Review: Rethinking Retention in Good Times and Bad

By Richard Finnegan
Davies-Black
$34.95, 292 pages

There may be no bigger issue facing the consulting profession in 2010 than staff retention. The consultancies best able to keep their hardest-working employees after the economy picks up will go a long way to defining the winners and losers of this recession. While there's no magic bullet to keeping employees, author Richard Finnegan offers perhaps the next big things—data. In Rethinking Retention in Good Times and Bad , Finnegan offers a hands-on, tactical retention action plan backed by his own research and on-site experiences. Some the best ideas for keeping your best workers include: holding supervisors accountable, scripting employees first three months and calculating the high cost of turnover. Case studies and statistics round out the effort and help cement some of the key takeaways in the book.