Pharmaceutical Firms Face Staff Churn Challenge

Retaining the best staff could be about to become the top management challenge in the pharmaceutical industry. Questionmark, the online assessment provider, has released a new paper that lists five ways employers can reduce staff churn and retain a winning team.

Just before the pandemic, a survey revealed that 67% of bio science workers were considering changing employer in the next 12 months.¹ Due to the outbreak of Covid-19 and the corresponding economic uncertainty, many put such plans on pause.

But as confidence returns to the global economy, workers are likely to be reconsidering their options. Half (52%) of American workers across all industries say they are looking for a new job, according to a study for the Achievers Workforce Institute.²

John Kleeman, Founder of Questionmark, said: "High staff turnover is bad for business. The cost of replacing a pharmaceutical employee can range from 70 to 300 percent of that worker's annual salary.³

"Employers must act now to strengthen staff retention. Our new industry briefing paper sets out five clear ways that the data from staff assessments can help."

The new Questionmark paper, "How to Retain the Best Staff in Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare" shows that by testing the skills of workers, employers can:

1. Make better recruitment decisions ? a third of new starters leave in their first year.⁴ Testing the skills of candidates before hiring them helps ensure new starters are a good fit for the role, increasing the likelihood they will stay.
2. Identify relevant training needs ? people are less likely to leave their job if they feel they are being looked after. Assessments can pinpoint an employee's immediate training need, helping demonstrate that employers are taking their career development needs seriously.
3. Improve onboarding ? the quicker people settle in, the less likely they are to leave. Assessments can reveal whether the onboarding process is effective and if new starters are learning what they should, reducing early departures.
4. Create a certification program ? people stay when they know they are moving in the right direction. Assessing employee progress and awarding certifications enhances an individual's sense of career development.
5. Predict employee retention ? spotting who might leave makes it possible to secure them. By tracking scores from relevant workplace assessments and correlating them with employee longevity, employers can identify risk factors that require intervention to prevent employee churn.

Read the new Questionmark industry brief, "How to Retain the Best Staff in Pharmaceuticals and Healthcare"

www.questionmark.com/

Notes to editors

About Questionmark

Questionmark unlocks performance through reliable and secure online assessments.

Questionmark provides a secure enterprise-grade assessment platform and professional services to leading organizations around the world, delivered with care and unequalled expertise. Its full-service online assessment tool and professional services help customers to improve their performance and meet their compliance requirements. Questionmark enables organizations to unlock their potential by delivering assessments which are valid, reliable, fair and defensible.

Questionmark offers secure powerful integration with other LMS, LRS and proctoring services making it easy to bring everything together in one place. Questionmark's cloud-based assessment management platform offers rapid deployment, scalability for high-volume test delivery, 24/7 support, and the peace-of-mind of secure, audited U.S., Australian and European-based data centers.

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¹ https://www.biospace.com/article/retaining-employees-in-the-life-sciences-industry/
² https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/turnover-tsunami-expected-once-pandemic-ends.aspx
³ https://www.biospace.com/article/retaining-employees-in-the-life-sciences-industry/
⁴ https://info.workinstitute.com/hubfs/2020%20Retention%20Report/Work%20Institutes%202020%20Retention%20Report.pdf