Tanglewood’s focus on reducing turnover makes sense for three key reasons:
It is costly to us.
It is affecting the performance of our organization.
It may become increasingly difficult for us to manage as the availability of skilled employee’s decreases in the future.

Tanglewood is struggling to come up with a generous plan to retain employees. Based off the responses given during the exit interviews, our company can come up with a way to produce a better retention plan. Immediate changes need to be taken with, but not limited to:
• Implementing a better manager training program and not doing away with it
• Brainstorming a creative plan to retain managers
• Employee satisfaction survey should be done every six months instead of every year (given the high retention rate, otherwise I would stick with a yearly survey)
• The four major topics within the survey should contain more than one or two questions in regards to each topic
• Exit interview questions should be semi-structured

We need to take the time to invest in our staff through career paths, opportunities, training and hiring which will save the company in the end by keeping the best employees. By having a positive work environment, where employees feel appreciated, our employees would feel encouraged to work harder, benefiting both themselves and the company.
RED FLAGS
Superior Alternatives: Better Salary elsewhere, Company Competitors, Additional benefits other than 401K

Dissatisfaction with Organization direction: If we do not make it clear what we are trying to achieve as a company, how can our employees help better themselves or the company?
Major Life events: Employees moving, serious family illnesses, special leave time

What should be important to Tanglewood?
As important as it is to understand the reasons that drive our employees to leave this company, it is just as important to understand why valuable employees stay. Employees become embedded in their jobs and their communities. They develop a web of connections and relationships, both on and off the job. Leaving a job would require severing or rearranging their social and value groups. The more rooted employees are in our company, the more likely they are to stay. We can increase the stay of our employee’s by providing mentors, nurturing team cohesiveness, encouraging employee referrals and providing clear socialization and communication about the company’s values and culture, as well as financial incentives based on tenure or unique incentives that may not be common elsewhere.
As a staffing director, I believe we are not only doing a disservice to our employees but to our company. How are we going to compete with our competition if they are acquiring our staff due to better perks?

Effective Retention Initiatives
1. Salary adjustments to keep up with competition
2. Flexible work schedules to better balance work/life based off employee feedback
3. Friendly competition among employees based on merit and in-store accomplishments
4. Ever evolving career development/ training
5. Cleary thought out benefits that will attract
6. High, non-comparative standards—demanding standards that don’t force rankings
We conduct employee satisfaction surveys and give exit interviews but none of that will mean anything to us or our current employees if we do not make a change. Starting off on the right foot in the beginning with hiring the right individuals along with providing more than adequate rewards; we will begin to see a decline in employee turnover.