Abstract:

Excessive employee turnover, either voluntary or involuntary, can be an often unseen but major expense for organizations. Turnovers lead to loss of talents and productivity, additional cost of recruitment and training, and could be an indicator of other organizational issues related to employee engagement, compensation, work climate, etc [1][2]. Even if there is awareness of high turnover, often there is little understanding and definition of the causes. The subject of employee retention and separations is a widely researched topic, yet many organizations struggle to identify causes and deploy effective retention strategies. A case study was conducted in an organization as a concluding component of the researcher’s graduate degree at a land grant University in Texas. The aim of this case study is to analyze retention problems within a field-based engineering team utilizing established methods to identify and classify turnover causes. A mixed-method is used, both quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed for the purpose of the study, including employee data and indices retrieved from the business system, surveys like Organizational Health Index (OHI) surveys and Employee Engagement Surveys collected in a three-year span; interviews with organizational upper management and leadership team were also conducted. Through financial calculations and root cause analysis, the findings presented substantial hidden costs due to turnover that the organization was not explicitly aware of. This resulted in the creation of an overarching organizational tool that established a management methodology to directly mitigate turnover root causes. Besides its value of potential financial impact to the organization in the center of this study, this case study is also a perfect demonstration of how a university Capstone project applied classroom learning to an industry-focused issue.

Keywords:

Organizational issues, case study, university-industry collaboration, turnover, retention.