matter how good your initial starting salary, if your organization is slow to give raises, bonuses, stock rewards, or to counter outside offers, you will inevitably lose these individuals when more money comes along. Leading firms like Ernst & Young and Southwest Airlines understand this relationship and as a result, they specifically target hiring individuals who don't have the "give me the money" mentality. Incidentally, individuals hired from executive search firms can fall into this "money first" category. If they left the last job because an executive search professional presented a "better money" offer, don't be surprised when they leave again when the next executive search professional calls with slightly more money to offer. Solutions include targeting individuals from not-for-profits, government, education, and medicine. Also, share information on the maximum and minimum salary, stock options, and bonus amounts (based on actual new-hire experience over the last two years). By providing only trend information from actual experience and carefully avoiding any direct promises to individual candidates, you can minimize legal issues and any misperceptions about the actual amounts that they "will" actually make. To determine a candidate's top motivators, give them a simple, one-page survey that requires them to force-rank the top and bottom factors that motivate them to change jobs. By forcing them to rank the top and bottom three "job change" motivators, you can get a good (though not perfect) idea of whether exceptional money is a critical factor. Options could include high base pay, bonus percentage, exceptional benefits, challenging work, learning and growth, working in a team, working independently, the opportunity to innovate, job security, a directive manager, a hands-off manager, a product they believe in, the desire to help others, recognition, and two-way communications.

4. On-boarding and orientation. The first few days on the job have a dramatic impact on future retention (one firm found that weak orientation could increase future turnover by as much as 20%). Research shows that individuals make a "mental decision" during their first month as to how long they expect to stay with the organization (Note: this phenomenon is highlighted in the popular book, Blink). New hires subconsciously judge whether the organization meets, exceeds, or fails to meet the expectations they have based on how they were treated during the first week and month. If they are under the belief that your organization promised exciting work but are told during their first week on the job to sit in their cubical and "read the manual," they are likely to conclude (and also to tell their colleagues) that while the organization may talk a good game, it is not reflected in the actual job. To avoid mixed messages, make sure that your "local" on-boarding is stimulating and gets them up to the expected level of productivity quickly. Such a program might focus on coordinating meetings with the top people right away, providing new hires with a mentor, and periodically asking them what can be done to bring them up to productivity faster. During orientation, ask candidates specifically "what is the best way to manage you?" By identifying what management approaches they personally have found to be effective with them in the past, you can avoid the need for a lot of trial and error on the part of their manager. Some of the "factors" you want to identify relating to "how to best manage them" include what motivates them, what frustrates them, what is the best way to communicate with them, how often they like to see their manager, what challenges them, and what would they like to learn during orientation. With this information, you can provide their new manager with insights into the management approaches that make them the most productive (note: managers can also provide new hires with a profile outlining how they manage their employees). Ask new hires during on-boarding why they accepted the job and what led them to quit their last two jobs. Passing those reasons on to their current manager can help ensure that they know which factors might cause the new hire to leave again.

5. Recruiter involvement after the hire. If you want to reduce future turnover, maintain a relationship with new hires during their first six months in order to ensure that they don't become frustrated (this approach was championed by Michael Homula at FirstMerit Bank with great success). Recruiters can add value because good recruiters routinely know what motivates and frustrates their candidates. It only makes sense that they maintain a relationship with new hires for a few months after they come on board to gauge whether the candidates' expectations are being met. I call this process "closing the sale." In this case, recruiters don't take over a manager's role in retention; instead, they only supplement it. Recruiters can be a source of advice and information, help reduce new hire frustration, and provide insight on how to navigate inside the company. Recruiters can also help new hires understand the "what" and "why's" within the firm. As many as 60% of new hires fail, not because they're bad hires, but instead because of a bad initial job placement. Recruiters who keep in touch can help to speed up internal redeployment of initially "mis-placed" individuals.

6. The lack of diversity orientation and retention. Many organizations have a diversity recruiting function that endeavors to hire diverse individuals. Unfortunately, once they are hired, diverse individuals frequently receive no further special attention. This is unfortunate, because by definition, diverse individuals have different expectations and needs than the average hire. If you treat all new hires exactly the same, you should not be surprised when you find that diversity turnover rates are higher than your average turnover rates. The solution is simple: offer variations in on-boarding to ensure that the unique needs of diverse people are met. Next, add a diversity retention function or process to ensure that your organization gets direct feedback from diverse new hires about factors that might cause them to be frustrated or to begin looking for another job.

7. Manager rewards for great retention. Less than one in three organizations reward managers for having low turnover rates among new hires. If you want managers to pay attention to retention both during and after a new hire's induction period, show them the impact that turnover has on their business results. Then, tie every manager's bonus to "performance turnover." Performance turnover differs from traditional turnover in that the loss of a top performer, a diverse individual, or an individual in a mission-critical job is weighted significantly higher than the turnover of an average performer. There is no punishment for losing a bottom performer.

8. Being aware of the most common causes of turnover. If your organization conducts delayed or "post-exit" interviews, you probably already know that most top performers leave because they had a bad manager, were not challenged, were not growing, or were mistreated. Don't place a top candidate with a mediocre or bad manager. If your organization doesn't have a bad manager identification program, look at the processes pioneered by FedEx and Dell.

Shifting to other turnover causes, if you want to ensure that new hires are challenged, learning, and growing, ensure that all new hires have an individualized plan for learning, growth, and challenge (Qualcomm, for example, requires every employee to have a learning plan). Next, focus on the lack of differentiation.

In my experience, it's hard to get compensation professionals to realize the important role they play in great recruiting and retention, but every effort must be made to convince them that you can satisfy most top performers' need for differentiation by ensuring that a significant portion of pay and bonuses are based on performance.

Few things frustrate top performers more than being paid, recognized, and treated exactly the same as poor performers like Homer Simpson.

Final Thoughts

HR has justifiably been accused of creating numerous functional "silos" that hinder cooperation between the different HR departments. New hires must be "maintained" just like any other new asset. There needs to be a planned maintenance schedule that is personalized to the needs of each new hire. That maintenance process must be coordinated and systematic and must "force" integration of the actions of the various silos. Almost without exception, one of the thickest walls between HR functions is the one that separates the recruiting function from the retention effort.
In my experience, the interaction between these two functions is, all too often, minimal to nonexistent even though bad recruiting directly "causes" future turnover and conversely, poor retention efforts unnecessarily increase the future workload of all recruiters.

To avoid this common problem, identify the direct connections between how you recruit and orient and future turnover. Then take the necessary steps to stop this wasteful, preventable turnover.

Ref: Dr. John Sullivan

Importance of Human Resource Metrics

The processes of recruitment and selection are not as easy as they may seem. Any person who works for the human resource department of any company can certainly attest to this. This is because there is no definitive means of distinguishing which of the applicants for a particular position would be efficient on the job from the ones who would not be as efficient. If there were some sort of definitive system of discerning such, maybe companies all over the world would not experience such high turnover rates! This is why human resource departments of companies worldwide recognize the need to come up with human resource metrics, or HR metrics.

The term HR metrics, when you put it as simply as possible, refer to guidelines. These guidelines are measurable and are used by companies to come up with cost-effective strategies that are primarily aimed at the ensuring high-end performance of the workforce. The operative concept in HR metrics is employee assessment. Unless you have years and years of recruitment and selection under your belt, it is actually quite hard to assess the efficiency of an applicant right off the bat. Without the proper training entailed in being a recruitment specialist, it is close to impossible to assess applicants accurately. There are even times when even the most experienced HR specialist would have problems going about with accurate assessment for this!

This is precisely why HR metrics are very much needed by any personnel working for the HR department of a company. With the proper HR metrics system, the HR department of the company can determine which of the applicants would be worth investing on.

Gathering and creating a system of human resource metrics for any company is something that can be done easily; that is, as long as you have the proper guidelines to back you up. The most important thing here is to gather information about the employees. However, not all pieces of information would be used in developing human resource metrics at all. Weeding out the reliable pieces of information from those which are not is the ideal here. But then, at what figure should the gathering of human resource metrics be pegged? The recommended figure by the lot of recruitment specialists and experts here is actually pegged at ten. With this figure, you will actually come up with an effective system of assessing your company's workforce.

Another important thing to remember in the process of developing human resource metrics is that all aspects of the business should be considered. To name a few of these business aspects, these would be recruiting and retention, employee engagement, manager satisfaction, and the productivity of the workforce. There are other aspects and factors to consider, of course. But the underlying concept in ensuring the efficiency of the human resource metrics a company would use is actually very simple: the company should be very goal-oriented. When a company knows what it wants to achieve, then distinguishing the aspects to be retained from the ones to let go would be certainly easier.

Career Development Program

Has your organization seriously considered implementing a career development program? If not, perhaps this is a good time to do so. The following description of several, widely used career development interventions and case studies can be used to stimulate discussion on various career development practices.

Alternative Career Paths

One approach to alternative career pathing involves incorporating the skills employees already have with what their hearts want to do. It can involve changing career and lifestyles for more meaningful and fulfilling work arrangements. Creating alternative career paths often involves incorporating other career development interventions, such as flexi-time or job enrichment. Alternative career paths should not be confused with dual career paths, which is described later.

Career Pathing

Career pathing, also called career tracking, is a process of outlining an individual career plan, usually within an organization. Career pathing is most often used as a part of management training and development, although individuals may develop their own career track, either alone, or in conjunction with a career coach.

Employees follow pre-determined steps along the career path to develop expertise in managing different types of organizational situations and to reach their career goal. Periodic checks evaluate progress, as well as determining what further training or experience is needed to move to the next step. Career pathing often uses several other career development interventions as part of the process. These include cross-training, job rotation, job enrichment or enlargement, and temporary assignments.

Dual Career Tracks

Dual career tracks should not be confused with alternative career paths. Creating dual career paths involves preparing employees to succeed and be rewarded without necessarily being on a management or vertical organization career path. In other words, ``up'' is not considered the only way employees can grow and advance within the company. The establishment of dual or multiple career tracks has proven to be an effective way to retain and motivate valued employees.

Management can be an attractive career alternative for many employees, but it is not for everyone. This may be particularly true for many technical or creative workers. The number of people managed often distinguishes managerial levels, but under the dual career track plan, individuals apply their expertise (like managers) to tasks of greater complexity and impact within their specialty field.

For example, they may make recommendations in a wide range of business areas, participate in high level decisions, and act as mentors to other employees. The interest in dual or multiple career tracks is likely to grow as more organizations do away with formal management titles and establish team structures.

Career Coaching/Counseling

Career coaching frequently involves helping individuals prepare for a career change or helping employees advance in their existing jobs. From the employee's view, career coaching consists of evaluating interests, values, work styles, and skills. From the organization's view, it consists of matching employee talents with organizational needs, recruiting and retaining talent in the company, identifying training and development needs, and assisting employees in specifying and locating new employment opportunities within the organization.

Cross-Training

Cross-trained workers are taught skills outside their current job assignment so they can be called upon to perform a variety of tasks as the need arises. Many workers and supervisors find themselves cross-training each other, just to make the day-to-day work life manageable. As a career development intervention, however, companies put into place a formal program of cross-training.

Cross-training helps organizations to balance workloads so everyone is busy, and allows the company to respond quickly to employee absences. It also allows employees and departments within an organization to gain a better understanding of the ``big picture'', and to improve communications and relations. Employees who are cross-trained are more valuable to the company, and more marketable in the work world overall.

Flexitime

Flextime is one of the most popular and most widely known career development interventions. Flexitime gives employees the opportunity to balance their work and personal lives by restructuring the typical workday to accommodate individual employee schedules. Employers who offer flexitime often report decreased use of paid leave, decreased tardiness and increased productivity. Other benefits for the employer include a low-cost method of providing personal time off and extending service hours without overtime pay. This career development intervention is popular with employees who have extended families or young children, who may be facing ``burn-out'', and those seeking further education or pursuing second careers.

Flexitime allows employees to set their own schedules, within limitations set by management. For example, workers may adjust their starting and ending times, but are required to be at the office during management specified core or peak hours. Working four ten-hour days is an example of a compressed workweek form of flexitime. Flexitime may also be combined with other interventions, such as job sharing, job rotation, and phased retirement.

Job Rotation

Job rotation is the systematic movement of employees from job to job within an organization, as a way to achieve many different human resources objectives : for simply staffing jobs, for orienting new employees, for preventing job boredom, and, finally, for training employees and enhancing their career development.

Job rotation is often used by employers who place employees on a certain career path or track, usually for a management position, where they are expected to perform a variety of duties, and have a variety of skills and competencies.

Job rotation is often confused with crosstraining. While both interventions perform essentially the same service of providing employees with a varied set of skills, job rotation goes beyond this. Besides being used as a means of management training, job rotation can also be used as a form of job enrichment, by adding increased responsibilities, increasing challenge, and reducing boredom or burnout.

Job Enlargement

Job enlargement is defined as increasing the number of tasks a worker performs, with all of the tasks at the same level of responsibility, and is also sometimes referred to as ``horizontal job loading'' . Be careful not to confuse job enlargement with job enrichment, which will be discussed later.

Job enlargement and job enrichment can both be used with plateaued workers or workers who are experiencing burnout, and with especially high achievers. These two interventions may be used in conjunction with each other, or with other career development interventions such as job rotation and temporary assignments. Both interventions provide the employee with increased skills, making him or her more valuable to the company, or more marketable in the job search.

Job Enrichment

Job enrichment involves increasing a worker's responsibility and control over his or her work, and is also called ``vertical job loading''. Job enrichment allows you to expand your responsibilities or change your role to develop new competencies without leaving your current position or the organization altogether.

Job enrichment is also used as an effective motivational technique. According to this perspective, if a job provides a sense of responsibility, a sense of significance and information concerning performance, the employees will be internally motivated to high levels of performance. The key to creating this situation is to enrich jobs so they provide five core characteristics: task variety, task significance, task identity, autonomy and feedback.


Job Sharing

With job sharing, a full-time job is split between two employees. The two employees share the duties and responsibilities, as well as the salary and benefits of the job. These two employees must also work closely together, and with management, to co-ordinate hours, duties, and communication among themselves and other departments in the organization. Most often, job sharing is used by parents or adults caring for their parents, and affords employees a better balance between their work and personal lives.

Employees pursuing further education or a second career may also use job sharing. Job sharing offers advantages over part-time work in that employees are able to maintain their professional status as well as some of their job benefits. One example of the advantage over flexitime situations is that with flexitime, parents may still require extended day care hours. Benefits to the employer include having ``two heads instead of one'', retaining valued and experienced employees, and down time due to vacation or sickness is reduced, because the job share partners cover for each other.

Phased Retirement

Organizations typically devote far more energy to recruiting and retraining than to phasing out workers. Phased retirement is one intervention that workers and employers can use at the latter end of the career cycle. During phased retirement, workers gradually taper their work schedules until they reach full retirement. Other career development interventions such as flextime and job sharing are typically incorporated into phased retirement arrangements. Retirees may work part time and serve as mentors or trainers to their successors. Benefits to employees include a greater sense of control over the transition from work to retirement, lowering the risk of economic insecurity, and more social support. The employer benefits by retaining valued talent and minimizing labor shortages.

Ref: James Kirk, Bridget Downey, Steve Duckett, and Connie Woody

High attrition haunts manufacturing too

The manufacturing sector in India is growing almost at the same rate as IT. The attrition rate too in this sector is very high and is a major challenge to its growth. Pointing this out, T Parabrahman, managing director and chief operating officer of Kirloskar Toyota Textile Machinery, said that an acute shortage of manpower had hit every industrial segment in the country and the manufacturing sector was no exception to this.

He said though the manufacturing and service sectors are growing multi-fold, there is a severe shortage of human capabilities in India. "Though many companies like Toyota are running in-house training centres for new recruits and as part of the continuing education programme, we need universities and educational institutions to start training centres in association with industry to address the paucity of trained manpower," he said.

Citing a case, he said in the next seven years the country needs about 5 million lakh truck drivers.

Martin Voglsanger, Managing Director of Bosch Rexroth-India, who inaugurated the train-the-trainer programme, said Bosch Rexroth had designed proprietary didactic concepts that can be implemented in engineering colleges.

"With modern equipment and teachware, learning at a high level is possible now," he said. Wolfgang Wagner, former managing director of Bosch Rexroth-India, said the design, development and launch of Nano by the Tatas has proved that a high degree of innovation is setting in, in the Indian manufacturing sector. It is heartening to know that more and more Indian firms are participating in industry-academia partnership.

G L Shekar, chairman of the Implementation Committee of the Centre of Competence, said the Indian Automotive Mission Plan had predicted an output of $145 billion in the automobile sector with the creation of an additional 25 million jobs by 2016 in India.

Retention is directly proportional to the Organization Culture

Retention is directly proportional to the Organization Culture, so Organisations need to make sure that it has a conducive culture for employees to operate. Here are some interesting Retention Tools which I came across-

1. Offer fair and competitive salaries. Fair compensation alone does not guarantee employee loyalty, but offering below-market wages makes it much more likely that employees will look for work elsewhere. In fact, research shows that if incomes lag behind comparable jobs at a company across town by more than 10 percent, workers are likely to bolt. To retain workers, conduct regular reviews of the salaries you offer for all job titles — entry-level, experienced staff and supervisory-level. Compare your department's salaries with statistically reliable averages. If there are significant discrepancies, you probably should consider making adjustments to ensure that you are in line with the marketplace.

2. Remember that benefits are important too. Although benefits are not a key reason why employees stick with a company, the benefits you offer can't be markedly worse than those offered by your competitors

3. Train your front-line supervisors, managers and administrators. It can't be said often enough: People stay or leave because of their bosses, not their companies. A good employee/manager relationship is critical to employee satisfaction and retention. Make sure your managers aren't driving technologists away. Give them the training they need to develop good supervisory and people-management skills.

4. Clearly define roles and responsibilities. Develop a formal job description for each title or position in your department. Make sure your employees know what is expected of them every day, what types of decisions they are allowed to make on their own, and to whom they are supposed to report.

5. Provide adequate advancement opportunities. To foster employee loyalty, implement a career ladder and make sure employees know what they must do to earn a promotion. Conduct regular performance reviews to identify employees' strengths and weaknesses, and help them improve in areas that will lead to job advancement. A clear professional development plan gives employees an incentive to stick around.

6. Offer retention bonuses instead of sign-on bonuses. Worker longevity typically is rewarded with an annual raise and additional vacation time after three, five or 10 years. But why not offer other seniority-based rewards such as a paid membership in the employee's professional association after one year, a paid membership to a local gym after two years, and full reimbursement for the cost of the employee's uniforms after three years? Retention packages also could be designed to raise the salaries of technologists who become credentialed in additional specialty areas, obtain additional education or take on more responsibility. Sign-on bonuses encourage technologists to skip from job to job, while retention packages offer incentives for staying.

7. Make someone accountable for retention. Measure your turnover rate and hold someone (maybe you!) responsible for reducing it. In too many workplaces, no one is held accountable when employees leave, so nothing is done to encourage retention.

8. Conduct employee satisfaction surveys. You won't know what's wrong ... or what's right … unless you ask. To check the pulse of your workplace, conduct anonymous employee satisfaction surveys on a regular basis. One idea: Ask employees what they want more of and what they want less of.

9. Foster an environment of teamwork. It takes effort to build an effective team, but the result is greater productivity, better use of resources, improved customer service and increased morale. Here are a few ideas to foster a team environment in your department: • Make sure everyone understands the department's purpose, mission or goal. • Encourage discussion, participation and the sharing of ideas. • Rotate leadership responsibilities depending on your employees' abilities and the needs of the team. • Involve employees in decisions; ask them to help make decisions through consensus and collaboration. • Encourage team members to show appreciation to their colleagues for superior performance or achievement.

10. Reduce the paperwork burden. If your technologists spend nearly as much time filling out paperwork, it's time for a change. Paperwork pressures can add to the stress and burnout that employees feel. Eliminate unnecessary paperwork; convert more paperwork to an electronic format; and hire non-tech administrative staff to take over as much of the paperwork burden as is allowed under legal or regulatory restrictions.

11. Make room for fun. Celebrate successes and recognize when milestones are reached. Potluck lunches, birthday parties, employee picnics and creative contests will help remind people why your company is a great place to work.

12. Write a mission statement for your department. Everyone wants to feel that they are working toward a meaningful, worthwhile goal. Work with your staff to develop a departmental mission statement, and then publicly post it for everyone to see. Make sure employees understand how their contribution is important.

13. Provide a variety of assignments. Identify your employees' talents and then encourage them to stretch their abilities into new areas. Do you have a great "teacher" on staff? Encourage him/ her to lead an in-service or present a poster session on an interesting case. Have someone who likes planning and coordinating events? Ask him to organize a departmental open house. Know a good critical-thinker? Ask him/ her to work with a vendor to customize applications training on a new piece of equipment. A variety of challenging assignments helps keep the workplace stimulating.

14. Communicate openly. Employees are more loyal to a company when they believe managers keep them informed about key issues. Is a corporate merger in the works? Is a major expansion on the horizon? Your employees would rather hear it from you than from the evening newscast. It is nearly impossible for a manager to "over-communicate."

15. Encourage learning. Create opportunities for your technologists to grow and learn. Reimburse them for CE courses, seminars and professional meetings; discuss recent journal articles with them; ask them to research a new scheduling method for the department. Encourage every employee to learn at least one new thing every week, and you'll create a work force that is excited, motivated and committed.

16. Be flexible. Today's employees have many commitments outside their job, often including responsibility for children, aging parents, chronic health conditions and other issues. They will be loyal to workplaces that make their lives more convenient by offering on-site childcare centers, on-site hair styling and dry cleaning, flexible work hours, part-time positions, job-sharing or similar practices. For example, employees of school-age children might appreciate the option to work nine months a year and have the summers off to be with their children.

17. Develop an effective orientation program. Implement a formal orientation program that's at least three weeks long and includes a thorough overview of every area of your department and an introduction to other departments. Assign a senior staff member to act as a mentor to the new employee throughout the orientation period. Develop a checklist of topics that need to be covered and check in with the new employee at the end of the orientation period to ensure that all topics were adequately addressed.

18. Give people the best equipment and supplies possible. No one wants to work with equipment that's old or constantly breaking down. Ensure that your equipment is properly maintained, and regularly upgrade machinery, computers and software. In addition, provide employees with the highest quality supplies you can afford. Cheap, leaky pens may seem like a small thing, but they can add to employees' overall stress level.

19. Show your employees that you value them. Recognize outstanding achievements promptly and publicly, but also take time to comment on the many small contributions your staff makes every day to the organization's mission. Don't forget — these are the people who make you look good!