Launching Hourly Worker Retention Series

Thursday, 02. 7. 2008  –  Category: All Blog Posts, Employee Retention, Workforce Development

When we met with our Board of Advisors on December 4th to formulate our research and publication agenda for the coming year, we determined that the most urgent human resource challenge for many organizations today is the retention of successful employees.  Relatively little has been written, however, on the topic of hourly employee retention – where voluntary turnover can exceed 100% per year in some organizations.  Given that our mission addresses the entire workforce, we decided to focus our efforts in the coming year on helping organizations with large hourly populations meet this challenge.

Over the next twelve months or so, we’ll be publishing a series of articles aimed at helping organizations to formulate and execute a retention strategy for their hourly workforce.   We’ve just published the first article in this series entitled “Building a Retention Strategy for Hourly Workers”.  Consider this article an introduction to the retention topic, with a deeper exploration of related topics to follow over the coming months.

In addition, we’ll be conducting original field research on how best practices in onboarding can help control early attrition of newly hired hourly workers.   Our goal with this research is to identify hourly onboarding practices that help organizations to retain workers beyond their first couple of paychecks – where the first wave of departures often occurs.  Stay tuned for more on this project as it unfolds.

Last, but certainly not least, my firstborn turns 20 today.  Happy birthday, Liz!  You are a wonder.

Tags: hourly onboarding, hourly retention