Worker attrition is one of the costliest problems afflicting most service businesses and customer-facing business units. Among rank-and-file workers in retail stores and call centers, more than half of companies face voluntary attrition rates in excess of 67% per year, and these rates are increasing! Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show that younger workers, from ages 20 to 34, stay with their employers for significantly shorter periods than even a few years ago.
High employee turnover rates put enormous pressure on businesses. For one thing, it costs about 15% to 20% of a rank-and-file worker’s annual pay to hire a replacement. And this is in addition to on-boarding and training newly hired workers, just to bring them up to speed. But not only is high employee attrition economically costly, it also hinders morale and undermines employee engagement, and this ultimately damages the quality of the customer experience, as well.
So how do you improve retention among customer-facing workers? If you Google “retail employee attrition” or “contact center attrition” you’ll get a laundry list of suggested ideas. Improve the culture. Hire smarter. Improve training. Set goals and track metrics. Measure the quality, not just the cost, of customer service. Give employees the chance to work outside their disciplines. Create career paths. Foster feedback sessions. Conduct exit interviews.
This is all good advice, and certainly worth pursuing. But there is one reliably dependable retention booster that an increasing number of firms are latching onto, and it doesn’t seem to make these advice lists:
Give job applicants and newly hired employees a more realistic idea of just how difficult, tedious, and trying their jobs will actually be, once they sign on.
If you want to keep your rank-and-file customer-contact people longer, if you want to improve employee engagement and ramp up the quality of the customer experience as well, then one of the best courses of action you can take is simply to paint a more realistic picture of how tough the customer-contact job is likely to be, from the very beginning.
In their book Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, Chip and Dan Heath report on how a number of companies have been able to improve their employee retention by being more brutally honest upfront with respect to the demands of the job. According to the Heaths, a large body of research has shown conclusively that a “realistic job preview” (RJP) can significantly reduce the likelihood that a new hire will leave prematurely. In one case, for instance, involving a call center that had been hiring roughly 5,400 people per year, after beginning to provide applicants with RJPs the number of new hires required plunged more than 10% within the first 12 months, generating a cumulative savings of more than a $1.5 million.
At my own parent company, TeleTech, we’ve administered RJPs as a routine hiring procedure when staffing our contact centers for years now, and with good results, especially when these RJPs are coupled with realistic work simulations during the job application process.
And RJPs have been shown to be effective not just with call-center agents, but with other rank-and-file jobs ranging from nurses, life-insurance agents, bank tellers, and hotel desk clerks to grocery baggers and even customs inspectors. One analysis of more than 40 independently conducted studies showed that the practice consistently improves employee retention rates.
There are two reasons for this – one obvious, but one not so obvious. The obvious reason worker retention improves when RJPs are used, of course, is that whenever an RJP inordinately worries a potential applicant about the job, that applicant is less likely to try to continue with the application in the first place. So while such brutal honesty might increase a company’s cost-per-applicant, it dramatically improves the retention likelihood of those applicants who do persist, lowering the overall number of applicants required in the long run.
The less obvious reason, however, has to do with something that one researcher called the “vaccination effect.” Simply by giving job applicants a “small dose of organizational reality” prior to their starting work, they are less likely to be taken aback when they first come face to face with a difficult situation or an irate customer.
Expectations do matter, not just with your customers, but with your employees too. So if you want more loyalty from your rank-and-file workers, one way to have it is to start by ensuring that their going-in expectations are as realistic as possible.
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