Reducing Turnover and Increasing Customer Satisfaction

A national financial service company has demonstrated a steady pattern of growth and profit over the years and is well regarded by shareholders, customers and staff. This has been achieved this by, amongst other things, paying attention to their workforce and workplace. Gilbert Acton Ltd. recently assisted them through a recent initiative to enhance employee psychological and physical health.

Recognizing the importance of employee psychological, as well as the physical, health, our client engaged in a comprehensive risk management process to determine the presence and significance of any workplace factors that may be impacting the functioning of their workers and work teams. This initially involved a survey, completed by staff, and an audit, completed by the manager for one of their branch offices. The results of the assessment were shared with staff and focus groups were held to dig deeper to understand the findings and come up with some solutions. The area that was identified by the assessment as worthy of attention was ‘psychological job fit’, in other words the extent to which there is a work environment where there is a good fit between employees’ interpersonal and emotional competencies, their job skills and their current position.

The risk analysis report identified several possible strategies to address this issue. The staff discussions resulted in several additional answers and three solutions were implemented:

• Current job descriptions were reviewed and, where needed, revised to accurately reflect the people skills and psychological requirements of the position
• Orientation of new staff was modified to ensure that recruits had, or could learn, the psychological skills necessary for their job (particularly in areas with frequent customer contact)
• Existing employees were given the opportunity to spend time ‘job shadowing’ some of their colleagues in other areas in the company in order to more fully understand how their work fit into the larger organization process and outcome

These solutions were implemented along with a detailed evaluation plan to determine their effectiveness. Six months later, on the basis of a brief follow-up survey and feedback from staff meetings, employees reported higher job satisfaction and engagement. The impact of this was reflected in reduced turnover and higher ratings of customer satisfaction.

Consultants from Gilbert Acton Ltd. worked with this company at each step of the assessment, implementation, and evaluation process and will be working with them to carry out a similar process with additional branches.

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