Summary
Employee retention survey - Includes related articles - Cover Story
Results of a survey conducted by Financial Executive magazine and Watson Wyatt Worldwide revealed employee retention practices of financial departments. Findings showed that 70% of the respondents have a yearly turnover rate of less than 10% while 7.1% boasted of zero turnover, a relatively low turnover rate. Top reasons why people leave from the departments are, in descending order, greater opportunities elsewhere, salary and compensation issues, stress and workload, lack of promotion opportunities and external situations. When pre-screening applicants for their retention potential, the departments look at residence, family matters and personal stability. To find out why employees leave or stay, managers usually rely on exit interviews to find out why some decide to leave. Managers also use different tools to entice employees to stay, including free skiing, employee discounts and attractive benefits packages.See the full content of this document
Extract
Holding your own.
Once you've got good people on board, what do you have to do to make them stay?
During a merger, Bruce Abbott, senior vice president at Bank of America, tried to induce a four-person technology support team at the target bank to move to San Francisco to join the finance department of the new parent. None would make a commitment, and Abbott couldn't understand why. When he realized each really enjoyed working with the others and preferred to be treated as part of a unit, rather than as an individual, he sat down with the group and negotiated a four-way employment package. The quartet wound up sharing relocation expenses, moving vans and even temporary housing. And, Abbott says, "They're a great team." The lesson to be learned, he thinks, is, to retain good people, "You've got to get out of your head and into employees' heads to help them make decisions." In the five years he's been CFO of Vinyl Plastics in Fond du Lac, Wisc., Richard Blamey has seen one member of the finance department leave the company: a young man who decided to pursue an MBA and bec...See the full content of this document
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