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Increasing Employee Retention or Reducing Attrition?

© 2008, by Barry Sweeny

The most frequent methods for increasing employee retention have been to provide orientation and some level of mentoring support and guidance, at least for novice educators if not all new employees. This author's reviews of such programs find that they do increase retention to some extent, perhaps as much as 15-20%. However, this "bump" is not as significant as is often desired, nor as high as a more comprehensive induction program can provide. A comprehensive induction approach can attain retention rates as high as 96% over five years. The induction program at Texas A & M at Corpus Christi is a great example of this significant level of retention, but there are many more such examples all over the nation. In fact, it could be argued that one would not even want a higher retention rate, for surely, not everyone who tries teaching should be kept as a teacher.

What a comprehensive induction program should provide will be discussed later in this article. Our goal at this point is to affirm the value of an effective program approach. Clearly, even when a district can not offer the top salary, it can still effectively compete for and keep the quality educators by treating them professionally and by expecting and supporting effective employee performance. After all, people become educators to make a difference in students' lives.

The more districts can demonstrate to candidates and new employees that the district can help them achieve their original goal for becoming an educator, the more effectively districts can recruit and retain those employees. However, such a statement is easier said then done. Never-the-less, there is now extensive documentation of the power of effective mentoring within a comprehensive induction program to increase teacher success and, thereby, to improve the ability of a district to attract and retain the best new employees. Simply stated, induction program success breeds teacher success, which breeds district success in attracting and retaining successful teachers, which increases the quality of teaching.

Funding New Employee Retention Efforts

The most typical way to provide a new employee support program has been a "common sense" approach, which is founded on two assumptions:

• Since we all were once beginning educators, we all know what is needed to better support our recent new hires.
• Every one accepts the value of increased support for new, and especially novice employees.

Each of these assumptions contain some element of truth of course. But experience has clearly demonstrated that each of these assumptions contain unexamined fatal flaws. Providing a program based on our own initial year experience ignores the dramatic changes in our profession which have occurred since that time and the fact that mentors, our very best teachers, do not feel they have all the answers as teachers themselves. This flaw has led to the wide spread discovery that "Not every good teacher makes a good mentor". It has also led to induction programs which have "eased the stress" for new educators and helped a bit with their retention, but not helped us to improve the quality of teaching or success of students.It's clear now that designing and providing mentoring and induction based primarily on our own professional experience and common snse is inadequate today.

Finding funding for "common sense" induction and mentoring incentives has been a challenge too. While induction programs seem so logical to educators, sadly, such programs are often perceived as less than essential by the non educators who are decision makers at the local school board, state or provincial policy, and legislative levels. This has led to inadequately supported and abbreviated programs which do not have the capacity to provide the desired results. It has also led to stronger programs while grant funding endures, but which cannot be sustained when the grant funds run out or become unavailable. Clearly, the case for common sense approaches to new employee support are not as compelling nor as valued as what we need.

A more recent approach has been to focus efforts to generate funding for new educator support programs on increasing employee retention. This ias an attempt to demonstrate one of the major benefits of effective induction, which is increased numbers of effective educators working with students. Many studies in every kind of demographic and geographic setting have shown the ability of effective induction programs to increase retention. Some examples of the impact of induction on educator retention include:

• Texas A & M University, Corpus Christi, whose program has delivered a 96% retention rate after five years.
• The New Teacher Center at the University of California, Santa Clara, which is direced by Ellen Moire and has reported about 95% retention after 3 years.
• Others include the La Fource, Louisiana School District's Beginning Teacher Program, The Beginning Teacher Support Program at Governors State University in Illinois, and the Washoe County School District Induction Program at Reno Nevada.

As powerful a demonstration of "success" as these programs are for educators, many non educators still question the value of induction and even increased retention. This may be because the intended benefits of retention, improved teaching and student learning, are less concrete, although no educator doubts they occur. The bigger challenge has been that it ’s harder to demonstrate these benefits have occurred as a result of effective mentoring and induction.

• End-of career attrition, largely a result of retirement , which is harder to control
• Early career attrition which are typically a result of controlable factors

Reducing End-of Career Attrition
Until recently, district efforts have most often been to offer early retirement packages as incentives to cause attrition of the most senior staff members. The primary motivation has been to reduce the cost of these high salary employees by replacing them with less expensive younger educators. Now that the problems are the quality of teaching and having enough good teachers to staff our classrooms, the challenge has reversed to "how can we keep people who might want to retire?".

The starting point for addressing these concerns is the development of a profile of the age of current employees and extrapolating the numbers and dates for their eligibility for retirement. This is an important set of information to know, since you want to target them with retention efforts, or at least, you must be able to replace them. Improving the retention numbers at the end of the career requires a different set of strategies than does increasing retention early in the career. Efforts should primarily focus on increased employee earnings that will increase a pension later, affirmation of the value of elder staff contributions, and on providing new, envigorating leadership responsibilities. Among other possibilities, appointment as a mentor, serving in mentoring roles, and receiving a mentoring stipend fit these needs very well. However, it is incumbant that your district "sell" involvement in mentoring as offering senior staff these benefits to make sure they are obvious to your target audience.

Reducing Early Career Attrition
You also need to know how many employees are leaving before retirement age. This is a more critical factor to quantify as it is one over which your district can assert considerable influence. Specifically, the district needs to determine the total rate of employee attrition less the number retiring. The goals are to define and target a specific group of people and to do so with a different set of strategies than the end-of-career people need. Since attrition is the "flip side" of retention, the retnetion strategies we have discussed are still relevant to address attrition. What is different here is the need to know the cost of attrition. These data can be quite powerful, for they are annually repeating costs which are assumed to be necessary. These costs are so accepted as to have become almost invisble expensens.

Your strategy should have three parts:

• Find out how bad early career staff attrition really is.
• Determine the total district and per employee cost of attrition.
• Present in a compelling way, a comparison of the cost of attrition and the cost of effective induction and mentoring support for new employees.

If done carefully, you should be able to show that the district is spending MORE on attrition than the cost of a quality induction and mentoring program. In other words, it costs more to do it wrong than it does to do it right! This argument is all the more compelling because your district does not need new money to do an effective job of supporting and keeping new staff. Induction will reduce the amount of money the district is already spending and losing each year to attrition! Induction more than pays for itself every year. Further, while that cost savings alone is enough a reason to do a quality induction program, there are many other reasons as well, like the improving teaching and learning, saving supervisory time, and increasing school improvement momentum, all of which are significant nonfinancial benefits in their own right.

Here are some things to consider that demonstrate clear financial costs. Your basic need is to know the cost to the district when a new employee leaves teaching or is not rehired. What you want to identify are your district's costs for factors such as:

• New employee recruitment, especially for recruiting the kind of diverse staff a great district wants
• Administrative time and costs for trips to job fairs & colleges, and time taken for screening applications, interviewing, and meetings to make decisions
• Newspaper, journal, internet and other ads
• Technology specialist time for placing recruitment and job info on the district web site
• Brochure and flyer printing, folding, addressing, and mailing
• Personnel staff time processing applications, answering phones, dealing with certifications, and other inquiries, etc.
• Cost of background checks
• New employee initial orientation
• New employee training during the first year or two? (both that just for new employees and all other district training)
• Reduced student learning during the year or two that a new employee is learning to teach
• Reduced student learning when a first or second year employee leaves with what they have learned from trial and error, and a different new employee is hired without that hard won experience and starts over at the beginning again.
• Loss of instructional continuity when new employees leave or are not rehired because they are not as successful as required
• Administrator time spent orienting, evaluating, coaching, developing, and supporting new employees who are not retained