My best HR management idea: Simple changes reduce turnover rate

It can be tough to keep good workers on your staff. Here’s how one HR manager got more employees to stay on board.
The turnover rate at our company was too high.
Our recruitment program for young professionals was unsuccessful – retention was the problem. A competitive salary just wasn’t enough to keep them on staff. The real culprit was today’s changing workplace.
Our new employees wanted different things than their predecessors had. We needed to find out what those things were and make sure we were providing them.
Dug deeper
We started talking to newer employees to find out what they looked for in a company and what was important to them.
We also used exit interviews to ask these young workers who chose to leave the company why they were doing so.
Our findings: There were simple things we could change to keep the younger workers at our company.
Relaxing the atmosphere around the office was cheap and effective. We loosened up policies on lateness and the dress code and started hosting happy hours and activities. A flexible schedule was also high on the request list, and we began to provide that.
The small changes have made a big difference. Since we started, our turnover rate has dropped 60%.
(Kay Harris, HR manager, American Quarter Horse Association, Amarillo, TX)