pratikkk

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Employee Retention of Bechtel : Bechtel Corporation (Bechtel Group) is the largest engineering company in the United States, ranking as the 3rd-largest privately owned company in the U.S. With headquarters in the Financial District of San Francisco,[2] Bechtel had 49,000 employees as of 2010 working on projects in nearly 50 countries with $30.8 billion in revenue.
Bechtel participated in the building of Hoover Dam in the 1930s. It has also had involvement in several other high profile construction engineering projects, including the Channel Tunnel, numerous power projects, refineries, and nuclear power plants, BART, Jubail Industrial City, the largest Airport in the world by land area King Fahd International Airport in Dammam, and Kingdom Centre and Tower in Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong International Airport, the Big Dig, the rebuilding of the civil infrastructure of Iraq funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the hauling and installing of more than 35,000 trailers and mobile homes for Hurricane Katrina victims in Mississippi.
The Bechtel family has owned Bechtel since incorporating the company in 1945. Bechtel's size, its political clout, and its penchant for privacy have made it a constant subject of scrutiny for journalists and politicians since the 1930s. Bechtel owns and operates power plants, oil refineries, water systems, and airports in several countries including the United States, Turkey, and the United Kingdom.

Less than two years into the contract at Los Alamos, the new management and operating partnership has made strides behind the scenes, maintaining its mission while absorbing increased costs without a budget increase. The facility has improved employee retention, reduced its contractor staff, and become more efficient using tools such as Six Sigma. Huge amounts of classified material have been eliminated, and communication processes have been reexamined, resulting in better security for facilities and networks.

Lawrence Livermore has only recently entered its new stage as a business entity, but it met every milestone on the way to the official transition last October from UC to the new consortium. Lawrence Livermore has been noted in particular for its work with radiation detection and supercomputer simulations. Its Blue Gene/L supercomputer is currently the fastest on the planet, with a top speed of 280 teraflops and 3 trillion calculations each second. Its scientists are pioneers in the fields of lasers, bio*fuels, and cancer detection, to name just a few.

Livermore is Los Alamos’ sister laboratory, meaning that the two facilities engage in a continual process of scientific peer review to keep each other sharp. “There’s always been a spirit of healthy competition,” says Lynda Seaver, spokesperson for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Bechtel has always functioned as a family-owned company. Its founder, Warren A. Bechtel, started as an employee of the burgeoning United States railroad industry in 1898 after his Oklahoma cattle ranch failed. Over the next 20 years, he built up a sizeable contracting business that specialised in railroad and highway building. One of Bechtel's earliest major contracts was grading the site of the Oroville, CA depot for the Western Pacific Railroad, then under construction.
In 1919, Warren Bechtel and his partners (including his brother Arthur) built the Klamath Highway in California, and in 1921 Warren Bechtel partners won a contract to build the water tunnels for the Caribou Hydroelectric Facility in that state. In 1925, Warren A. Bechtel's sons Warren Jr., Stephen, and Ken joined him and incorporated as W.A. Bechtel Company. In 1926, the new company won its first major contract, the Bowman Lake dam in California.
In a down economy, employees have fewer opportunities to take a job at another company, but entrepreneurs would be remiss to take their fingers off the pulse of company morale simply because employees have fewer options. "Companies that don't think about [employee retention], that basically rest on their laurels and think 'the economy will take care of us, where are they going to go?' Those are the companies that, as soon as the labor market picks back up, their turnover rates are going to go from 5 percent to 50 percent and it will happen overnight," says Mark Murphy, author of The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention and CEO of Leadership IQ, a Washington D.C.-based executive education firm.

So what's one of the biggest reasons people quit their jobs? "One of the major reasons is being dissatisfied with their supervisor," says Linda Argote, a professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon and editor-in-chief of Organization Science. And in the cramped confines of a small business, that relationship can create even more of a strain. "In bigger companies there are more opportunities to move to other jobs if you're dissatisfied with a particular supervisor but like the firm, whereas smaller companies may have less options so they run the risk of losing the employee," Argote adds.

How to Improve Employee Retention: Motivation is Not Enough

Bonuses, vacation days, office parties, and many of the tools in a business owner's arsenal revolve around rewarding employees for a job well done and motivating them to produce similarly stunning results in the future. But Murphy says that leaders who dole out these types of perks are only focusing on half of the picture.

There are "two issues generally going on with employees at any given time: there are 'shoves,' things that demotivate people, and then there are 'tugs,' the things that motivate you, that tug at you to stay at the organization," he says. While these factors will differ for every employee, leaders often make the mistake of focusing on the motivators without adequately considering what rubs people the wrong way.
In a down economy, employees have fewer opportunities to take a job at another company, but entrepreneurs would be remiss to take their fingers off the pulse of company morale simply because employees have fewer options. "Companies that don't think about [employee retention], that basically rest on their laurels and think 'the economy will take care of us, where are they going to go?' Those are the companies that, as soon as the labor market picks back up, their turnover rates are going to go from 5 percent to 50 percent and it will happen overnight," says Mark Murphy, author of The Deadly Sins of Employee Retention and CEO of Leadership IQ, a Washington D.C.-based executive education firm.

So what's one of the biggest reasons people quit their jobs? "One of the major reasons is being dissatisfied with their supervisor," says Linda Argote, a professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon and editor-in-chief of Organization Science. And in the cramped confines of a small business, that relationship can create even more of a strain. "In bigger companies there are more opportunities to move to other jobs if you're dissatisfied with a particular supervisor but like the firm, whereas smaller companies may have less options so they run the risk of losing the employee," Argote adds.

How to Improve Employee Retention: Motivation is Not Enough

Bonuses, vacation days, office parties, and many of the tools in a business owner's arsenal revolve around rewarding employees for a job well done and motivating them to produce similarly stunning results in the future. But Murphy says that leaders who dole out these types of perks are only focusing on half of the picture.

There are "two issues generally going on with employees at any given time: there are 'shoves,' things that demotivate people, and then there are 'tugs,' the things that motivate you, that tug at you to stay at the organization," he says. While these factors will differ for every employee, leaders often make the mistake of focusing on the motivators without adequately considering what rubs people the wrong way.
 
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