| A company hired us to conduct research with
their employees to improve retention. These employees had a very specialized job that
required a great deal of training. The company had calculated that, for every employee who
left the company, they had to spend $80,000 to hire and train a new employee. Obviously,
they had a great incentive to improve retention. They were wondering if they should be
searching for a certain type of employee who would be more likely to stay with the
company. And they felt that they couldn’t pay employees any more than they were
currently paying, so they told us they didn’t want to hear that answer. We asked the client, "what if we found that, if you hired only
red-headed employees, your retention problem would disappear, because those employees will
stay no matter what? Would you change your hiring policies?" The answer was no,
because there were not enough of these employees in the market even before we limited the
field to red-heads. So we learned that our research would have to find ways to increase
employee satisfaction. We explained this to the client, and told them that compensation
was very likely to come up, but that we would also explore any other ways in which
employee satisfaction could be increased.
Of course, compensation came up very early in the
research. It turned out that these employees were paid less than they could get elsewhere,
and this is in a market where, if they quit today, they could have a new job tomorrow! But
we also learned that compensation could be structured differently (for example, paying for
certain types of overtime, for which employees currently weren’t getting paid extra,
and which they felt was unfair). And we uncovered various non-monetary changes that could
be made which would make the employees feel better about their jobs and about their
employer.
Our report covered all of these findings, and pointed out
that, if the client had the opportunity to spend $10,000 in order to save $80,000, that
might be a wise move to make!
More anecdotes (click on the quote to read
the anecdote):
"We don’t know what we have to say
to sway them. How do we turn prospects into customers?"
An unusual focus group technique yields results
"That sounds like it came from the
Iraqi Ministry of Information!"
Dealing with difficult respondents
"But
if the software goes down, my whole business would be paralyzed."
Category knowledge helps obtain additional insights
"I
want to know what people think of our website – both how it works and also the
overall concept."
We came up with a hybrid methodology for more effective website
research |