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CPD ACTIVITY 31 Staff turnover and leadership Poor leadership, as well as poor management, can lead to compromised morale and lesser performance. It can also lead to a high staff turnover. Estimates vary as to what it costs when a staff member leaves, but it can be significant, depending on the role within the business. If you think of pharmacy, an effective and experienced PIC, retail manager, dispense technician or retail staff member leaving the pharmacy can be a highly disruptive – and expensive – experience. The main factors in any calculation (aside from specific costs) are the time and money involved with a departing employee, such as: • Time spent on filling the vacant position. • Hours/weeks in lost productivity before the employee leaves. • Time that co-workers and the manager/supervisor combined will need to make up for the vacant employee (overtime, added shifts, etc). • Number of hours in lost productivity resulting from orientation and training of a new employee. • Time spent on admin and hiring tasks (advertising, resume screening, interviewing, inducting). In retail, these costs can sometimes be hard to measure, as losing a truly effective sales member can result in significant lost sales. As a leader, it’s imperative to create an environment where people want to achieve a common set of goals, feel they’re part of a team, and are valued. Managing change Often, good leadership involves managing change to ensure your business is following a business plan for success. However, a change process can be a confronting experience for employees. The uncertainty and upheaval around it can lead to anxiety and a lack of motivation and disengagement from the organisation, or can manifest as resistance behaviour. As a leader, it’s essential that these situations are prevented or quickly addressed if they begin to appear. Change is generally destabilising for staff and requires a specific communication and leadership style to successfully navigate. These include: • Ensuring you have the involvement and support from the people within the system (group) being changed. • Understanding where the business sits at this time. • Having a clear vision of where you want to be at the end of the change process and how you will measure whether you have successfully achieved your outcome. • Setting a plan for change, ensuring you break up the process into measurable stages (especially if the change process is large or will take a significant period of time to complete). • Communicating and facilitating the involvement of your people as early in the process as possible and continually checking in on them. • Professor Kotter, recognised as a leading expert on change management, has put forward the model, ‘8-step process for leading change’.4 The model addresses the different phases of the change process and the impact of each on the individual. He argues that, through any change process, each phase needs to be addressed and managed in the order presented in this model. Skipping any step will result in significant problems and a lack of ‘stickiness’ of any change outcome for the organisation. TO PAGE 32 Illustration. John Kotter’s ‘8-step process for leading change’. RETAIL PHARMACY • JUN 2021