Employee retention is a top 3 priority for 77% of HR leaders and 62% of senior leaders going into 2023. This is no surprise as the Great Resignation persists and another period of economic uncertainty looms.
But while retention is top of mind , many leaders admit their employee retention strategies aren’t very effective . Most say their organization’s approach is at the intermediate or beginner level.
If you’re not taking time to strategically address retention and turnover, you’re leaving a lot on the line. The good news is that a lot of unwanted turnover is predictable and preventable.
These employee retention case studies will give you hope. You’ll learn how these Quantum Workplace customers have optimized their employee listening strategies for employee retention. And how they’ve leveraged our employee success platform to uncover insights, build better workplaces, and retain their best talent.
Briggs Industrial Solutions began partnering with Quantum Workplace on their engagement survey in 2020, wrapping up their third engagement survey in 2022.
By taking feedback from the surveys and diving deep into targeted areas of the company via focus groups, Briggs has uncovered solutions and strategies to move the needle on areas that are impacting engagement and retention.
In 2021, Briggs was struggling to retain their technicians, who make up the majority of the company’s workforce. These technicians spend their days out in the field, traveling to customers and repairing equipment. They are critical to the success of the company. But most were leaving the company before they hit 3-5 years of tenure.
The leadership team at Briggs knew they needed to take a good look at what might be causing disengagement and turnover. Their engagement survey shed light on specific and actionable challenges to overcome:
With the feedback received from engagement surveys, Briggs continued to evaluate benefits, compensation, and team structure across the board. They also worked to understand why techs were not feeling recognized for their contributions.
Leaders uncovered multiple areas to review. There was frustration around pay gaps between tenured and incoming employees. Work assignments weren’t always aligned with technicians’ strengths and skill level. And there weren’t clear guidelines on increased compensation for new skills and training assistance.
As a result, Briggs implemented profit sharing in 2022, in addition to ESOP. They created a career path for technicians, providing clarity on what they needed to do to grow, develop, and advance in their career. And finally, they provided more internal classroom training, rather than solely relying on senior technicians.
The changes the Briggs leadership team made led to impressive results on their next engagement survey:
“Our industry is very competitive. It’s tough to hire skilled technicians,” says Perez, HR Manager at Briggs. “But we’re now hearing that Briggs is becoming the employer of choice in our industry. Our techs are talking and we’re seeing a ton of referrals now.”
When it comes to acting on survey results, Perez has this advice:
“Don’t try to boil the ocean,” she says. “You’re going to get a ton of feedback and a lot of things you want to act on–but you can’t do it all at once. You need to focus on what matters most. On what you can give your full attention to.”
As one of the largest privately held companies in the Midwest, this Twin Cities manufacturer has experienced exponential growth over the last several decades.
Coinciding with that growth, the company has evolved its employee listening strategy to capture and understand the employee experience. They partner with Quantum Workplace to implement engagement, pulse, and lifecycle surveys.
With data from these surveys, the company can understand macro and micro turnover trends. They can also see how turnover affects different employee demographics and pinpoint reasons for turnover within specific groups. Exit survey analytics have helped the company uncover areas of misalignment and opportunity, including:
Survey analytics have also helped shed light on why critical roles and skill sets have left the company, and to uncover trends in areas of the business experiencing higher turnover.
“The labor market is really tight right now, and we get a lot of great intel from the surveys to help us improve the employee experience and understand why people might be leaving,” said the company’s Organization Effectiveness Leader. “In an industry where turnover is pretty high right now, it’s important for us to have this intel in order to stay competitive.”
HR leaders at Meritrust Credit Union were focused on retention and turnover in 2022. They wanted to take a deeper dive into the reasons employees leave–and why they stay. Partnering with the People Insights Team at Quantum Workplace, they were able to uncover key information that shed light on just how critical company culture is to their retention strategy.
When asked to rate “it would take a lot to get me to leave this organization,” Meritrust followed up with a logic-based response based on how employees answered the question.
Meritrust asked every employee a variation of the question and then turned the responses into a custom survey demographic. What did they find? The primary reasons people stay at Meritrust were:
This proved that culture and career growth are imperative for retention and engagement–something leaders at Meritrust had been trying to improve all along.
A Fortune 500 insurance company, Mutual of Omaha was founded on a simple but powerful principle: to help people in their time of need and protect those they love the most.
In recent years, the insurance and financial services industries have become increasingly competitive for talent. Mutual of Omaha was having a hard time recruiting for technology roles—and was seeing high turnover within the first two years of employee tenure.
The company knew that having the right insights would help them understand and troubleshoot turnover effectively—so they turned to Quantum Workplace’s employee engagement platform.
Mutual of Omaha utilized a broad range of employee surveys to capture feedback at various stages of the employee journey. In addition to leveraging an annual engagement survey, Mutual of Omaha also launches regular pulse surveys to capture critical feedback on important topics.
A strategic employee listening strategy has empowered Mutual of Omaha to gain clarity around what is driving people to stay, what is driving them to leave, and what leaders can do to improve retention and engagement. The company has seen measurable improvements:
Sammons Financial Group (SFG) is heavily focused on establishing a “workforce of the future” and best-in-class workplace culture. The company feels both are necessary to retain top talent in a competitive market. To support its retention and talent management efforts, SFG uses employee listening tools from Quantum Workplace.
Initially, SFG’s survey implementations were infrequent, happening only every 2-3 years. Years later, they had a big question:
“What are we actually doing to understand employee voice?”
The company realized employee voices needed to be captured more frequently to achieve a more accurate, timely view. After shortening their engagement survey cadence to 18 months, SFG’s employee engagement efforts started gaining momentum. The company saw an increase in engagement and a stronger organizational commitment to action. The progress led to leadership buying into an annual survey.
With a regular cadence of employee listening, SFG gains a true year-over-year understanding of employee voices—and can design annual commitments around this timing to better align with opportunities uncovered in the survey data.
Prior to moving to an annual survey cadence, one of the challenges SFG faced was understanding how to best utilize their data. Now, SFG can equip organizational leaders with the data they need, on a more frequent basis, and understand where to act. They have the potential to activate real, meaningful change when it comes to engagement and retention.
With the right intel, insights, and a roadmap for change, you can build a culture that draws in and retains your best talent. Quantum Workplace offers employee retention solutions to help keep your top talent engaged and on the path to success—making them more likely to stay.
Get feedback that moves you forward. See what’s driving (and hindering) engagement to keep your top talent engaged and committed to your organization. Our employee survey tools are expert-backed and easy to use, so you can:
Employees want clarity, support, recognition, growth, and coaching. Your managers need tools to help them deliver on all of this. Think of our integrated performance management tools as engagement and retention remedies. They’re meant to create the kind of employee experience that employees crave—while also driving results. They’ll help you:
Take the guesswork out of understanding turnover with our Intelligence Dashboard. Turn data into insights and insights into action with our CEO-ready dashboards. You can:
Learn How to Keep Your Best Talent by approaching retention with intention in this eBook.
Published December 9, 2022 | Written By Kristin Ryba
