Get Real: Honest Job Previews Can Cut Employee Turnover

企业内部居高不下的员工流动率是困扰很多HR人员的问题，因为这样非常不适宜建立稳定的企业工作环境，阅读完本文相信你会增加一个解决此问题的好方法。

Years ago, when Denver-area realtor Ed Flynn owned a Dairy Queen, he became so fed up with teen-worker turnover that he started interviewing job prospects with their parents present. That way, kids couldn't tell Flynn they weren't allowed to work late on a school night -- Mom and Dad had been present when that job detail was initially shared. Across the continental divide, Dr. Greg Stilwell of Durango, Colorado has started to invite prospective employees in to spend a day -- with pay -- watching his current employees manage the administrative side of his medical practice. It gives people a feel for the work they'll be doing and how they fit in with the rest of the office, explains Susie Stilwell, the doctor's wife and sometime CPA. In a small business, that's what makes or breaks the office, she adds. Dr. Stilwell calls his job-shadowing process a working interview, but some industrial psychologists might consider it a form of realistic job preview or RJP. Studies show that RJPs raise employee retention, which in turn cuts recruitment costs and productivity losses. Whether the truth about an opening is terrific, terrible, or merely ho-hum, honesty is the best policy for hiring employees who'll stay on the job. Labor Pains U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics on voluntary turnover show that during the time period of September 2003 to August 2004, about

20 percent of workers walked off the job. That's an overall average. For the period cited, only 13.70 percent of workers in durable-goods manufacturing quit, while 21.40 percent in professional and business services left employers, and 47.30 percent of those working in accommodation and food service positions tossed in the towel. Based on my personal experience, I'd say turnover is higher for small businesses, says Bill Boothby, a veteran of both corporate life and small-business ownership, and a counselor for the Small Business Administration's Senior Corp of Retired Executives in Denver. Boothby adds that loss of a skilled employee can have a much more dramatic impact for a 10-person firm than for one with 500 workers. At the same time, small businesses have a more difficult time replacing people, especially technical people, he says. You can't match yourself against the big guys, adds Enrique Garcia, another Denver SCORE counselor and semi-retired restaurant owner. Turnover is costly for any organization, and it's not just recruitment costs that add up. Peter Hom, professor of management at the W. P. Carey School of Business, has studied lost productivity incurred when social service workers left mental health agencies in Arizona and greenhorns stepped in. A newly hired behavioral technician won't be able to see as many clients as someone who is more proficient in the job, he says. He determined productivity losses for such personnel changes by calculating the lost revenue from reduced client-contact hours managed by the new hire. Still, Hom says turnover costs are difficult to get a handle on. Along with the obvious outlays, such as help-wanted ads, relocation expenses, training expenditures and other hard dollars spent, there are a host of hidden expenses, such as productivity lost to managers who must screen resumes and interview candidates, administration costs for processing separations and new hires, hits to customer service -- the list goes on and on. According to Hom, human resources experts estimate the cost of turnover to range between 93 percent and 200 percent of an exiting worker's annual salary. It all depends on the employee's skill level. This circumstance makes turnover all the more dire for small businesses. According to the SBA, small businesses employ 41 percent of high-technology workers -- scientists, engineers and the like -- and these small-business workers produce

13 times more patents per employee than people working for large patenting firms. Unfortunately, fieldwork recently conducted by Leadership IQ, a Washington, D.C.-based research and training company, found that 47 percent of high performers are actively looking for new jobs at any given time, and another 44 percent are passively looking, which might mean they're checking out monster.com or posting resumes online. Workers today have much more access to job-search resources than workers had

20 years ago, SCORE's Boothby says. If they're even the least bit disenchanted with a company, they have the ability to look for a job through online employment sites, he explains. Worse, they may be using the current employer's time and computer to do it. Such factors make employee retention especially urgent, which is one reason Hom joined forces with colleague Rodger W. Griffeth to produce a book entitled Retaining Valued Employees. In it, the team offers practical prescriptions for cutting turnover through proven methodologies. One is the realistic job preview. On average, RJPs boost job-retention rates by 8 percent, the research shows. Warts and all RJPs combat the very human human-resources error of sugarcoating a job description for prospective employees. Generally speaking, a new job is typically oversold to newcomers, creating inflated job expectations. Once they begin work, newcomers often find that their new job does not live up to their lofty expectations. As a result, they become disenchanted and leave, Hom and Griffeth write. That's where RJPs come in. The job previews should be designed to reveal a true picture of positions and companies -- not just the glorious parts but also the mundane, or even the undesirable. RJPs can be written documents, face-to-face presentations, or even online, click-through slideshows, which is how telecommunications giant BellSouth displays them. The delivery vehicle isn't necessarily as important as the realism and honesty conveyed. The purpose of an RJP: to avoid on-the-job reality shock for the new kid on the block. Large organizations create RJPs by gathering input from many employees. When you work with a big company, you do a lot of interviews and surveys to verify job descriptions, Hom says. Smaller firms might have to apply different methodology. Hom did find one way to recreate the many-faceted inputs that big companies are able to produce during job-description creation. He developed a generic RJP for the Arizona Society of CPAs by interviewing more than 100 accountants at nearly four dozen firms. Other smaller companies might also tap such professional association resources to see if they have similar data. Job shadowing is another way small companies could offer RJPs, Hom says. So is peer involvement in the interview process. By having a peer employee deliver the position details, companies can provide the opportunity for one person to candidly share information that might not make it into a written job description. Hom also points to expectation-lowering procedures or ELPs as a means of cutting job disillusionment. He cites one study in which a group of new hires was introduced to the notion of reality shock and unmet job expectations, then invited to remember how they experienced unmet employment expectations in the past and how they coped with the disappointment. That simple intervention proved beneficial, Hom says. In this study, only 3 percent of employees who'd been through the ELP had quit after six months on the job. Six percent of those hired using RJPs had left, and

22 percent of the control group had turned in their resignations. One thing to avoid in RJPs is being overly negative, Hom cautions. He points to an Army RJP that offered a very negative depiction of boot camp. They found it was