Turnover is a fact of business life. A recent study showed that associated costs of replacing each employee costs a company 29 to 46 percent of his or her salary! In today’s world of 1 to 1 marketing and customer relationship management, it is essential to reduce turnover to help key employees nurture successful business relationships with customers. As many businesses wrestle with changing from a company based organization to a customer-based organization, employees face accountability, technology and behavioral challenges that must be addressed by management.

Why do people leave their jobs? What types of support and process changes do we need to implement to make it easier for valuable people to stay on job? Do your people have right knowledge, skills and attitudes to meet your customer service goals? Are employee expectations being met?

There are three major ways organizations can answer these difficult questions.

Whether spoken or unspoken, your expectations have a powerful impact on your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and are key drivers of your attitudes. Your attitudes in turn, influence performance, commitment and job satisfaction. Research by Inscape Publishing Company, February, 2001 shows that when companies implement clearly defined, well-communication expectations, their employees are happier, more fulfilled and more successful. Without a clearly defined mandate, many employee expectations go unspoken or unrealized. Questions like, “Will my supervisor support a balance between work and my personal life?” Can I get flexible work hours, now that I have a child,” “Will my job be secure as long as I do my job well?” Unless these expectations are managed properly, workplace satisfaction will be adversely affected.

know. Now it’s time to add public relations to list of your entrepreneurial skills.

Public relations is human relations and a critical aspect of growing your business. Everything

you say and do is part of your PR campaign. It is image you project every day to everyone

you meet. It is about you and your company becoming a force in public eye on a regular

basis PR that you undertake yourself can be a primary way to grow your business and become

known without major expense.

There are seven basic steps involved in mounting your campaign.

Step #1 involves figuring out who you are, what you do and how to express it in most

succinct and interesting way possible. There may situations such as networking functions

where you have only 30 seconds to introduce yourself and make that all important first

impression. Spend as much time as necessary practicing your "intro" until it truly flows in a

positive, strong, and confident manner. Remember that success begets success and great first

impressions will speak volumes about you and your business.

Now that you have developed most effective message possible, Step #2 is to determine your

ooh-ahh factor, “story” about you. It’s important to understand why you are news from

media's perspective and how your products help people or your service gives value and benefit.

Once you know your “ooh-ahh” factor, you can begin to create materials, which will tailor your story to specific media, whose attention you wish to gain. And this leads to Step # 3 which is to define your audience and create a media list. Your list will,