HR Final Project Essays

Submitted By rimbrkr
Words: 3161
Pages: 13

Staying Competitive to Retain Tenured Employees
DeVry University

Professor Courtney Anderson
HR 587 Managing Organizational Change

Executive Summary
The focus of this research paper is to diagnose the efforts taken by a Fortune 500 financial institution in its efforts to retain its employees and how the focus on senior or tenured employees over newer employees affected moral. This paper will focus on the financial side of the Citi Corporation. According to its website, Citi is the leading global financial services company, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 140 countries. Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management.
The research will focus on the efforts taken by Citifinancial Auto to retain employees and changes the organization implemented to address the needs of its tenured employees. The organization faced several issues while implementing changes to retain employees. Many of the negative feedback came from new employees that felt tenured employees were receiving too much special attention at the expense of the newer employees.
The research paper will examine the changes implemented by Citifinancial Auto-Houston office, the challenges in addressing the needs of all employees, changes in vacation time, incentive pay, flex scheduling, working from home options and other retention programs. The paper will consider other retention strategies and compare results. Interviews with tenured employees and newer employees will be used to depict the effects of change in an organization.
The enormity of an organization like Citi provides a good example of what a large corporation is willing to do to retain its employees. The changes that they implement can be studied by smaller organizations to determine if this is of value for them as well. In the past, it was common to believe that an organization loyalty to an employee for doing a good job was to reward them by simply stating well you get to keep you job. In these competitive times, however, employers look for and treat top producers differently. It is no longer a simple matter of firing employees that are not happy, but instead trying to find ways to keep those employees and working with individuals.
Retaining your employees is absolutely critical to your business’s success. While the tendency is to focus on production, operation costs and market share, retention programs easily get pushed to the wayside.
The statistics related to employee retention are staggering: According to a recent survey conducted by Chart Your Course International, it costs $4,000-$7,000 to replace an hourly worker and up to $40,000 to replace a midlevel, salaried employee. Other costs associated with employee turnover include lost customers, lost business and damaged morale, not to mention the hard costs of time spent screening, verifying credentials and references, interviewing, hiring, and training the new employee just to get back to where you started.
To top it off, 60 percent of the workforce is considering leaving their current job for another as the economy improves. Despite these known costs and loss of productivity, 54 percent of businesses still do nothing to focus on employee retention or reduce their high employee turnover. A satisfied workforce reflects a positive attitude about their jobs, you and the organization, and provides exceptional service to customers. Studies from the Gallup organization show that employees who have an above-average attitude toward their work will generate 38 percent higher customer satisfaction scores, 22 percent higher productivity, and 27 percent higher profits for their companies.
http://www.carlsbad.org/EditionDetail.aspx?aid=251