Accurately measuring employee loyalty and turnover in an organization

I work in human resources and one of our priorities is employee loyalty and turnover. We want to gather information from employees in order to measure how loyal they are or will be to the company. How should we go about soliciting this information in a way that won't negatively affect our employee's trust in human resources?

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This is an excellent question. We can answer it in several ways. First of all, if your employees suspect that what you are trying to do is gather information that will impact their compensation in any way (i.e. the more loyal you are the more we'll compensate you) then they're just going to give you answers that sound good and that is not going to give you a very accurate read. There are two things you can do that come to mind right away.

  • Have a third party gather this information for benchmarking and comparison, and clarify anonymity.

  • Use the information not for the evaluation of the employee, but for the evaluation of the culture of the organization itself.

    The evaluation then shifts to the management of the company – top management as well as the immediate managers and those whom the employees report to. So, if I'm evaluated not only by how my division performs but also by how loyal my employees are to the company, then that says something about how good I am as a manager. If you make the emphasis on the management rather than on the employees in terms of their loyalty, then that makes it quite different. Of course, you should have a third party do it.

    This was first published in October 2008

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