CASE STUDY

AMMARA ASHFAQ
Question 1
Without doing any further research than what you learned in this
chapter, what other steps would you suggest Google take to improve
employee retention?
Here are 10 steps you can take to implement an employee retention strategy that meets your
employees' individual needs and strengthens your practice.

1. Hire Right. According to many estimates, at least 50 percent of employee turnover can
be attributed to poor hiring decisions. Reduce the odds of having to "undo" a bad choice
later by hiring staff who not only have the requisite skills and experience, but also a
personality and mindset that fits with your practice's culture and values.
2. Listen up. The hiring process presents a valuable opportunity to learn what motivates
(and de-motivates) candidates. Once you've made your hiring decision, note the
successful candidate's reward "hot buttons" and use that information to help tailor
retention activities. The same holds true for existing employees: listen and observe each
one carefully – or even ask them directly – if you're not sure what floats their boat.
3. Offer competitive compensation. Know the market values of each staff position and
target new hires to the norm for the position and your community. Should you need
assistance establishing compensation benchmarks, professional associations, including
many Medical Group Management Association local and state chapters, as well as the
law firm The Health Care Group, produce annual staff salary surveys.
4. Take a close look at the work environment. Do your employees have work spaces
appropriate to their activities? Do they have the tools and resources they need? Are
systems, policies and procedures a help or a hindrance? Streamline and simplify
wherever possible to make it easy for your staff to do their jobs well and reduce
employee stress.
5. Set and communicate realistic expectations. Top performers often assume heavy
workloads, which is great – until it leads to burnout. These employees may be reluctant to
turn down requests to add "just one more thing" to their already-overflowing plates, so
you need to take the initiative. Periodically review staff assignments with your employees
and determine what, if anything, can come off their plates; sometimes tasks remain on job
descriptions long after they've lost their utility. Update the descriptions and review them
with each employee to ensure you have a common understanding of baseline
performance expectations.
6. Provide opportunities for growth. In addition to streamlining assignments, work with
each employee to set quarterly and annual objectives that are specific, measurable,
achievable, realistic and time-bound; remember the components via the acronym
"SMART". These objectives should go beyond the basic activities of the employee's job
description to move the practice forward and provide opportunities for professional
development, cited by many employees to reduce their propensity to leave.
7. Foster relationships of trust. Practices with low turnover rates have good physician-
staff (not just physician-nurse) relationships. They socialize, have potlucks at lunch, hold
BBQs behind the office, etc. In short, they have fun together – and in the process,
develop camaraderie and interdependence that strengthen the practice.
 8. Proactively manage performance. Meet individually with each employee on an annual
basis (and quarterly for new ones) – job description and objectives in hand – to review
progress, praise good performance and discuss any lingering performance issues (critical
performance issues should of course be dealt with as soon as they arise). If you've built
relationships of trust, the payoff will come in these conversations, which ideally should
be a candid sharing of information, rather than managerial monologues. Acting promptly
to correct performance issues is particularly important, as top performers pay attention to
how you deal with those they perceive as not "pulling their weight" and may leave a
practice in which underperformance is tolerated.
9. Reward good work. Rewards may be tangible – like cash bonuses or other financial
rewards – or intangible, like public recognition for individual or team achievements. As
not all employees value the same type of recognition, personalize rewards based on what
you know about each employee in order for them to be effective motivators. Surprise
rewards are particularly powerful, because employees never know when to expect them:
Try a movie ticket as a reward for a long day of work, a gift certificate for a bed and
breakfast after months of overtime or a flower on everyone's desk after a computer
conversion.

Balance it out. Offering flexibility in scheduling or providing services that meet employees'
personal needs can reduce stress and support work/life balance. You might negotiate an
employee rate with a local day care provider, make arrangements for a dry cleaner to stop by
the office for pick-ups and drop-offs or contract with a car wash service or chair masseuse to
visit the office monthly. Caring about your employees means they will care about you

Question # 2

Was there any information in previous chapters of this book that would
help to illustrate others steps Google’s took to improve retention?

Keeping in Touch
One reason CEOs of small businesses must remain vigilant against high turnover is that it
impacts them more than their counterparts at larger companies. Argote notes that, "smaller
companies are hurt by employee departures more [than larger companies] usually because a lot
of their knowledge hasn't been formalized or embedded in processes and routines." But where
small businesses fall down when it comes to institutional memory, they have a distinct advantage
of giving employees greater access to the boss.

Murphy recommends holding monthly check-ins with every employee to see what is motivating
them and demotivating them. This can give a CEO foresight into potential morale problems
much sooner than he or she would ordinarily catch them. "Instead of getting two weeks notice
when somebody is quitting, if you're doing these conversations regularly, you should get a
 minimum of four months notice if you've got a real problem with an employee, and that's just
light- years better," he says.

While Hoffman doesn't meet with every employee individually, he conducts frequent all hands
meetings to give employees a role in setting company goals and to stay in touch with what their
needs are. Still, especially as your company grows, details of the employee experience will
escape your attention, which is what the exit interview is for. It's the last line of defense against
a bolting employee and it can sometimes yield surprising insights and reveal fixable problems.

For example, when Hoffman's head of accounting quit, everything was going amicably. She gave
plenty of advance notice, she helped train her replacement, it was only at the exit interview that
Hoffman realized why she was leaving. It had nothing to do with the company, she had simply
grown tired of accounting and needed a new challenge. That was all it took and two months later,
the employee returned to the company in a different department and she is now its head buyer.

Attracting the Right Candidates

Over the years, Engage has implemented a number of policies that serve the dual purpose of
attracting potential employees and keeping current ones passionate and committed. Here are a
handful of examples:
 Engage gives hiring priority to people who live near the office because they believe that long
commutes are detrimental to work-life balance.

 Instead of a traditional vacation policy, the company lets employees take time off from a leave
bank, in which they can accumulate as many as 60 days off to use as they see fit. This policy has
helped with employee retention, particularly by making it easier for female employees starting
families to take time off and ultimately return to work.

 During the hiring process, Engage administers the DISC Personality test, which charts the four
characteristics, drive, influence, steadiness, and compliance, to build personality profiles for new
hires. All employees' test results are public knowledge, which Hoffman feels helps people
understand one another and get along.

 By setting quarterly goals with rewards attached, such as iPods for the whole team or a trip to a
nice restaurant, Engage can encourage employees beyond the competitive, and potentially
divisive realm of salary bonuses. The group nature of these rewards is important, says Hoffman,
because "somebody who is not motivated by getting an iPod knows that other people in his or
her group are and doesn't want to let them down."
In addition to spurring employees to productivity, this team structure can make them happier in
the workplace. Argote says, "there's evidence that being in cohesive work groups where
members like each other reduces turnover."
Question # 3
Use other Internet sources, including Google.com, to finalize an answer to the question,
what other steps should Google take to improve employee retention?
By providing meaningful and enriching job designs for key employees. Discuss with key
employees their future opportunities within the organization, so that they know there the future
of their work. All high performance environments share a serious devotion to results.

They’re competitive, stressful workplaces where mediocrity is disdained and failure intolerable.
Moreover, individuals who thrive in these environments tend to be “A” players with intense
ambition. And they are always on the lookout for greener pastures.

1. Hire retainable employees

The pressure’s on from Day One in a high performance environment. While some thrive under
pressure, others will falter. Elissa Tucker, Human Capital Management Knowledge Specialist at
APQC, says the first thing leading organizations are doing to curtail this type of turnover is a
focus on “hiring retainable employees.”
While there are some obvious indicators of a candidates’ ability to deliver consistently (e.g. three
to five years’ tenure in a similar role), there are other signals that can provide insight in your
sourcing and screening.”

Tucker suggests working with your managers and top performers to identify what backgrounds,
skills or personality characteristics your retainable employees have in common.

2. Plan careers, don’t fill roles

It’s easy to focus on the near-term when managing people in a high performance environment.
You bring in “A” players with the expectation that they’ll succeed in the role for which you’ve
hired them — and unrealistically assume they will stay in that role forever. Your top performers
are thinking about their career, and you should be too.

“Best-practice organizations work to help individuals plan to stay with the organization — to
plan their careers with the organization,” says Tucker. The key is to guide your employees in
mapping out how they can attain their career goals within your company.

For example: If a top salesperson sees her current role as a rung in the ladder up to senior
management, outline some long-term goals that will get her there. If another is just in it for the
money, keep him in challenging roles that will reward him for working hard and allow him to
play hard.

3. Make retention personal

Every employee is motivated by different things, and retention strategies thus need to be tailored
down to the individual level.

Steve Miranda, Managing Director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies,
Cornell University ILR School, says, “The key phrase is specialized efforts.” Successful
organizations, he says, don’t view retention initiatives as ‘one size fits all.’ Instead, they’re
making retention strategies personal. How? By simply asking, “What motivates you?”
You may be surprised to find that monetary incentives are low on the list of responses you get.
These days, “A” players are more concerned with challenging work, personal and professional
growth opportunities, work/life balance, and workplace flexibility.

4. Get to the heart of underperformance

Let’s face it: Underperformance happens, but you don’t want to lose employees who were
previously strong performers. If you notice a drop in performance, Miranda advises against
writing them off without first getting to the heart of the issue.

In my conversation with Miranda, we broke underperformance down into a few root causes:

 Skill and competency issues often come up when someone’s been promoted into a
role they weren’t quite ready for. Fortunately these can be addressed with coaching
and training–and usually for a fraction of the cost of replacing an employee.
 Behavioral issues are usually more difficult. “If it’s a behavior issue,” Miranda says
“identify the source of the issue to get an idea of whether it’s something worth
investing the time and effort in.”
 Personal issues are a leading cause of burnout among top performers. Things
come up (divorce, health issues, mortgage issues, etc.), and can distract employees
from their work and affect their ability to deliver. In these cases, a little support and
flexibility will go a long way toward cultivating loyalty.
You may uncover trends in underperformance that you can use to your benefit. Are employees
bored with the work? Are people burning out after six months? This kind of feedback is vital to
the refined people process that supports success and curtails turnover.