Employee Turnover (Six Sigma Project)

I hope your HR department is a little more open than a previous employer where I attempted to do a similar project.  They hit the roof when I wanted to analyze data using ethnicity, gender and age.  I don’t think your Xs are sufficiently inclusive.  Are you making a distinction as to reason for turnover; voluntary leaving, involuntary leaving, leaving for another job, leaving due to relocation, etc.?  I don’t see any Xs indicating type of job, education level, level in the organization, size of department and a whole bunch of other information.

Nick,  I completed a project in Dec of last year on employee turnover.  We were very specific that it was “Voluntary” employee turnover that we were trying to reduce – it may help to get clarification on that.  Sounds like you are looking at Voluntary and Involuntary both.  Q: Is Involuntary really important to the customer? 
My projects actual objective was to “Reduce the voluntary turnover as measured by annual voluntary terminations from 22% of workforce in 2002 to less than 15% by 12/31/2003 and sustain this level.”
I actually was able to succeed with this project and further reduced it to 8% in 2004! 
A couple of pointers.  Age, Race, and Sex had no bearing and HR although they provided this information, they did not want us to report on it.  Since it had no value in our findings, it was fine.  We did find that Location, Supervisor, Function (job), Length of Service, Reason for leaving, Education, Grade, Title, and any Exit Interview information was very helpful.  Unfortunately we did not have Exit interviews for everyone but now require an online one they can fill out privately before they leave.   
Our data told us that the majority of employees left us before their first year and the next level was just a few before 2 years of service.  That was quite telling.  They were also from two specific job functions which led us to look at job titles next.   Root causes:  We determined that the job descriptions were not clear – therefore were filling positions inaccurately,  some supervisors had some employee/manager issues to name a few.  We ended up doing an employee survey.  The outcome resulted in us going temp to hire on our line staffing, we added some additional reason codes to our profiles for future analyis tracking, revised our job descriptions where it was needed, added in the online exit interview, and implemented some employee programs run by the employee committees to improve employee satisfaction such as recognizing years of service – something we had never done before.  (focused on 1, 2 & increments of 5 years of service) and a few other things I can’t think of without pulling out my report book.  I hope this helps you with your project!  Good luck!
Rhonda 

I think I need a spell checker.  Sorry, that was “receptive”.
Lass

Few other pointers that can be focussed on :

Sure enough, employees that terminate their service voluntarily, effect the customer satisfaction level and cause a reasonable concern with regards to the operational efficiency and proficiency, in the minds of the customers..
Employees come from different walks of life, as we can see on their resume, they would have experience in different types of services..iam going to Services Industry for example.  In my opinion, at the time of hiring an employee, resume can be a very good reflective of the intentions of the applicant.  Not always can the management be blamed for an employee leaving the organisation.  The employee could have left just out of “Habit” of changing jobs and analysis of the same and questioning the same of the employee and measuring the seriouness and the trust-worthyness of the employee can reduce the chances of the same applicant quitting at a later date…This analysis when carefully done could reduce the training costs of hiring a new replacement..
Peer Factors can also be considered while trying to reduce the employee turnover.  Colleagues and fellow workers can, to a great extent effect the performance and satisfaction levels of an employee..
The whole working environment can be taken into picture..is it encouraging or criticizing….
Flexibility of work timings…
As it was mentioned before, definitely job descriptions and expectations and review based on the same standards and specifications
Appreciation for an employee when he/she performs exceptionally and also recognition on the same note…Additonal training to perform better..
Freedom to express and demonstrate creativity as and when applicable.
Employers should try and provide Quality Work Life to employees.  Also does the employer have the rules for all the employees..
An exit interview is the best way to know as to why the employee quit the job..but even more better would be for the employer to try and understand the relevance of the facts mentioned in the exit interview and work towards their fulfillment or betterment..
Internal support and assistance in times when a employee needs help with something..
Employer should recognize the fact, a sound employee is a sound company..should provide continued training for the employee to make progress and move to different positions..
Look at the past career graph and calculate the average time spent on each job..
Encourage an employee to perform better and give him/her reasonable time to improve and demonstrate improved performance levels and appreciate the employee for sustained performance improvement and give a raise accordingly, in contrast to considering the option of “firing” the employee and “hiring” a replacement and spend on training costs..
Factors that are upto the discretion of the employer are the only factors controllable..  a careful observation and analysis of an applicant before/during the hiring process has the potential to minimize the employee turnover..
 
 

Alas, oh one brandishing the new red light saber and the new Christmas cape, as well as salting and peppering from the new Don Julio matching-first-edition-autographed-boxed-gift-crystal-shakers…… Yes, it should not be difficult. Yet many among us are still learning the details of the technology Santa left under our Christmas tree/Hanukah Bush.
Hanukah Bush, is he/she a governor somewhere?

Dear Nick,
I will share my experience.
lets go step by step. the project CTQ is to reduce the employee turnover by x%.
now where do u start. – it is voc.
the practical problem here is, if u use exit interview data, it will be biased and by experience i am telling u, it is 90% incorrect. It is because of the reason that, the person exiting wants to get out of the organization and with minimum problems. hence all statements and data are not factual.
It is better to meet these exited people may be after some time or once they settledown in a new job and capture through an inteview, on what was the reason for their exit. Then you have a very probability of getting correct reasons.
I am sure this first step might take lot of effort, but it is worth doing it.
regards
sathish

Data stratification done by you for the project will give you only the stand alone analysis. For this project your project should start with the VOC (Employee Left the organization). “Basically employee joins the Organization and left due to reporting Manager” Now your analysis should start with the data stratification and the stratification should be
· Performance Rating in last two years (If quarterly then better)
· If 360 feedback data available then rating of reporting manager
· If you have past data of any Employee engagement survey / Satisfaction survey then rating of reporting managers
· Function wise analysis (Department Wise) and incorporate your data stratification in this
· Performance rating of Reporting managers – as Sublimation plays a vital role and results in employee turn over
· Over all Business performance
· Competitor analysis – Most HR projects are only done on Analysis based on employees, but turn over is the resultant of over all business performance so look at this angle which will give you the insight for turn over.

Hi
I’m fairly new to the world of Six Sigma and its concepts – what are the basic key indicators of Six Sigma.
Usha

Hello Nick – I am doing a Six Sigma project on voluntary termaintion in a manufaturing facility.  One of the strongest correlations I have found is between length of service and accidents – new hires have ~80% of the accidents. Records are not available to correlate length of service to quality & productivity but I am sure it exists. Would like to share more – how can we do that?

Rajesh
Whats the Rumba concept?

The main thing that would make me leave and did make me leave Burger is was the lack of respect that was given to me by my bosses and employees. I was undermined at every turn and suggestion I made died right there in that room and on top of that I was asked to do illegal things to cover other peoples mistakes.

One problem is gettgn acurate information from your exit interviews.  The people doing these and the tool used should be very detailed to get at the actual causes for leaving.
That being said – data collected will probably show that the majority of people who leave do so within the first year.  We found that by holding a 45 day roundtable with new hires, we found issues we could deal with while they were still there eliminate/reduce the effects for future new hires.