How to deal with high staff turn-over?

An advisor working with various local NGOs faced the main challenge of high staff turnover of the local staff. After the staff members have been trained and improve their performance, they leave the NGO for another job. Many well performing staff of local NGOs moved to international NGOs.

How can an advisor working to develop the capacity of local NGOs deal with this? An option is to keep meetings and trainings very simple. The capacity assessments are performed in a light way, because they are only a snapshot, and change as time passes by. The plannings that follow are focused within a time frame of 6-12 months. If there are 3-4 things to work on for a period of 6 months, the results may be more sustainable. One year later, the context can be totally different due to the departure of staff.

So what are interventions that can reduce the high level of staff turn-over and/or mitigate its effect on the organisation? As a capacity building advisor you can stimulate:

• Improvement of the non-monetary working conditions, the secondary benefits
• Documentation of practices
• Sharing of stories about activities that have been undertaken in the organisation

How to improve Human Resource policies?

picture: Jouwert with Blantyre Synof project staff
Jouwert van Geene shared his experiences with strengthening Human Resource Management for partner organisations in Malawi in a case study. This is a shorter version of the case.

A tool for participatory assessment and planning of human resource policies and practices was developed in collaboration with a local consulting company, Sabi Consulting.

The process consisted of the following activities:

Interactive assessment of the human resource capacity by group discussions, individual questionnaires and interviews

Interactive analysis and prioritisation of human resource issues

Development of organisation specific assessment reports with concrete recommendations

Implementation planning by partner management

After this, organisations would receive specific training on human resource management issues and started to develop their own human resource systems and procedures.

The assessments raised a lot of issues and put human resource management much higher on their agenda. All partners have changed the way human resource matters are covered by members of the management team. Some changes are easy like the distribution of the organisational chart, others take more time like the development of an HIV/AIDS workplace policy.

The strategic importance of human resources made them choose a relatively high level of external input. At the same time, they tried to bring down the technical issues to understandable proportions which allowed staff of different levels to participate in the assessment.

A key learning is the trust that organisations have to place in the facilitators of this process. Human resource issues are sensitive. In this case, organisations had already gone through other interventions with the advisor and the local consultancy firm, for about a year.