Bagshaw, M.C. (2006, November 15) Keep your student workers. Library Journal, 44. (http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=23298406&loginpage=Login.asp&site=ehost-live&scope=site)
Bagshaw, a Reference/Media Center Librarian at Lake Erie College in Painesville, OH, attributes her library’s high student worker retention rate to careful hiring practices, combining general more mundane work tasks with one special responsibility (with consistently well performing students being awarded particularly coveted work tasks that allow them greater schedule flexibility than other students), an annual two-way evaluation, and special morale maintaining treats (candy, occasional pizza parties, etc.). Most of all, Bagshaw advocates treating student workers and their educational goals with respect. The more their personal goals are respected and valued, the more effort they will put into their performance at work.
Harris, D. H. (2000, Summer) The Benefits of Exit Interviews. Information Systems Management, 17-20. (full-text unavailable)
Harris warns that thinking of the exit interview as something to “get out of the way” instead of as a prime chance to find out why an employee is leaving squanders the perfect chance to find out where working conditions can be improved to help bolster employee retention. Harris seems to advocate conducting exit interviews in a very similar manner to how one may conduct hiring interviews with the consideration of the employee as someone who may be re-employed at some point in the future and also considering the reasons that the employee is leaving as reasons that might cause other employees to leave. Harris lists 5 points for admin to remember about conducting exit interviews and 6 valuable lessons that his organization learned from them. The first 5 points for conducting them are:
- Be clear about your purpose (learn why person is leaving and how you might use that info to retain others)
- Select a neutral location that encourages communication and puts the employee at ease (use spaces that you use for hiring interviews)
- Allow sufficient time (don’t rush employee, allow for silence and thinking time.Give them plenty of time to express everything they want to express about the job and work environment)
- Have an open and honest attitude (partly this includes valuing the process of the exit interview and making that apparent so the employee will try to help you with your objective instead of just try to get it over with.Also, this is about trying to improve not digging up dirt on other employees. Most exiting employees will want to provide information to help try to make it a better working environment if they perceive that you are open)
- Cover specific points and events (do not ask leading questions, just open ended questions like you would ask in a hiring interview.As points come up, ask questions to clarify the point and delve deeper. Don’t argue or contradict, just keep the interview moving forward in a positive direction)
The six lessons learned are:
- Communication (though sensitive information needs to be guarded carefully, they realized the importance of rapid and appropriate dissemination of necessary information)
- Assignments (each year employees’ submit three choices of assignments they would like to be involved with for the coming year and management tries its best to accommodate the requests.i.e. letting the employees’ own their work.)
- Respect (They realized how often they might ask for employee input and then disregard it.They now try to incorporate as many employee ideas as they can)
- Benefits (They realized the weaknesses in their own benefits program and also the importance of those benefits to their employees)
- Training (the need for continual employee training and education.
- Recruiting (also making it a goal to fill positions quickly so that a vacancy doesn’t become a long carried burden on those employees “picking up the slack” until the position is filled.
Harris finally attributes these efforts toward improvement based on exit interviews for reducing their IT department turnover rate from 23% to 7.3%.
Ream, R. (2001, April). Holding on to the best and brightest. Information Today, 16-17. (http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=4279994&loginpage=Login.asp&site=ehost-live&scope=site)
Ream starts by likening employees to stock investments—the less turnover in your portfolio the more value it gains. He then goes on to say that one major factor in reducing turnover is careful hiring practices that take into account the person’s skills, competencies matched to tasks, career ambitions, and work habits. Ream also expresses the importance of conducting multiple in-person and phone interviews and practicing full disclosure in regards to the job and the environment. Ream states that the common industry standard for calculating the cost of replacing an employee is 1.5 times their salary. Ream states that creating a friendly, dynamic, and challenging work environment along with strong leadership are essential to retaining your best people. “It’s often said that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers.” Also, make it clear to your staff that they have your support.
Stanley, M. (2008) How ‘ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm—The problem of retention. Indiana Libraries, 27(1), 84-89. (full-text unavailable)
Similar to what was written in the above articles, Stanley begins this article with some statistics and figures from a couple of studies which found that while employee retention was a high priority to administrators, fewer than 15% of organizations have an actual retention plan. Stanley also repeats the figures of the monetary costs of replacing a staff member (anywhere from 1 to 2 times that person’s salary). The article indicates that employees who are thinking of leaving tend to show signs of disengagement over a period of days to years with a single event often tipping the decision in favor of leaving. According to the article, 89% of managers believe employees leave for more money when in reality 88% actually make the decision to leave based upon an aspect or even in the workplace environment and/or culture and an overwhelming majority of the time they are events or aspects that could have been controlled or avoided by management. Much of the time retention is based upon the employee feeling valued, challenged, and supported at work by their managers. Stanley talks about the benefits of an efficient mentoring program and warns against the danger of forgetting employees once they’re trained and at the job. Stanley concludes the article with a number of areas of consideration for increasing employee retention and offering information about how to address these topics that affect retention.
PLA Recruitment of Public Librarians Committee. (2006). What were they thinking? Results of a survey on the profession. Public Libraries, 45(1), 53-57. (full-text unavailable)
Article covers some of the results of a survey conducted on the PLA website in 2005 on the topic of library professionals’ views about the profession.
Luzius, J. and Ard, A. (2006) Leaving the academic library. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(6), 593-598. (full-text unavailable)
Interesting survey distributed to former academic librarians through a variety of library listservs asking for former librarians to respond and for librarians to forward the survey to any former librarians they knew. Not surprisingly, and as the researchers point out, the problem of finding former librarians to distribute the survey to was problematic and they ended up with only 18 usable responses for their study. The results are interesting, and certainly support a lot of the other scholarship published on this topic. However, with the sample being so small it can really only be taken as somewhat anecdotal instead of representative of this population as a whole.
Jones, D. E. (1988) “I’d like you to meet our new librarian”: The initiation and integration of the newly appointed librarian. The journal of academic librarianship, 14(4), 221-224. (http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=7849001&loginpage=Login.asp&site=ehost-live&scope=site)
Though this article is 20 years old, it contains some still very valid points and suggestions that Jones states are essential to the initiation and integration of a new librarian into an academic environment. Jones notes that there are some lessons of librarianship that cannot be learned in library school but that it is essential to teach new hires. These “four important areas” that Jones lists are the political setting, the work organization of the department, the details of each task, and the path to promotion and job retention. Jones also states that the department objectives must be clear and understood by the staff in the first place so that it can be communicated to new hires and that managers should be active in continual supervision, informal evaluation, and guidance of their staff members.
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