Changing And Improving

Question 1

Situation:
The company I worked for was experiencing high attrition and was making ineffectual retention decisions based on anecdote rather than data, without much emphasis on key employees. I had…

Answer 1

…developed an innovative product to address this and I needed to drive through the adoption of the product to change the business’ workplace culture concerning retention, from anecdote based to data led.

Question 2

I engaged with senior decision makers in various business units by organizing a “Road Show”, where I set up a series of presentations where I demonstrated the framework.
I organized it…

Answer 2

… as such so that each business leader could consider how this enables change and helps develop their talent retention strategy.
Also so that I could provide them space to give ideas specific to their business area.

Question 3

I clearly articulated how the framework would add value to the business by setting out the annual cost of attrition in their respective business area…

Answer 3

…and how the adoption of the attrition risk framework could enable them to develop a strategy to reduce these costs.

Question 4

Given how different the tool was compared to the current state of operations, I anticipated concerns around the impact of such a tool on staff morale or behavior and I assured the leaders I had considered a full range…

Answer 4

… of risks and developed mitigations inline with industry best practice and academic research.
I gave legal and privacy assurances by communicating that in the planning phase of this project, our Legal and Privacy team had full oversight of our plans and signed off on the project.

Question 5

• I encouraged the leaders in each session to raise any concerns and challenges by explicitly stating at the start of the presentation that this was an open forum for discussion the whole way through and that there were “no stupid questions”.
• This was well received and invitees felt comfortable asking me challenging questions and pitching suggestions throughout the presentation.
• I identified common themes from the the Road Show, the main on being:
  - “How can I use this product in practice?”.
  Taking on board this feedback,

Answer 5

… I lead a cross functional team to develop a strategy with the risk scores at the center. This set out clear guidelines:
- What the framework is.
- How to proactively use the risk scores to target retention efforts.
- What levers could be pulled to aid retention i.e. salary increase/secondment/stretch project.
- Privacy guidelines.

After thorough consultation with SME’s and business partners, I reengaged the stakeholders and presented the new framework and retention strategy, and they agreed to adopt it.

Question 6

To ensure that the product was meeting user requirements now in deployment, I engaged with business partners to discuss how the product was being used in practice….

Answer 6

…However, their feedback was that it was not helping in prioritizing action for key employee groups.
To mitigate this, I redesigned the dashboard, using specific data visualizations, so that the risk profiles of the key employee groups were clearly visible and actionable for the end user.

Question 7

Result:
The employee risk model framework has been adopted into the retention strategy in a key business areas.

Answer 7

As a result of my efforts, the workplace culture and practice concerning retention shifted from a reactive and anecdotal practice, to a sound, data centric, cross-functional strategy the business could trust.