A charity HR director has managed to almost halve his organisation’s staff turnover in three years by offering a range of online training, it has emerged.
Guy Pink, HR director at charity Addaction, told Personnel Today that since implementing an Open University course in management development in 2005, as well as launching further online learning courses in leadership, he has seen staff turnover drop from 31% in 2005 to 18% this year.
Addaction has 900 staff, but many of these are rarely office based. Pink said the online courses gave people the chance to complete further training as and when it suited them. This in turn made them consider the charity as a good place to work, he added.
“Recruitment and retention is the biggest challenge for the charity sector. By putting together techniques to address that, such as e-learning and Open University courses, the stats show a year-on-year improvement in retention,” he said.
However, he admitted there were still issues in attracting and retaining under-represented groups of people.
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“Seventy per cent of our staff are women, and 30% are men. However when you get into the higher positions, those figures almost swap,” he said.
Pink has launched a new external jobs site which includes information about what it’s like to work at Addaction to help attract people with different backgrounds.
