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The Employee Job Life Cycle describes the evolving quality, productivity and job retention of typical employees throughout the process of hiring, employment and then termination. An employee life cycle is the steps the employees go through from the time they enter a company until they leave. Often Human Resources professionals focus their attention on the steps in this process in hopes of making an impact on the company’s bottom line. That is a good thing for them to do. Their goal is to reduce the company’s cost per employee hired.

Unfortunately, they aren’t the ones who really make a difference – managers are. People don’t really work for companies; they work for their boss. To the extent that you can be a good boss, you can keep employees, keep them happy, and reduce the costs associated with employee turnover. In the process, you will make your own job easier and increase your value to the company.

An employee joins a new Organisation; therefore he is always into the torment to set up him on the job. A brief introduction of the company and its entire rules & regulations book is given to the employee during the induction process. Thereafter, employee is placed on the job for live exposure of the job, where he interacts with the existing employees and tries to be friendly with them. Upon his work he faces various obstacles such as rude behavior of seniors & juniors, negative comments from dissatisfied colleagues, weak support from management and many other problems. Sometimes employees’ leave in frustration in such situations, but those who pass through the tough times, they might have a better future in the Organisation.

Upon the job, the job responsibilities are changed so that employee learns about the various skills required to work. Also, so that employee does not feel monotones on the job. Like Bank, where one employee is transferred from Cash department to public relations (prepare DD etc.) and then to corporate communication (communication with the head office) etc. This is done because a change is required on the job and the Organisation also prepare their employees to work on the various jobs in the same or different department; also sometimes in order to fill any future gaps.

Every year the employee is rewarded with a performance appraisal for his honest and diligent working and also promoted to the next position so that he feel more responsible and work more diligently and further increase his skills and knowledge to reach up to another level, this also increase the morale of the employees and make them work blindfold.

Management tends to make a good work force of the existing employees thus sometimes the employees are transferred to a different location for starting a new project or the branch. Management trusts its old employees thus they are preferred while forming a team for a new project or business. Once transferred to a new business or location, the employee needs to start everything afresh working beyond expectations and making his presence felt in the Organisation. This is how some people grow very fast on their career ladder. While working on the job, employee faces lots of competition from the existing employees working in the same department, because everybody wants to be a loved-one of the management and believe more most often people work for numbers and performance game.

At various occasions, the employees’ skills are developed through extensive training and workshops. You can see below a flow of various phases during the tenure of the employee with the Organisation.
Need to recruit -> Process flow of Recruitment -> Recruitment -> Offer & Appointment -> Induction & Orientation -> On Job Training (OJT) -> Personal Development Programmes -> Management by Objectives -> Career Planning -> Job Rotation -> Knowledge Management -> Courses and Administration -> Termination of Employment. Today, almost every industry whether of a large or small size is suffering from the problem of higher attrition rate therefore resulting into huge recruitment costs? Thus, Human Resources jobs become very tough in increasing the life cycle (tenure) of the employees working in the Organisation.

In order to manage the employee workforce, it is important that the management group has a structured business process and the tools for monitoring and managing the evolution of its workforce. This can only be accomplished by having information that identifies, in a consistent manner across all departments and all locations of the Organisation. This information should include:

• Hiring and termination data across the employee population in order to identify Job durations by department-wise, role-wise and location-wise.
• Hiring, training, productivity and cost data for employees of each Job Group.
• Work activities, task details and business processes of each group, such as task duration, transfers of work, completed work, accuracy and error rate & types, etc., in order to determine the real cost and productivity of each Group
• Keeping a check on employees’ problem through ESS.

Capturing, analyzing and providing monthly reports on the Employees workforce correctly and consistently, with scheduled monthly updates, will enable Management to manage the trends in its labour pool. An Organisation will be able to identify the productivity opportunities, qualify the business impact and value of project initiatives, and be able to measure the changes in the productivity, and costs as various initiatives are implemented.The goal of a strategy to increase average job life cycle is to make the business a fun & interesting place to work, where employees have no desire to go anywhere else. Over time, this means that good employees stay, that there is a large pool of prospective employees who want to join, and this may result into low attrition. The processes which might effectively work in every Organisation in order to increase the life cycle of the employment may include:

Changing New Employee Hiring Strategies
This is very effective at reducing initial employee churn, which occurs in the first 1 to 3 months, that is very expensive since these short-term hires have high expenses and very low contribution to the Organisation. Often the investment in significantly upgrading the new employee hiring strategy is low, and in fact almost immediately reduces costs.

Introducing Aggressive Reward and Recognition Programs
A good Reward and Recognition Program is not particularly expensive and often leads to not only longer job durations, but also increases the efficiency of the employee. The HR’s goal is to make the workplace more fun and interesting, but in doing so, targeting behaviors and goals that improve quality and efficiency. This affects the entire workforce.

Providing longer-term upward mobility and career paths
The future is very important to an employee, especially those on the lower rungs of a corporate ladder. This is a powerful motivator, which may or may not be available to larger Organisations.

Making compensation competitive & changing it frequently
Paying competitive compensation to employees and also making frequent changes in the compensation may also help in increasing the Employee life cycle. Though, it may amount to a huge expense for the company. But a small change in compensation twice in a year (than once in a year) may be helping in making employees stay for longer duration.

Conducting Recreation activities such as Birthday celebration, extra curricular activities etc.
We all celebrate almost all festivals; Organizations should also celebrate employees’ birthday and probably celebrating wedding anniversaries too. Conducting extra curricular activities is another idea to give employees’ a little time to relax from jobs and work on hobbies and other area of interests. With such kind of activities employee and employee’s family often attach with the Organisation.In order to manage towards the goal of job retention, it is necessary for an Organisation to have a formal business process with continuously updating reports and Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and informing management about the workforce. There is usually a vast amount of data already available with Human Resources about hiring, retention, and job performance, but little of it:

• Shows the progression of new hires through their life cycle on the job.
• Identifies the true costs of handling issues at each stage of an Employee Life Cycle, then linking this information to the overall costs.
• Provides the ability to measure the impact on personnel, costs and returns of possible management strategies addressing these issues.
• Enables upper management to understand measure and manage the trends in its workforce.

This might also require:

• Collecting enough information about the work force, its costs and the changes in key factors such as average job duration on each role and productivity.
• Tracking and measuring the impact of the various initiatives in order to select and optimize those that have the desired effect.

More importantly, by successfully implementing the processes to reap the productivity opportunities, it will also reap significant increases in the quality of its work product and also customers’ satisfaction.

A general relationship is where productivity opportunities are almost always directly linked to quality improvements. Therefore it will lead to more ongoing business from current customers as well as provide the track record to continue its growth with new customers; which surely and only means retention of both existing employees and existing customers.