By: Andrew Harris, Sylas Linnemann, Muse Asefa, Gerardo Quiroz Nava, Tony Tareski

Introduction:

You have been working as a cashier for your local grocery store for a year now. You have no problems with your job, your coworkers are fine, your quarterly demands are met, and you are at work for the eight-hour shift five days of the week. Yet somehow,  you still cannot stand going to work. You ask yourself, “why am I frustrated with my work environment? I like all my coworkers.” When in this situation, one needs to consider the larger picture. Have you ever stopped and taken the time to analyze how your manager handles certain conflicts or new ideas? How does your manager work with you and your coworkers to maintain progression and continuous improvement? The way any manager or supervisor handles any type of situation can lead to either strong employee retention or poor employee retention. 

Within businesses, employee satisfaction is a large part of making a business successful. We want to understand why companies have great and poor employee retention, and if there is a correlation between company hierarchy. We believe there can be a large disconnect between the overhead, managers, and the people underneath them, possibly through poor communication and employee satisfaction. Is there a leadership style that creates successful retention? How are managers and leaders within the company creating disconnect and turnover? These are questions we plan to answer and understand. This matters now because with more advancements occurring within businesses, there is more growth and need of employee loyalty. As a company sees growth, one needs to understand and adapt to the environment to create a better work environment and a more stable employee retention.

Real-World Applications:

We start off with a case study done by Jodi Kanter and David Streitfeld about Amazon. The authors strive to unearth some big ideas that Amazon is keen on working to achieve in a very bruising workplace. The authors bring forward the good and the bad of Amazon’s internal management practices and how they play into the lives of Amazon workers in mainly a harsh manner. The authors wrote about how blunt and painful feedback is from managers to their employees through multiple interviews with current and previous workers. I found that Amazon offers no pretense that catering to employees is a priority. Many former and current employees say work comes before family which points to a clear indication of no satisfaction for many employees. In other words, managers or supervisors demand maximum effort day in and day out. This leads to employees beginning to burn themselves out and leave Amazon after a short time.

Amazon’s management style seems to lean towards the mover and shaker style of management, which means managers push their employees over their head into an unrealistic state. Pushing your employees to the absolute limit is not good for morale and can lead to stress and exhaustion. To improve this style of management, leaders must adjust workload and make the set goals more achievable and realistic so employees can gain more satisfaction and motivation towards their work. This article is critical for our topic because it shines a light on how certain management and leadership practices can be detrimental to employee satisfaction and motivation. This article gives a good basis of comparison as to what management practices are wanted in the workforce and what practices are not wanted. In the case of Amazon’s style of management, a new practice should possibly be studied and compared to the current system in order to increase employee retention.

We now shift gears from Amazon to the hospitality industry where Laurina Yam and Michael Raybould dive into how job embeddedness contributes to employee retention, specifically in the hospitality industry (jobs in hotels, casinos, restaurants, theme parks, etc.). A negative aspect of this industry is that it holds high turnover rates and low retention of skilled and unskilled employees. This issue is crucial to companies because it can lead to a decrease in overall company performance, lower customer satisfaction, and inconsistent service quality. The reason for such turnover and low retention rate is due to the job embeddedness which employees lack in the industry. This ties in ideas of organizational behavior because job embeddedness and employee engagement are what lead to a more positive business structure. If the employees do not identify with the company nor feel that the culture there encourages them to apply higher quality of work, then it is more likely for them to seek other more fulfilling jobs.

Another area of certain businesses struggling with employee retention is hospitals. Authors Burr, Stichler, and Poeltler explain how hospitals are able to improve their employee retention rate by creating a mentoring program specifically for their nurses. Upon research, they found out that over 50% of nurses left their jobs in the first year and hospitals wanted a way to attract and retain more nurses. At Sharp Mary Birch Hospital, they developed and sustained a mentoring program for nurses, which at the end helped with improving employee retention and the organizational culture such as the shared attitudes, values, and goals. Not only did implementing a mentoring program benefit the nurses but they realized it benefited the entire company as well.

Improvement:

In a text written by Roger Herman, he discusses workforce stability, bouncing back and forth between appropriate managing strategies to continuously have engagement and committed employees. Research shows continuous improvement motivates people to stay with an employer, and that employee retention specialists concentrate on training and coaching to improve retention skills of leaders, managers, supervisors, and employees at all levels of an organization. Many employers hire people to evaluate a manager in the workplace. They then understand what the environment is like and how to improve the observed environment. A key role of keeping a high retention rate is always adding communication and intertwining company culture and philosophy with the employees. As long as a manager works with his employees improving such traits, along with maintaining employee satisfaction from within, the employee will understand or remember why they selected the company they work for. It is important to always improve manager and employee relations.

Conclusion:

Although there can be many reasons as to why businesses can experience poor employee retention, we feel that the main points highlighted in our research is proper training and a manager’s ability to develop effective communication skills, and employee satisfaction. Not only do these strategies improve employee retention, but overall employee performance. Constant training is crucial in the performance of an employee, and with the ever-changing world of business, managers must train employees accordingly and not leave them behind to struggle. Along with training, a manager’s way of communication with employees is vital in employee retention. Giving clear instructions and constructive feedback will allow the employee to understand what is needed without a sense of feeling down. This will lead employees to higher motivation and satisfaction since they will be able to continuously improve on their work, instead of being stressed and exhausted due to always feeling pushed and behind in their work. Overall, improvement of the manager to employee relations through training, communication, and satisfaction is quintessential to improved employee retention.

References 

Agrusa, J., & Lema, J. (2007). An Examination of Mississippi Gulf Coast Casino Management Styles with Implications for Employee Turnover. Retrieved from http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=7&sid=4d04e47b-ec3e-4ee9-b8eb-4d2fe1d9cc68%40pdc-v-sessmgr06&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=bth&AN=24390982.

Burr, S., Stichler, J. F., & Poeltler, D. (2011, June 14). Establishing a Mentoring Program. Retrieved from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1751-486X.2011.01636.x

Herman, R. E. (2005). HR managers as employee-retention specialists. Employment Relations Today, 32(2), 1–7. doi: 10.1002/ert.20058 http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=6&sid=18 2c098-cb9d-4d5f-96c9-bea4a13620c4%40sessionmgr4006

Kanter, J., & Streitfeld, D. (2015, August 15). Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace. Retrieved from http://www.cabrillo.edu/~cclose/docs/Case Study 3 Fa15Aristotle.pdf

Mengjun. C. (2014). The Effect of Training on Employee Retention. Retrieved from https://www.atlantis-press.com/proceedings/gecss-14/11009

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Samuel, M. O., & Chipunza, C. (1970, January 1). [PDF] Employee retention and turnover: Using motivational variables as a panacea: Semantic Scholar. Retrieved from https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Employee-retention-and-turnover:-Using-motivational-Samuel-Chipunza/a4614b5d5f29ebd4b2d14cbc8656c345345698e2

Tanwar, K., & Prasad, A. (n.d.). Exploring the Relationship between Employer Branding and Employee Retention – Karnica Tanwar, Asha Prasad, 2016. Retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0972150916631214

Yam, L., & Raybould, M. (2011, January 1). Employee retention: Job Embeddedness in the Hospitality Industry. Retrieved from https://pure.bond.edu.au/ws/files/27740630/employee_retention.pdf