Retention is more than just a number. It has a real impact on your company and your clients. That’s why WorkHound is here. We simplify employee retention and make it easier to retain your workers.
Today’s employee wants to feel valued, appreciated, and understood. Without empathy for your employees, it’s more a matter of when workers will leave rather than if they will seek other employment. Once your turnover rate hits a certain point, it will begin to damage your reputation. That, in turn, has serious implications for the future of your company and your ability to attract top-tier workers.
Page Contents
- The Cost of High Employee Turnover
- The Solution: Retain Employees Today and Remove Issues for Tomorrow
- How WorkHound Makes High Employee Retention Rates Possible
- Better feedback, better insights, better results.
- The WorkHound Process
- The Cost of Employee Turnover
- How WorkHound Works
- The Industries We Serve
- Employee Retention FAQ
- Ready to Improve Your Employee Retention with WorkHound?
The Cost of High Employee Turnover
Why is retention and turnover such an issue? While losing a single employee may seem to do very little to your overall business, every lost employee comes with a cost:
- SHRM estimates that the cost to find, interview, onboard, and fully train a replacement manager is between $20,000 and $30,000. This includes those whose annual salaries are around $40,000.
- According to the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute, the average cost of replacing a single truck driver was over $8,000. In some cases, the cost was as high as $20,000.
- For warehouse workers and other logistics experts, replacement costs are around $7,000. However, you may actually need to spend between 25% and 50% of the position’s salary in finding a new employee.
- Gallup estimates that these costs can be up to twice an employee’s salary in some industries, making finding and retaining the right talent imperative.
- You also have to take into account the time, production, and reputation costs. HR has to advertise the position and interview candidates. Someone has to fulfill the duties of the vacant position until they can be replaced, or the other team members have to work harder. If neither of these is an option, you may have to adjust projections and inform clients that work will be delayed.
- It’s impossible to put a dollar amount on the experience, talents, and skills you may have lost by not retaining employees.
In addition to these costs, employees who are burnt out or feel unappreciated may stop working as hard. If they’re interviewing and preparing to leave your company, they aren’t going to be giving you their best. They may no longer do more than their job requires, may work slower or with less enthusiasm, and may not take initiative. They no longer have any loyalty to you and have no reason to put in the effort.
The Solution: Retain Employees Today and Remove Issues for Tomorrow
Retention problems don’t work themselves out. You have to fully understand the issue and craft a strategy to address it. If you don’t, your turnover rate will continue to rise.
WorkHound is here to help you understand what employees want and need to do their jobs. We give you hard data to use when making decisions. Your leadership team may believe they understand what workers want, but too often, these assumptions miss the mark.
Retention doesn’t mean you have to change how your company operates. You don’t have to rewrite job descriptions or develop new processes. All you really have to do is listen to what your employees are saying.
Doing so does more than improve your retention—it boosts your company and improves your reputation. Your teams will work more efficiently, your customers will have a consistent experience and relationship with your company, and you’ll reduce the amount of money you spend on hiring and onboarding.
By repairing employer-employee relations today, you remove issues future employees may have. The policies you put into place will both retain current employees and work as incentives for future workers. You’ll develop a reputation for being a fair and supportive company to work for, helping you attract new employees.
“When you look at the benefit vs. the cost, WorkHound is a tremendous value. It doesn’t take much for WorkHound to pay for itself in many ways. You’re going to learn what’s motivating drivers, what their pain points are, and where you can improve.”
– Eric Hanson Vice President of Driver Recruiting & Retention, J&M Tank Lines
How WorkHound Makes High Employee Retention Rates Possible
Here at WorkHound, we believe that raising the professionals of tomorrow begins with empowering the workers of today. That cannot be done without communicating with workers and fully understanding their needs.
We started on this journey in 2015 with the goal of breaking down communication barriers in the trucking industry. Since then, we have begun expanding into other sectors. We realize we’re not the only retention companies out there, but we do approach retention differently. This starts by getting real-world experience in the industry by doing ride-alongs with truckers or visiting the warehouses.
More than that, we empower all of your employees with a voice. While an open-door policy is great, how many of your employees take advantage of it? While a vocal minority may do so, many do not. Some may be intimidated by speaking up, while others may fear questioning the company will make it difficult for them to move up. Others may have spoken up at a previous job and faced retribution for doing so.
Whatever the reason, the bulk of your employees is likely to be a silent majority. WorkHound gives them a voice by implementing anonymous feedback and suggestions. This anonymous feedback is then made accessible to you in real-time, and you’ll meet weekly with a dedicated customer success manager to strategize solutions to the issues your employees are currently dealing with.
There’s no guesswork involved—you know exactly what problems your workers have. Weekly feedback allows you to make adjustments to your solutions to ensure that you’ve hit the mark.
As seen in:
Better feedback, better insights, better results.
Here’s how WorkHound turns feedback into business results for you:
Frontline workers share feedback through WorkHound’s mobile platform.
We analyze and prioritize all feedback.
You get daily actionable insights and tools needed to improve.
Your frontline workers stay on your team and your business keeps rolling.
The WorkHound Process
High employee turnover is going to leave your company perpetually short-staffed and eat up a large portion of your budget. By improving retention, you do more than simply keep employees:
- Reduce the amount of money spent on hiring and onboarding every year.
- Create a consistent experience for customers.
- Improve efficiency by maintaining a consistent team of professionals.
- Gain a reputation for being a fair, empathetic company.
- Facilitate a culture of trust where employees are not afraid to speak up.
- Enforce on-the-job safety thanks to an experienced, tenured staff
Invest in employees and see a return on that investment as those workers remain with your company for years, allowing you to benefit from their skills and knowledge.
The Cost of Employee Turnover
Depending on the industry, it can cost anywhere from $4,000 to tens of thousands of dollars to replace an employee. If you have a huge turnover rate, this translates into thousands, possibly millions of dollars a year. That can greatly impact your bottom line. Investing in retention, on the other hand, is often very affordable. For the cost of hiring and training one new employee, you could work with WorkHound to retain a large percentage of your workforce.
Our ROI calculator will help you visualize exactly how much WorkHound will help you save.
How WorkHound Works
We’ve done our best to keep the WorkHound process as simple as possible to reduce the number of barriers to communication. Every extra step you ask an employee to do makes it more likely that they will not participate. We also want to make everything easy for your leadership team. To that end, here’s how WorkHound facilitates communication:
- We send a weekly text to your employees.
- Employees respond anonymously with their feedback, including positive comments and ideas.
- Your dedicated customer success manager meets with you to discuss the feedback.
- You can send a follow-up immediately and/or strategize a company-wide communication to send out weekly.
- Every 90 days, we meet with your entire leadership team to discuss trends, solutions, and other actions.
While feedback is always anonymous, you can ask an employee to voluntarily reveal their identity. This is typically only done when a matter needs to be addressed immediately, such as an HR concern, but this also serves as a great opportunity to understand who’s behind the most positive comments in order to add to your roster of ambassadors. However, WorkHound will never require an employee to reveal themselves, nor will we reveal an employee’s identity without their permission.
The Industries We Serve
WorkHound currently works with companies with 150 or more employees in the following industries:
“As much as I would like to hire other companies’ drivers, I think that if other companies would use WorkHound, it would make the entire industry better. It’s an effective way to fix issues and each company is responsible for making trucking better, not just our company.”
– Brian Matthews Vice President of Operations, American Central Transport
Employee Retention FAQ
WorkHound reaches out via standard text message to your employees at the beginning of the week to ask for feedback. Once you take action on the feedback, you and your WorkHound representative can follow up at the end of the week with an additional message. All data we collect is anonymous.
Yes. By making the process very easy, we have found that many workers do use WorkHound. Typically, around 40 percent answer a weekly text message question. Comparatively, only around ten percent complete annual employee surveys. By making all responses anonymous, employees feel more empowered to speak up, without the fear of retaliation.
You can request the employee identify themselves in the event of a serious issue or urgent need. However, employees are never required to do so. Even if the employee does not reveal their identity, it is still possible to directly message them to address specific issues.
No. We’ve determined that a weekly text asking for feedback is infrequent enough that employees don’t feel spammed but often enough to allow you to keep your finger on the pulse of the company. By checking in once a week, you can be aware of any sudden shifts in worker needs. This also helps new workers have immediate input, allowing you to learn about potential problems right away. As we’ve all witnessed, workers in high turnover industries are often one event away from entertaining a job offer at their company’s competitor or a completely new vocation. Turnover happens fast. We want to help you quickly intervene.
Yes. You will have a dedicated customer success representative you will meet with on a regular basis. We will meet with your contact person weekly and with your entire leadership board every 90 days. This team will remain the same, allowing them to truly learn about what makes your company unique and what your specific retention roadblocks are.
As with many processes and tools, you could develop a system very similar to what WorkHound has, but it would be reinventing the wheel and would take a lot of time and money. We’ve invested millions of dollars and years of time into building and optimizing our system. Additionally, we know that it’s also more difficult for employees to trust a system that is supposed to be anonymous when they know their employer is behind it. By coming to us, your employees know you don’t have the keys to their identity, which in turn fosters more trust.
Ready to Improve Your Employee Retention with WorkHound?
The bottom line is that high turnover is costing you time and money, neither of which you can afford to waste. WorkHound is here to improve your communication with your employees so you can boost retention rates and watch your company grow. Reach out to WorkHound today to learn more about how we can help you.