People and Leadership
A multidisciplinary team from KPMG worked with a retail grocery giant to help it improve staff retention, creating a machine learning solution to carry out one of the largest modelling exercises conducted using workforce data.
With colleague retention one of the most important business challenges across the retail and logistics industries in general, our client wanted to lead the way in being a great place to work.
To achieve this, they called on KPMG for support. A multidisciplinary KPMG team with deep expertise across operations, people & change, data analytics & modelling created a comprehensive and systematic project plan, delivered over the course of 12 months.
This started with a primary qualitative research phase to develop a deep understanding of the working environment through observation, interviewing and workshops, conducted with reference to 60 hypotheses around what factors may impact staff engagement and retention. A second phase consisted of extensive external benchmarking to contextualise their performance and identify the white space they could occupy to differentiate from competitors. This also included looking outside the immediate industry to adjacent organisations.
The third phase was the centrepiece of KPMG’s work – the building of a leading-edge machine learning model to analyse the huge amounts of live data available to create insights into the drivers of employee retention. This included using some sophisticated approaches to enrich the solution, such as SHAP values and scenario modelling, which enabled KPMG not only to identify factors leading to employees leaving but crucially to interrogate the model’s results to understand why this may be the case. This opens up the ‘black box’ of machine learning to make it truly actionable. To KPMG’s knowledge, the solution is one of the largest scale turnover modelling exercises conducted using workforce data.
Based on the insights generated, KPMG then used a design thinking approach and ran collaborative working sessions with our client to surface 54 ideas/opportunities across five key areas (recruitment & onboarding; job design; pay & incentives; culture & engagement; structured development). Seventeen of these ideas were then shortlisted as ‘must do’ initiatives under five workstreams.
KPMG also built a data-driven scenario model to support the client with dynamically predicting the impact of making changes in these key areas. For example, this model highlighted that reducing driving incidents for the top 10% of new joiners who faced incidents in their first 12 weeks could reduce new joiner turnover by more than 5%.
A powerful dashboard visualisation suite was created enabling the client to view the results and see how factors change over time, along with comprehensive training to equip teams to use it.
Key outcomes already achieved include:
- 54 employee experience enhancement opportunities identified and 5 workstreams set up to implement these
- 17% reduction in staff turnover last year
- On track to hit new joiner retention targets by the end of this year, for the first time in many years
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