Turnover and Presenteeism

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The Total View Newsletter

January 21, 2009

Edited and Written by Ira S. Wolfe

Published by Success Performance Solutions. Major Sponsor,

2008 Best Places to Work In Pennsylvania

What's Inside this issue of The TotalView:

1. Cheating on Pre-Employment Tests

2. Perfect Labor Storm Warnings

3. Create Effective Interview Guides in Minutes

4. Attitude virus causes rise in presenteesim

5. Quotes from the Hire Authorities

Geeks, Geezers and Googlization - Schedule Your Keynote or Workshop today.

1. Reduction in Turnover Saves Thousands of Dollars

Greater Louisville Impact Study

By definition, high impact businesses are high growth businesses. A high degree of change is necessary in high impact businesses to respond to market pressures: demand for improved delivery of services, global influences, rapid changes in technologies and increased competitiveness. But a traditional employment model doesn't allow businesses to be agile enough to adapt quickly to changing business needs and conditions.

Existing employees often lack the skill sets and competencies needed for new business, and training for new skills isn't always an effective option in a fast-paced environment. High labor costs as a percentage of the cost of doing business makes it imperative that businesses maximize their return on investment in people. Added to these challenges, employers are losing their ability to respond to business issues as experienced employees retire and take with them the institutional wisdom that they bring to the conference table.

Not only are many high impact businesses caught in this "war for talent," but turnover rates combined with rising retirement rates foretell future difficulties in having the talent on-hand to meet growing and changing business conditions.

Read more about how just for a one percent decrease in turnover, every company could realize annual savings between $400,000 and $4 million depending upon the size of the company. Even for a company with as few as 64 employees, savings averages approximately $8,000 by reducing employee turnover by 1 percentage point.

2. Perfect Labor Storm Warnings

Subscribe to the Perfect Labor Storm 2.0 blog and receive skilled worker shortage updates like this:

By age 21 years of age, it is estimated that the average Millennial (Generation Y) child will have:

Spent 10,000 hours playing video games

Sent 200,000 emails

Spent 20,000 hours watching TV

Spent 10,000 hours on their cell phone

Spent under 5,000 hours reading

Learn more about workforce trends. Purchase the NEW Perfect Labor Storm 2.0 books (soft and hard cover versions) at PerfectLaborStorm.com.

New Perfect Labor Storm videos added. Watch now!

3. Create Effective Interiew Guides in Minutes

The Automated Online Interview. Screen candidates over the web. Candidates provide written responses to customized interview questions online --ideal for a pre-interview screening or first interview.

SELECTPro(R) is web-based program that helps interviewers design and organize behavior-based selection interview in minutes. It also allows the interviewer to easily create a custom Interview Guide: a document (or script) that the interviewer uses to conduct a behavioral job interview.

Take a Tour and Sign Up for a Free Interview Question Guide Membership.

4. Attitude Virus causes rise in presenteeism

The Attitude Virus seems to be everywhere. We know that there are lots of layoffs, morale is down, and productivity is suffering. We see the symptoms every day as rudeness, poor service, lack of motivation, and increased job stress. Managers feel the pain of the long-term effects of the Attitude Virus with employee turnover, lost productivity, customer complaints, increased worker and consumer liability, and a drain on profits. But the greatest damage the virus has is that it leaves the workplace vulnerable to other attacks and opens the back door for healthy workers to escape.

Employees, managers, and owners with bad attitudes seem to spend the better part of each day figuring out ways to avoid work, complaining about the work they have, or redoing work. These behaviors have recently been reported in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine as a workplace condition called presenteeism-showing up for work but not being very productive. It's like absenteeism ... but worse. With presenteeism, employees are still showing up and still receiving a full paycheck. But they likely are disrupting and demoralizing the other workers and not doing the jobs they are being paid to do.

The cost of this presenteeism in the U.S. alone is in the hundreds of billions of dollars and results in over 2.5 billion lost workdays per year.

5. Quotes from Hire Authorities

"Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein."

H. Jackson Brown

Permission is granted to consultants, managers, business owners and HR professionals to reproduce content from this newsletter for your internal publications, or to distribute copies to your workforce, on the condition that you reproduce the credits and contact information as follows: "Reprinted with permission from Ira S Wolfe and Success Performance Solutions. Copyright 2008 Ira S Wolfe." We also hope you will forward the newsletter in its entirety and recommend to others that they subscribe.