port that their companies will be investing more over the next six
months into training and recruiting efforts. But at the end of the
day, if employees are don’t feel valued, they aren’t going to stay.
For PricewaterhouseCoopers, that means acknowledging that
employees have individual needs, so a retention strategy designed
for all is destined for failure. “There isn’t just one path; there’s a
variety of paths,” says Genevieve Girault, the firm’s human resources communications director.
PwC recently faced some retention issues of its own. In 2001,
ILLUSTRATION B Y VAL BOCHKOV
Girault says, “We kind of reached a critical point when we
reached a record high turnover at 24 percent.” At that point, she
and her colleagues had to figure out who was leaving and why.
“We really sat down to do a lot of thinking,” she says. That thinking and their research determined that women were the ones running for the door. “We realized we were losing some of our
moms,” says Girault, adding that some men were leaving for the
same reason—family time.
So PwC made a number of policy changes that Girault says
