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Staff Retention & Succession Planning

Focus areas

Staff retention and succession planning refers to the efforts, plans, strategies, policies, and procedures in which a VR agency engages to retain current staff and to ensure qualified personnel have been trained to fill leadership positions resulting from attrition.

Strategies

  • Assess your agency’s overall environmental factors, current practices, and culture.
    • Look at what is and is not within your control for impact. Determine approaches for handling both.
    • Develop a multi-step- multi-year approach based on your findings.
  • Conduct employee engagement surveys regularly and develop actions based on staff feedback.
  • Conduct stay interviews.
    • The Power of Stay Interviews and Engagement and Retention (Finnegan, 2nd ed. 2017): This book provides research to support engagement and stay interviews. It also describes how to use and conduct the stay interviews in conjunction with engagement surveys.
      • Question 1. What do you look forward to each day when you come to work?
      • Question 2. What are you learning here, and what do you want to learn?
      • Question 3. Why do you stay here?
      • Question 4. When was the last time you thought about leaving us, and what prompted it?
      • Question 5. What can I do to make your job better for you?
    • Example-Wisconsin-Combined Stay Interview Report Results
    • Example- Wisconsin-Combined Stay Interview one pager
  • Communicate! Keep staff informed and welcome a two-way conversation about the agency culture.
    • Examples include email blasts, newsletters, fireside chats from the director, video addresses from leadership, monthly all-staff teams meetings to inform, etc.
  • Give staff access to leadership. Hold listening sessions with staff from across the state-really hear what they have to say and make plans to address issues.
  • Implement exit interviews and learn from the results.
  • Review VR staff rates of pay and develop a strategy for wage increases where needed.
  • Review organizational structure and advancement opportunities.
    • Create different levels when possible.
  • Review job duties and make changes accordingly.
    • Consider caseloads and assignments based on staff strengths and demands of the caseload.
    • Create VR Counselor specializations (e.g., VR Intake/Eligibility counselors, youth counselors, postsecondary counselors, TBI).
    • Look at manageable caseload sizes.
    • Provide opportunities for special projects.
    • Move case management duties to another position.
    • Create roving counselors that cover when people are on leave or leave the agency.
  • Provide work schedule flexibility. This includes days and hours worked.
    • Consider compressed schedules (e.g., four 10-hour days).
    • Provide telework, hybrid opportunities.
  • Survey customers to see how they want to be served. This provides a solid foundation for determining hybrid work schedules.
  • Analyze internal hiring processes for gaps and process improvements.
    • Explore if there are unnecessary steps or approval levels to streamline.
  • Review your onboarding process. Make improvements based on feedback.
  • Invest in staff development.
    • Hire a dedicated staff person for training and staff development.
    • Provide opportunities for continued learning and development.
    • Provide supervisor training on leadership principles.
  • Consider “growing your own” for positions that are difficult to fill. This includes providing tuition reimbursement and time off to study.
    • Build opportunities for staff to develop into professional positions.
      • Make the discussion part of the performance review process.
      • Offer opportunities to get more engaged in agency initiatives.
      • Provide mentoring opportunities.
      • Provide tuition reimbursement.
  • Explore achievement awards and recognition for staff.
    • Be clear on the criteria for achievement awards.
    • Present annual staff awards (could be based on CPM metrics, other items- “above and beyond”).
    • Create recognition-highlight in newsletters and social media.
      • Start every meeting off with recognition of staff (personal or professional).
      • Managers send personalized notes to staff to recognize efforts.
      • Ask staff how they like to be recognized and what they would consider a reward (e.g., create a cafeteria-style menu of nonmonetary rewards  from which staff can select when they are recognized to account for the individuality of staff and how they are motivated).
  • Empower Workplace Culture through Recognition (Gallup).

Resources / Articles