Case Study: Syska Hennessy Group

The Client: Syska Hennessy Group 

The Problem

Founded in 1928, the engineering firm was serving a national market and growing rapidly.  With over a dozen offices throughout the US, new ones planned and considering Asian markets for further expansion, this is a company committed to growth.  However, they were experiencing a high rate of turnover across all technical departments in all offices.

 

“Our best people leave before we can promote them to management”.

 

The cost of this was that hiring from the outside was expensive, onboarding time, lengthy and people who hoped for long careers, looked outside of the organization to find them.

 

The Objectives

Create a systematic approach to developing and promoting internal talent. Reduce turnover in targeted demographic by 50%

 

The Approach

We set out to develop what we called the Syska Hennesy Mentoring Program.  First, we brought all the identified, highly effective young staff members together, and got them to discuss the future of the organization, their roles, and where they would like to be.  We created a team of experienced managers and set them to the task of identifying young people throughout the company they wanted to see be successful.  We offered training to both groups, and they enthusiastically participated in both the training and the discussions about the future of the organization.  Through this process we began to understand the challenges that each group was facing, brought concerns to HR and senior leadership, and began to partner experienced people, (mentors) with small groups of up-and-coming young leaders.  These “Mentor Groups”, naturally evolved into focused teams, where career objectives were similar.  Members stopped competing with one another and instead, worked together to bring about success for all involved.  And most importantly, barriers to long-term growth within the company were identified and recommendations were developed to resolve these. 

 

The Results:

First-year- Turnover among our target demographic went from 26% to 2%%, During that time, the only outside hires of new management were those already planned.  In the next year, turnover bounced back up to 7%, a reflection perhaps of impatience with the process of implementing organization-wide change, but still well below the targeted 13%.

 

We experienced big change right away, I would be happy to work with Mr. Hoffman again, His ability to understand what was happening in our organization and target the root causes was dramatic as were our results. —  Allison Knowles, Director