The relationship between effective employee benefit packages and employee retention is clearly defined: it’s nearly impossible to improve the latter without paying for the former. If your workforce doesn’t like your employee wellness benefit program, they’re four times more likely to leave your company for greener pastures. While most execs aren’t thinking much about employee retention at the moment, they should be. Two out of three employees are quietly job hunting right now, according to a recent salary.com survey. There’s a staggering financial impact associated with having ineffective employee retention plans. The average 100-employee professional firm burns between $3M and $4.5M on turnover costs every year. On average, an $80,000/yr salaried employee costs $240,000 to replace – costs that arise from job advertising, interviewing, vetting, onboarding, training, and periods of low productivity while the new employee learns the ropes. This turnover cost cycle occurs every 2.4 years, on average. The potential turnover cost savings are on an equal scale. Convincing one $75,000/yr employee to remain on staff for ten years can save over $675,000 in turnover costs. Reducing turnover by just 20% can save the average IT firm over $875,000 every year. Finding employee retention techniques that keep just one more $90,000 per-year salaried employee on staff this year will save over a quarter of a million dollars. So how do you implement best practices for employee retention without breaking the bank? It’s not that difficult to do, but your human resources employee benefits folks have to put in a little sweat equity, and the executive suite has to invest a bit of money, to realize the savings. Your employee wellness benefit programs have to be well thought-out, valuable, perceived positively, and given far more than just lip service. The key is to leverage the power of perceived value in your employee benefit package. Wellness travel in general, and Vacation Wellness in particular, provide an inexpensive and extremely high-return employee retention tool because of their high perceived value. Employees have literally jumped up and down with excitement at Vacation Wellness rollouts – certainly a compelling phenomenon when you’re considering how to bolster your employee retention plans. You have a lot of choices among employee retention wellness programs. Wellness vacation programs, and wellness travel in general, are highly lucrative, low-cost additions to your employee benefit ... Read More

Why should you spend any time revamping your employee retention techniques now, in this economy? Aren’t employees just happy they have a job? Not really. Let me illustrate: Once, there was a man who lived in a small town, and drove a great distance every day to his work in a different town. The road was bumpy, narrow, steep, and riddled with potholes. Yet every day, the man drove his old car many miles to work. And his car broke down frequently, so he spent a great deal of money on repairs over the years, but he didn’t believe he could quite afford a newer, more reliable car. So over and over he drove. And the potholes would jar loose suspension parts, the steep hills would strain the engine, and over and over again his car would break down, requiring costly repairs. One day, the worst happened: his boss told him that due to difficult economic times, he would have to accept a reduction in his wages. He could no longer afford his car repairs. What was he to do? He couldn’t get to work, because he needed to repair his car. But he couldn’t miss work, because he would soon be fired from his job. How did he get in this situation? He didn’t think strategically. He should have invested in his transportation much earlier, before he reached a crisis point. Let me connect the dots. Your employees are like this man’s car. They’re tired, overworked, and in need of quality attention. You’ve asked a great deal of them, and the road has been difficult, steep, and bumpy. You’ve reduced their wages and benefits because you don’t feel you can afford them, but at the same time, you can’t afford to neglect your employees because they make money for your business. Your business relies on your employees to be smart, sharp, motivated, innovative, and loyal. You can’t afford to let them break down, or walk away, due to neglect. Voluntary employee turnover costs the average IT firm over $4M per year, and it costs three times an employee’s wages and benefits to replace her when she leaves. And the important paradox is that your talent is more valuable in a down economy than otherwise, not less. You need to work hard to keep your employees motivated and loyal. So businesses have a compelling reason to invest in their employee retention plans under all economic conditions. Here are five employee retention tips, drawn from various sources of best practices for employee retention: Take a hard look at your employee benefit package. Are you adding value? Have you asked your employees what they want? If you’ve asked for their input, have you delivered? Add low-cost, high-return extras, such as employee health and wellness programs, budget wellness vacation programs, flexible work schedules, and telecommute options. Start thinking like an economic buyer instead of a cash miser. You’re investing in the future of your workforce. Strategic workforce investment can have outlandishly positive results. Get educated on voluntary turnover’s enormous financial impact. Learn how to estimate your turnover costs, so that you can track your employee benefits retention performance over time, and maximize the return on your various employee retention plans and techniques. Understand that due to the incredible power of perceived value, your employee benefit package can have many times the retention power, dollar for dollar, as a salary raise. While all of that may sound like common sense, employee retention is no different than the man with the old, broken-down car: a little bit of attention and investment goes a long way toward avoiding a crisis situation. Now is the perfect time to readdress your strategic employee retention plan, before your workforce leaves in droves as the economy bounces ... Read More

Life is gloriously circular. Lessons of childhood repeat. And teaching the lessons of childhood to our kids can be a tremendously powerful reminder of inexorable truths and insoluble tenets. To wit: picture a brow furrowed in fear, tears of worry and dread trickling down a sour visage, and quivering mouth forming those crippling words: “I can’t.” Endemic. Instant. Tragic. Who teaches us to imprison ourselves? It’s as if we’re programmed to sidestep disappointment by limiting our expectations. We fit ourselves into smaller and smaller spaces to avoid the pain of growth. “Yes, baby, you can. You can do…” I trail off in an expectant pause. “ANYTHING” comes the somewhat muted but visibly invigorated refrain. You can do anything. Our shared mantra. Mine and my four-year-old daughter’s. You can pick up the pieces. You can take back your life and your body. You can set off in an entirely different direction. You can live with purpose and confidence while you smile genuinely at the self-imprisoned hecklers lining your path. You can even learn to ride this bicycle without training wheels. If you just let yourself. If you choose courage. If you recognize that all the pressure is self-imposed, and that worry is always worse than the worst. And if you decide that failure is a necessary precursor to success, your ally in your quest for a better life, your chief educator, your best friend, your cheering companion on the road to the life you know you were designed to lead, it is possible to create a life that is drastically, unrecognizably different – better – than your life today. Something happens to us when we “grow up.” We lose connection with the people who push us, encourage us, exhort us, cajole us into getting beyond our fears. We lose contact with the support structure that teaches us to confront fear. And we stop confronting fear. So we stop growing. Worse, we become addicted to the path of least resistance, which keeps us subdued and sedated. We have invented entire systems whose sole purpose is to isolate and eliminate risks of all sorts. Unfortunately, risk is essential to reward. By grand design, the two are inextricably linked. Wellness and productivity are based on personal risk-taking. Confronting fear of failure, fear of criticism, fear of standing out, fear of being wrong, or worse, fear of being successful (crazy as it sounds, the last one plagues most of us) always precedes innovation, productivity, and positive life changes. So how do we return to that place where a loving hand and gentle voice encouraged us to bravely place both feet upon the pedals and set out training-wheel free? Here are five suggestions: 1. Find someone in your life who will push you. Don’t place your spouse or significant other in this position. There can be no politics involved. You’re asking for bare-knuckled honesty and patient but relentless engagement. 2. Find someone in your life who will journey with you toward your goals. If you have a fitness goal, find a workout partner or class. If you want to stop smoking, find a friend who’s doing the same. You’re accountable to each other, of course, but more importantly, you’re experiencing the ups and downs together. Misery needs company. IMPORTANT: this cannot be the same person you chose in #1. 3. Find an expert in the field of your chosen endeavor. Enlist their support. Ask for their advice and mentorship. Pay for it if it’s appropriate to do so. Life is difficult enough; you might as well find someone who has already blazed a trail in the direction you need to go, and learn from their experience. Don’t be afraid that you’ll lose out on the richness of the experience – the hills will be just as high for you. More importantly, you’re five times likelier to fail without expert advice. 4. Put your goal in writing. You’ve heard it dozens of times before, yet fewer than 5% of people ever write down a goal. As Yogi Berra says, “if you don’t know where you’re going, it’s awful tough to get there.” 5. Follow Churchill’s advice: “Never, ever, ever, ever quit.” Period. More important than what you gain by achievement is what you become through it. But any accomplishment of meaning will begin with a white-knuckled grip on the handlebars. What story will you tell ... Read More

More than in any other employment program arena, perceived value plays an important role in the degree of positive impact your employee benefits program has on employee productivity and retention. It’s a phenomenon you can leverage to generate goodwill and improve motivation among your staff, with just a little effort. There’s no shortage of benefit offerings. Pet insurance, supplemental insurance, flexible work hours, telecommute options, and Vacation Wellness™ programs are just a sampling of the wide array of available employee benefit options. While only a few employee benefits can be directly tied to a tangible business benefit (such as retention and healthcare cost reduction), all of your benefits become a strategic investment when you take the time to learn which programs have a high perceived value among your staff. Some answers are obvious – discount monster truck tickets might not resonate at a maternity business – but you’ll never know which benefits are important to your employees unless you ask, and you shouldn’t ask until you’re ready to take action on the answers you get. If you’re ready to reevaluate your strategic investment in employee benefits, you might as well get the most bang for your buck. Here’s an example. A business owner recently rolled out our Vacation Wellness™ program to his employees, with a dramatic response (his staff literally cheered and jumped up and down). This is a terrific example of the benefit’s perceived value among employees far exceeding its cost. If he had told his employees that he was giving them a raise in the amount that the Vacation Wellness™ program cost, his employees would have either rioted or laughed him off the stage – the raise would have seemed so small as to be insulting. But because he had taken the time to discover what was important to his staff, he was able to generate enormous goodwill with a very simple and inexpensive benefit program. Employee benefits don’t have to be difficult, complicated, or expensive. They just have to be valuable to your staff. A little extra effort can go a long way toward making employee benefits a strategic retention and productivity investment. We’ve explored the impact of benefits on turnover in a recent white paper – take a look here. [contact-form 2 “Contact form ... Read More

The Corporate Wellness Advisor reports that only 45% of US workers feel satisfied with their jobs, down from 52% in 2005 and 61% in 1987. With the highest unemployment rates in a half-century, you’d think the numbers would be going in the opposite direction – people should just be happy they have a job, right? But it’s not quite that simple. Feeling thankful for employment is not the same thing as feeling satisfied with your work environment and feeling engaged in your work. It’s worthwhile for employers and business owners to regularly assess their work climate, because employee state of mind, happiness, health, and engagement have an enormous impact on productivity and healthcare costs. Since every business is a people business, it pays to improve employee morale and motivation. Creating a positive work climate that encourages just one $75K/year employee to remain loyal to your company for ten years can save you over $675K in turnover costs. It pays big dividends to have an effective employee retention strategy. How do you improve retention? Businesses are wise to regularly explore two avenues to ensure their work environment isn’t squashing people or profits. First, do regular non-attribution work climate surveys to uncover latent personality or work environment difficulties that might be causing stress or lowering productivity. Owners often discover problems they’d otherwise never hear about by giving employees the chance to answer an anonymous survey. People are reluctant to talk to the boss about workplace difficulties, so it’s likely you won’t hear about them until they’re already a problem – unless you ask for anonymous feedback. Second, be sure your benefits package is up to date and competitive. Everyone offers a solid insurance and EAP plan; you need to go a step beyond in today’s environment to keep your employment costs down while keeping employee motivation high. Consider a vacation wellness plan to help keep your employees healthy, happy, loyal, and low-stress. Your staff and your bottom line will both thank you for the effort! We’ve recently done some in-depth analysis of the factors that influence employee turnover, and its cost to businesses. Learn what you might be spending to replace departing employees, and discover how you might influence them to stay on your team – we’ve summarized our research in a short but informative white paper. We hope you find the information useful and ... Read More

Our recent retention focus has revealed some interesting statistics. For instance, a 100-employee project management firm with $98K average annual employee salary and benefits package outlay, and a 14% annual turnover rate – the industry average – spends over $4.1 million every year replacing employees lost to voluntary turnover. As we’ve mentioned in other posts, your benefits package plays a monstrous role in the retention equation. Implementing an employee wellness program attractive enough to convince just 1/5 of the employees who would otherwise have left the firm to remain on staff would save the company in this example around $800K the first year. That’s an impressive first-year cost reduction, but the savings actually increase in the out-years. Keeping one employee happy enough to remain on staff for ten years can circumvent more than five turnover cycles. As the Sasha Corporation notes, the value of keeping an employee is far greater than the cost of replacing one. This revelation has helped business owners take a more long-term view of their benefits package. See some of their results here. We’ve also compiled our research into a white paper. It’s a quick read, but the numbers might surprise you. Take a look ... Read More

They wouldn’t be alone. Salary.com reports that while most employers think around 1/3 of their staff might be searching on the sly for another job, the truth is that close to 2/3 of your workforce is probably looking for a better offer. When you consider that replacing key staff can cost upwards of 300% of their positoin’s annual salary and benefits total, employee retention becomes a much higher priority. In fact, US businesses experience 14.7% voluntary turnover every year. Depending on your industry, average employee salary, and time to replace key staff, turnover can add up to 46% more to your total employment costs every year. What factors influence turnover? Numerous intangibles, of course, such as the level of draconian tyranny your managers use to enforce company policies, but there’s quite a bit the average company can do to mitigate voluntary turnover – even (especially!) during a recession. A terrific place to start is with your employee wellness package. We discovered that if employees don’t find your wellness program attractive, they’re four times more likely to leave your company for greener pastures. A Vacation Wellness™ program is an easy way to spice up your employee wellness offering. At a recent Vacation Wellness™ benefit program rollout, employees were literally jumping up and down with excitement over their new vacation benefit program. The business owner was still fielding thankful comments from staff members two weeks later. That’s certainly a warm wellness reception. Having excited employees is worth far more than just a warm feeling. Right Management and the World Economic Forum report that 64% of employees who take a favorable view of your wellness offering plan to remain with your company for more than five years. Depending on your market segment, keeping a single $75K/year employee on staff for five years can save two replacement cycles, and up to $600K in replacement costs. For a single employee. Those figures mean that few employee initiatives can save you as much money over time as a focused retention strategy. It’s best to keep your own pastures green. We’ve just released the results of our employee retention study review in a white paper. You might be surprised what you learn about how much employee turnover is costing your business. Take a look ... Read More

It may seem strange to think about retention during a period of double-digit unemployment. If you chose to ignore retention, you wouldn’t be alone – 43% of business owners guess at their employee turnover costs, and 13% don’t consider employee turnover expenses at all. The Institute for Corporate Productivity reports that while only 20% of businesses have a retention strategy in place, 46% of businesses claim concern about retention to a “high” or “very high” extent. While few businesses pay as careful attention to retention as they should, employee turnover turns out to be among the highest employment costs most businesses bear. We’ve done quite a bit of research to support our recent white paper, and discovered that the average 100-person professional firm can save over $850K per year by reducing employee turnover just 20%. The counterintuitive upshot is that recessions don’t make your key talent less valuable; instead, the economic downturn means your business relies more heavily on your most important staff members. And if they’re high quality leaders in your field, beware: truly talented employees are worth more during a recession. It’s important that you’re positioned properly to keep your talent on your team. So how do you attract and keep high-caliber staff? A recent Salary.com survey reveals that your benefits package is of equal importance as your base compensation plan to employee retention. 20% of employees say benefits are the most important retention consideration, and 20% report salary as the most important factor. Other key factors include workplace environment and job stress. Happily, employees perceive our Vacation Wellness™ program as a high-value benefit, and enjoy the reduced stress and lower healthcare expenses the program offers. It might be a business solution worth ... Read More