Case Study: How CVS Caremark Reduced Turnover by Over 60 Percent in Under Two Years by Nadine Rastelli

HRIQ speaks with Nadine Rastelli in this exclusive interview. Rastelli is currently serving as Talent Acquisition Director at CVS Caremark. In her role, she has responsibility for working with the company’s senior leadership team to take the company’s vision and translating that into a compelling message and programs to attract high performance talent into a fast paced organization in the healthcare industry. She is responsible for creating a recruitment strategy for her company and managing the recruitment function across the nation. Rastelli shares how to validate HR's impact on CVS Caremark's bottom line through the use of viable metrics.

1. You reduced turnover from range of 95-125 percent to 35 percent in less than 2 years. How did you achieve this?

We set a realistic target of 18-24 months, knowing that there were some low hanging fruit items that we could tackle and solve quickly and early on, so that could motivate us to keep heading to the future state. Too often, we set goals that are lofty and long-term and people lose the momentum it takes to sustain such large-scale change. So we had milestones for ourselves, we employed lots of pilots across the organization to have a chance to go back and tweak and keep going. We also knew that the issue was multi-pronged. The turnover data were a metric that told us something was wrong, but obviously not at the root cause. So we employed a cross functional team of senior leaders, HR partners, Finance, Communication and Quality partners and our Project Management office to work on a variety of facets. We also relied heavily on the top performers of the employee population and their supervisors to give us feedback and to try things out.

2. What was the business case?

For our business, the organization in question was critical in three main areas. They were the first line of contact for our customers and our internal clients had a say so about how we were doing, there were performance guarantees associated with terrific customer care that would result in paying back fines if we did not deliver the service we promised to the client. This was a very niche and competitive industry, so we could not afford NOT to be the best at what we did. When there were issues, our CEO would hear from the CEO of ABC corporation that things were not going well-- and that’s never a good thing. As an organization, we are measured by customer retention, so we had to listen. Thus, we began our transformation.

3. How did you determine what you needed to accomplish this, and what were the first steps to doing so?

We needed leadership change at the top and this came with putting new leadership in place quickly. Those leaders and HR worked together on creating components of the problem by competency area and by feedback gleaned from customers, internal clients and employees. We then set out to chart our future state and were really clear about what that needed to look like, no fancy jargon, no pie-in-the-sky unless there was major bang for the buck. We set out to create plans that tied back to that future state for everyone in the organization and established clear and related metrics. Some of those metrics were numerical in nature, some were qualitative.

I have found that to be truly successful in the metrics area, the HR metrics need to have the look and feel of business metrics. What I mean by that is too often, the clients we partner with in HR do not understand how what we have translated for them has anything to do with their business. So we start with their end in mind: Are they trying to save operational costs? Often times labor costs are a significant portion of that. So how do we look at labor costs and see if we can do anything with that metric to help in achieving that goal, while not disrupting the culture or the engagement of the teams? They can take that to their senior leadership and even to Wall Street, but it takes being a very keen HR/Business leader to know how to do this well and a person whom the business considers a terrific partner typically has shown elements of that business understanding.

5. How did you go about translating metrics results in a common language into financial data to showcase value to the organization’s business strategy?

As an HR leader, my finance person and I are attached at the hip. So often one hears, "Who really runs the company? Finance, right?!" I think we have come to a point in our HR industry where we have many resources that can help us define what we do and how it affects the bottom line. It is imperative for us to start with the business strategy, which typically has intertwined within it, taken some clear financial goals (i.e., for shareholders) and asked, "What does this mean in terms of the value I bring to the success of this goal?"

The language that needs to be created should be one that all levels of the organization and can understand and put their arms around. Sometimes translation needs to be done, hence where terrific communications partners can play a key role. This can be anyone, not a particular department, as this group may not be a resource for every company. So we embarked on a plan to know our audience, define the WIIFM ("What’s In It For Me") for each audience member and type and were very open to being told "This will not work here," or asked, "What if you did this instead?" This approach has really worked. All of our team members had a stake in the success of this transformation.

Interview conducted by Alexandra Guadagno, Editor for Human Resources iQ.