High employee turnover led to high overhead costs and loss of profit margin

The Issue:

One company I worked for was a tech support call center that supported a major technology company. The New Hire Training class was 5 weeks of in-class instruction, followed by 2 weeks of transition onto the phones. The problem that had plagued the company is that a typical new-hire class would be approximately 30 people and by the time the class hit their first two days of of transition queue, an average of 5 people per class would suddenly quit. This happened over and over and cost the company tens of thousands of dollars, per class. Average wages lost represented $3,000 per employee for this period. That amounted to a loss of $15,000 lost wages, per class, plus the additional costs in advertising & recruiting, background checks, and drug screens, totaling about $20,000 per class. We conducted approximately 30 training classes per year at our location alone, which brought the total lost expenses to around $600,000 per year.

The Solution: 

In talking with some of the outgoing employees they disclosed that the call experience was not what they experienced and they felt woefully unprepared for these duties. I got permission from management to conduct an experiment. I completely reworked the training program provided by our contracted client – I removed unnecessary blocks of training about products that we did not support, I condensed other blocks of training, and I moved things around. In the end I created 3x 4-hour blocks of time throughout the 5 week period, spaced out fairly evenly throughout the program.

I used these 4-hour blocks to create kinesthetic learning labs where the employees actually practiced the skills they would really need on the job, starting with easy scenarios and working up to more complex situations. The employees forgot that it was all simulated. By the end of the experiment the employees reported that they felt very confident to do their jobs and only 1 person from each class quit on average.

Savings:

This change saved the company $480,000 per year in onboarding costs by reducing employee turnover.