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Workplace Factors That Affect Hiring and Retention 131 the larger group, otherwise people may become isolated and out-oftouch. Telework clearly represents new challenges for managers, but the benefits—especially in terms of work-life balance and retention— can be substantial. Flexible Work Schedules Flexible scheduling is another mechanism for helping employees achieve work-life balance. Flexible scheduling allows individual employees to work something other than the usual 9-to-5, 40-hour, 5-day week. This creates opportunities for people to work even as they accommodate the needs of young children, infirm relatives, and so forth. Many people favor flexible schedules.This is what the accounting and consulting firm Deloitte & Touche learned when it surveyed its professional staff—both men and women—in 1993. Eighty percent said that they wanted greater flexibility in where,how,and when they worked. The company responded the next year with programs for both flexible work arrangements and parental leave.By 2000,approximately nine hundred of the firm’s professional employees were enrolled in one or another of these programs.10 Did these programs help retain professional employees? Clearly so. Eighty percent of the individuals enlisted in the Deloitte & Touche programs reported that they would have left the firm if the programs had not been made available. If you figure the average replacement cost of 720 Deloitte & Touche professionals at 1.5 times annual salary (assumed here at $75,000), the savings to the firm are roughly $81 million. Here are some typical flex-schedule arrangements used in business today: • Reduced-time schedules. For example, an employee works from 10 to 5 in order to accommodate her need to drive her children to school in the morning. • Seasonal schedules. For example, a tax specialist works 60hour weeks from January through April to accommodate the 132 Hiring and Keeping the Best People tax-filing crunch, then works 30-hour weeks for the balance of the year. • For example, to accommodate his weekend acting vocation, a computer technician puts in 40 hours Monday through Thursday, leaving Fridays free for rehearsals. Compressed schedules. Flexible work schedules are appreciated by many employees. More important, they expand the pool of potential employees. If you define “who can work here” too narrowly—as 9-to-5, Monday through Friday—you automatically exclude many otherwise qualified people. Any hospital will confirm this. Desperate to recruit and retain licensed nurses, most hospitals have expanded their hiring pools through flexible scheduling. The first to do so differentiated themselves from rival institutions.You can too. But first make a business case for it. Women as a Special Case Everything said so far about the importance of work-life balance and its enabling mechanisms is doubled if you are having trouble hiring and retaining talented women. For reasons too numerous to discuss here, women still bear the brunt of raising and caring for young children and keeping the homestead running on an even keel—often by choice.As Felice N. Schwartz once observed, majority of women . . . are what I call career-and-family women; women who want to pursue serious careers while partic pating actively in the rearing of their children.”11 Traditional work schedules and the demands of business travel put these two goals in conflict. It’s nearly impossible to manage the household if both parents are “career primary.” And it’s still usually the woman who handles the home front and the job.This is why flex-schedules, telework, and similar programs are particularly appreciated by women. And since women represent half of the talent in the world, it makes good business sense to do what needs to be done to make their recruitment Workplace Factors That Affect Hiring and Retention 133 and retention as easy as possible. So, if you don’t have work-life programs at your company, ask yourself: • What is our turnover among women in key positions, and how does that compare with male turnover in the same positions? • In exit interviews, what have defecting female employees cited as their reasons for leaving? Are they moving to firms with work-life programs? • In our recruiting for those positions, what percentage of women versus men has rejected job offers we’ve made? Was work-life balance a factor in our offers being rejected? If the answers to these questions point to clear problems in hiring and retaining women, determine through research which—if any— work-life programs would neutralize those problems.Then calculate the cost/benefit relationship of these programs. Summing Up This chapter examined three “workplace factors” that can affect a company’s ability to attract, hire, and retain good people: Your company culture should be appealing to the types of employees you want most to attract and retain. Depending on the types of people you are looking for, you may need to alter your culture to be more formal or informal, relaxed or fast-paced. It should also be welcoming and as free as possible from the internal conflicts that sour well-intentioned people. • Company culture: • Employee burnout: Burnout is an important workplace factor to avoid. It can lead to lower job satisfaction, less commitment to the organization, and defections.And talented people won’t be eager to work for your company if it has a reputation as a meat grinder.Watch for the several warning signs of burnout and their root causes described in this chapter.You can avoid 134 Hiring and Keeping the Best People or mitigate burnout through proper staffing, being sure that people are adequately trained and prepared for their assignments, prioritizing the workload, periodic redeployment, and/or adding variety to employee assignments. • Work-life balance: Work-life balance is a core element of employee satisfaction, loyalty, and productivity. Find ways to help employees successfully manage their commitments at home and at work, and you will avoid many retention problems.And if your company develops a public reputation for providing work-life balance, its recruiters will have an edge over others in hiring good people.Telework and flexible work scheduling are the two of the most effective tools for providing work-life balance. Give them as much attention as you would other aspects of hiring and retention. 7 When All Else Fails Keeping Talented Employees, Even After They Leave Key Topics Covered in This Chapter • Using alumni relations and informal contacts to keep departed employees in your company’s orbit • • The benefits of rehiring former employees Using exit interviews to uncover the root causes of employee turnover O n e o f t h e r e a l i t i e s of market-wise retention is that you will never be able to keep all employees—particularly the most talented, who have the greatest mobility. People retire.They are “poached” by rival companies. More than a few entrepreneurial types go into business for themselves. Others simply find opportunities elsewhere that your company cannot match. Some organizations actually create employee turnover as a matter of policy. For example, CPA and law firms have “up-orout” traditions that result in 20 to 25 percent annual turnover in their professional ranks. Perhaps one in ten employees makes partner, but all the rest have to go. One major accounting firm, in fact, admits that at any given time half of its professionals have a year or less tenure with the company or are within one year of leaving. In the end, the struggle to retain good employees is a losing game. Either by death, retirement, or defection, everyone eventually leaves. The most you can hope for is to have some influence over who leaves and when. This chapter explains how you can minimize the damage caused by employee turnover—and even benefit from it—through attention to alumni relations and the rehiring of former employees. We also explore how exit interviews can be a source for insights into improving the attractiveness of your workplace. Keeping Valued People in Your Orbit If you’re like most managers, you hate losing a real contributor. First, there are those nagging personal questions: “Is there something When All Else Fails 137 TE AM FL Y wrong with me?” “Could I have done something to prevent this person’s defection?” Then come thoughts about the consequences: “This won’t improve my performance evaluation a bit.” “Why did she have to leave right in the middle of our key project? This will really throw a wrench into the works.” “How will we cover her work until we can bring someone else on board?” Finally, you think about what you must do to fill the empty slot—and what that will cost in time and money.Talking with HR about the job description. Posting the vacancy. Scanning dozens of résumés—almost all wide of the mark.Arranging for interviews, and approving thousands of dollars for travel expenses.Then getting the new person up to speed.And all the while you know you’ll be lucky to get someone as good as the person who left. Losing a good contributor is a big headache and produces nothing but negative thoughts and extra work. But don’t let those negative thoughts color your parting with the employee. In some cases you should not even use the word parting. Consider the hypothetical case of Stephen, a management consultant with Global Strategy Advisors, a full-service firm. As often happens with consultants and CPAs, Stephen was lured away from his job by a client company that he had advised on marketing strategy for the past four years.That company was seeking a top-drawer professional for its vacant Vice President of Marketing post. Stephen was a logical candidate for the job and was asked by the CEO to apply. Stephen knew the company, its competitors, its industry, and industry best practices. And the company knew Stephen. Its executives and marketing staff had observed his performance over several years, and they liked what they saw. Compared with Stephen, other applicants for the VP position were simply question marks with good résumés. No one could say with any confidence how these other applicants would perform or fit in, whereas everyone agreed that Stephen was sharp and fit in nicely. Stephen’s move to the client company appeared to be a loss to his consulting firm—but was it, really? Now that he was the marketing VP of a company that made regular use of consultants, Stephen was a potential customer with a sizable budget and the authority to hire outside marketing advice. If fortune favored his career, Stephen 138 Hiring and Keeping the Best People might rise to the CEO level, in which case he’d be hiring consultants in business strategy, mergers & acquisitions, marketing, IT, and other areas.And as a consulting veteran, he would be in a position to recommend different firms to both practitioners and M.B.A. graduates of his alma mater who might be seeking consulting careers. So if Global Strategy Advisors handled its relationship with Stephen sensibly, his defection might not be a loss after all. And if corporate life didn’t suit him, Stephen might even return to his old firm in three or four years—and with the operating experience that many consultants lack. This hypothetical story is not far-fetched in the field of public accounting and consulting. Leading firms in those industries now have regular “alumni” programs that: • keep track of former employees; • maintain up-to-date, password-protected directories of former employees to which alumni have access; • post job vacancies and recruiting information; • provide free access to the firm’s latest research; and • host events that bring alumni together with current employees. The whole point of these programs is to keep former employees within the company’s orbit, even after their official ties are severed. That’s good for business. It also makes the company more appealing to career-minded potential recruits who understand that joining the company makes them part of a larger network of business professionals. As Carl Stern, president and CEO of Boston Consulting Group, put it, “I want our people to feel that in joining BCG, they have joined a second family, and they remain part of that family for the rest of their lives.”1 What are you doing to maintain productive relationships with your valued former employees? Whether you have a formal alumni relations program or have used less formal links, keeping in touch with departed employees can lead to new business, market intelligence, and an occasional rehiring of good people who temporarily