The BASK names five employee retention concepts and best practices. Know the list, and know that the keyed action in a scenario is usually diagnosis before intervention.
The five practices
Realistic job previews, suggestion mechanisms, identifying causes of turnover, predictive attrition analysis, personalized onboarding.
- Realistic job previews: setting accurate expectations before hire. They come first on the BASK's list even though the preview happens during hiring.
- Suggestion mechanisms: a route for current employees to raise ideas and concerns.
- Identifying causes of turnover: retrospective. It explains why past separations occurred.
- Predictive attrition analysis: forward-looking. A model estimating who is likely to resign next is this one, not "identifying causes".
- Personalized onboarding: the one practice with a counterpart in the Talent Acquisition onboarding list, where personalization is a named approach. It links the two functional areas.
Distractor lists: cost per hire, time to fill, applicant-to-interview-to-offer ratio and candidate yield is the talent acquisition metrics list. Job enrichment, job enlargement, job rotation and work simplification is the job-design list, which sits in this same functional area but under a different heading. Lead, lag, match and lead-lag is the Total Rewards compensation-philosophy list.
Matching practice to problem
- Employees say they have no route to raise ideas: suggestion mechanisms. Predictive analysis measures risk but creates no channel; onboarding and previews do nothing for people already employed.
- A model forecasting resignations two quarters out: predictive attrition analysis.
The reasoning the SJI rewards
Turnover rises in one department and leadership wants an immediate retention bonus. The first step is to identify the causes of turnover before selecting an intervention, because an intervention chosen before the cause is known may not address it.
- Launching the bonus spends money on an unverified hypothesis.
- Matching competitor pay assumes pay is the driver without evidence.
- Replacing the manager acts on an assumption about supervision the scenario does not support.
Address the cause, not the symptom, and act on what you can verify.