Employee turnover can be costly, disruptive, and time-consuming. To help employers understand the decisions behind voluntary turnover and keep valuable staff engaged, Tourism HR Canada recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Safa, a Canadian-based software company that provides tools and a certification process for employers to improve employee retention.
Applying psychological principles and using artificial intelligence and predictive algorithms, Safa works with hoteliers to measure and assess employee turnover risk and intention. Safa believes that improving employer profitability and employee happiness can be synonymous.
“Our Safa Insight platform puts the power of industrial-organizational psychology in the hands of organizations who previously would have had to regularly hire expensive consultants with long wait-times for results,” explains Jason Trask, Safa Co-Founder and CEO. “With this evidence-based approach, customers get access to the exact knowledge that allows them to take immediate action in their business.”
Safa Insight tells hotel owners and operators which employees plan on quitting, why, and how to keep them. It also translates impacts on the profit and loss (P&L) statement and provides an implementation framework, all of which is integrated into the “Safa Certification” process. This makes Safa’s insights actionable and outcomes measurable. Moreover, Safa can benchmark any hotel against cohorts of its peers.
Safa’s proprietary “Turnover Intention Index” was developed by industrial-organizational psychologists based on validated academic research and utilizes artificial intelligence so it continuously improves.
The unique “Safa Certification Process” provides employers with a structured, repeatable business process to effectively analyse, plan, and implement their employee retention strategy. Becoming “Safa Certified” shows employees and other stakeholders that the employer adheres to the highest standards when addressing employee retention. Safa empowers companies to use data, not intuition, to proactively increase employee retention and quantify the financial impact on the company.
As part of the MOU, Safa will conduct primary research among the hotel owners and operators to ascertain the following with respect to employee turnover:
- Data currently collected by hotel owners and operators
- Strategic objectives regarding employee turnover and its impact on their company
- Types of research desired and needed for them to achieve their organizational key results
- Types of data they would be willing to collect (facilitated or supported by Safa) to enable Safa to provide them with:
- data output, including industry benchmarking
- predictions regarding which employees plan on quitting, why, and how to keep them
- cost analysis, future cost projections, and return on investment calculations against various retention initiatives (all of which can be presented in such a manner as to allow the hotel owners/operators to translate initiatives to financial return for shareholders)
“As part of our mandate to build a world-leading tourism workforce, it’s important that we identify and bring to the industry’s attention new and innovative methods of helping tourism businesses meet their labour challenges,” says Calum MacDonald, Tourism HR Canada Vice-President, Labour Market Intelligence. “We know the hotel industry is facing chronic labour shortages, and Safa’s system offers an opportunity for employers to retain current employees and identify during the recruitment process potential employees who are likely to stay longer. AI and data analytics are growing fields. In tourism, we have seen them successfully applied in the customer research and destination marketing field. It’s application to the labour market has just as much potential.”
Tourism HR Canada and Safa will also discuss future joint labour market research.
If you are interested in being included in this research project, please contact Jason Trask at jasontrask@safa.io or Calum MacDonald at cmacdonald@tourismhr.ca.