Workplaces That Work
Improve the Return on Investment in People
Workplace practices and cultures that encourage greater participation by women, share many of the same characteristics as those that maximize employee satisfaction and engagement: a workplace where information is shared, promotions and rewards are tied to performance and merit and employees participate in decision-making.
Management practices and workplace cultures that are good for women are also good for men and for the employer’s financial results.
Employee satisfaction and engagement is closely related to an improved ‘bottom line’ (lower costs of turnover, absenteeism, etc.) as well as to an improved ‘top line’ – organizational productivity, revenue and customer satisfaction.
Illustration
For one Canadian employer in the petrochemical industry, the turnover rate for women was twice the rate of men in comparable positions.
The following assumptions of typical figures are used for this illustration:
- Average salary for an early-career engineer is $60,000.
- Length of time to fill a vacant engineer position is four months.
- Average length of time until the new hire is fully productive is six months.
Including administrative costs, lost productivity, training costs and others, the estimated turnover cost would be approximately $30,000 per resignation.
Across the entire organization, the following assumptions were used:
- Turnover rate for women is 30 per cent and for men it is 15 per cent.
- The organization employs 20 young women engineers and 80 young men.
Changing work culture to reduce the women’s turnover rate to 15 per cent would save $90,000 in direct costs, per year, for this one employer.14
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