Optimal Ways to Control Staff Turnover in a Company - Essay Example

 Turnover in a company is inevitable.  It’s not a question of if but when.  Studies of employees located within Silicon Valley were conducted to explore the reasons why staff members leave their position and what companies are doing to retain quality employees as reported by the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal. Employee retention is a major concern of businesses but retaining quality staff is a more important issue.

 Ten years ago, Silicon Valley experienced just a 10 percent turnover per year.  By the year 2000, one employee in seven changed jobs.  Today, the average person will have had nine different employers by age 30.  The challenge is how to slow the mass departure of talent that has been trained at great expense to the company.  A recent Harvard Business Review article suggests, “If managing employees in the past was akin to tending a dam that keeps a reservoir in place, then today it is more like managing a river.

 The object is not to prevent water from flowing out, but how to control the direction and speed” (Ruhmann, 2000).   With its high-tech industrial base, the Silicon Valley area of California is widely acknowledged as being notorious for elevated levels of employee turnover.  Job-hopping was common during the tech boom times.  Even in the coastal community of Santa Cruz, twenty-five miles southwest of Silicon Valley, the workforce is not nearly as stable as many employers would prefer.

 This area often loses well-trained employees to higher-paying counterparts in Silicon Valley.  “We always feel that pull,” says Dinah Phillips, Santa Cruz County spokeswoman (Pittman, 2002).  Following the boom of prosperity in the late 1980s and early 1990s, poor economic conditions have prevailed causing fewer employees to change jobs.  This has also caused companies to allocate less capital to effectively train their employees and put more towards security which has become a larger concern.

According to the study, employees listed five major reasons as to why they abandoned their previous job.  They include “career growth and development; earnings potential with the company; fairness of salary increases; timeliness of increases; and company loyalty to employees” (Pittman, 2002).