Staff Retention & Succession Planning

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.
  • Survey Examples:
    • 24 insightful employee engagement survey questions
    • 50 Employee Engagement Survey Questions You Must Ask In 2023
    • The 45 Questions Your Employee Engagement Survey Needs
    • Dr. Karri Wilson's Employee Engagement Survey PPT
    • Dr. Karri Wilson Employee Engagement one-pager
    • Minnesota Employee Engagement Survey
• 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 the CSAVR SVRA Salary Repository.
  • Talk to state directors who have been successful with this.
• 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.
  • Mn General Customer Survey
• 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).