Employee Turnover

New Ideas to reduce Employee Turnover

Efficient training and knowledge transfer

There is nothing more frustrating than losing a key employee and its made worse when that employee holds key information in his or her head. In fast paced jobs with a traditionally high turnover, training and handover can also be a significant problem. At both ends of the spectrum, the rentalresult application ensures that employee handover can be as smooth as possible and that you can capture that information from your best and key employees and put it to use around the rest of the organization.

rentalresult offers a number of key features to protect you against employee turnover and to reduce employee turnover itself

intuitive applications

At Result Group we take the user interface for our software very seriously, it shouldn’t be necessary for a user to have days of training, they should be able to use the applications intuitively and naturally. Our java application is not simply a screen scrape of an old product, it has been designed to take advantage of the great features and possibilities offered by a modern framework. We use color, interactive menus, drag and drop etc to ensure that the user is easily able to move round our screens without excessive clicking or being required to remember key sequences. This is essential where rapid training may be necessary or time to train extremely limited.

putting usability at the heart of the system

A little while ago we put our software up against all our main competitors in a usability test for a prospective client. Users with absolutely no knowledge of our software were given ten tasks to complete and absolutely no assistance, we were even forced to turn off our embedded tutorials. Ours was the only software where the users could complete all 10 tasks without help. This is essential if you have a high employee turnover, where the cost of non-intuitive software can be failures in customer service, speed and productivity.

embedded training and tutorials

In every application and on every screen throughout the Result system you will find a tutorials icon, this is designed to assist employees who may have only occaisional need to use an application and need a quick reminder of how to use it, and for those who may be filling in for someone else who is on vacation or off sick. It also allows you to help new employees become more confident quickly. The system also allows you to embed your own company tutorials, manuals and policy statements throughout every application so that if you need your teams to remember something important you can put that information right inside the software.

simplify

In rentalresult, if a screen has 5 fields on it, and for your business process you only want to use 2 of them, then you can simplify the screen to just show the 2 fields. This seems like a simple concept, but actually removing unnecessary information and fields from the screen is an excellent way of simplifying the use of the system and making employees more comfortable. Reducing applications to the bare minimum to suit your business needs makes perfect sense and is very simple, if you want to enable the fields later when your business process changes, its just as easy to switch them back on again. In addition our configuration options mean that mandatory fields, lookups and workflow can be controlled to avoid mistakes even for employees who are new to the business.

business rules engine to control workflow

At its most fundamental level, workflow is about controlling the processes that your employees carry out when no-one is watching over their shoulders. If you have a high employee turnover then often you will have issues with specific process steps or company policies that new employees may not pick up quick enough. Using the rentalresult business rules engine, you can eradicate these problems, the rules engine allows you to define a process flow based on data rules from the system, for example you might have a different process for dealing with a customer who consistently pays their bills later, but does eventually pay them, to one who pays on time, to one who is on credit-stop. Using the rules engine you can make that process flow explicit and allow the system to help your employees both new and old, work effeciently and consistently to your internal company policies.

product configurator using the business rules engine

If you have very complex equipment, or a very large inventory where multiple options could provide the answer to customer requirements then the product configurator helps you maximize your best employees. We recently had a customer with a very complex product which required math calculations and physics to work out the right product for the customer’s requirements. Naturally the business was dependent on a number of key experienced engineers to identify equipment and produce quotes for customers. Using the product configurator, the business was able to take the thought process that the engineers used, the calculations and turn the product selection process into a logical series of questions and rules that allows 80% of their business to be quoted for by the newest employee with little experience.