Your riddle is a more like a puzzle box with intricate paths, subtly designed into the surface required to open it—a puzzle, by the way, spreading well beyond the Pacific Rim.

I think your description of the problem, however—“plagued by poor levels of commitment”—is very apt.

When I was in China less than a year ago, HR and staffing professionals uniformly pointed to high turnover (30 percent-40 percent) among middle managers as the No. 1 issue affecting their companies’ plans for growth, as well as concern over sustaining company performance. As a consequence, nearly all firms were resorting to counteroffers—promotions and money primarily—in a doomed attempt to improve retention. This short-term mentality has unintended consequences that you've described very well. Seeing how consistently their colleagues are rewarded by obtaining external job offers and parlaying them into promotions and raises, other career-minded employees are following suit. They see little alternative to periodically interviewing for an extra internal move, whether or not it makes any sense for the business.

I recently surveyed 100 of my U.S. colleagues and found that 97 percent are using counteroffers as a retention strategy—just not as liberally (yet) as their Asian counterparts.

In my opinion, the problem cannot be solved by escalating the compensation and titles without regard to profits. It can be solved by focusing on the core needs of a growing professional class in the Pacific Rim. There, as you know well I’m sure, the importance and expectation of rapidly escalating income and promotions are inextricably linked to family and mentors (to whom a high level of commitment is required).

If, for example, the successful completion of a project were to be followed by a great celebration where all the members of the team (not just management) were feted and their families were involved and they received significant bonuses, it would be clear where the honor (and commitment) lay.

If real profits are shared with employees, and especially if those profits include high regard for safety and social responsibility, there would be alternatives to this too-rapid ladder climbing. If leaders of multinational corporations continue to make 600 to 1,000 times an entry-level professional worker’s salary, however, employees are going to feel as if management isn’t committed to them—so why should employees commit to the company?

Your firm may be very different (I certainly hope so). Therefore it is essential that you break the cycle by:

1. Branding your company’s “difference” as part of the interviewing process. Tell stories in each interview about how employees are honored in ways that give their family great face in the community, not solely by compensation and promotion. Show real career maps and then commit to them.

2. Describe during the offer what a counteroffer is—how it may meet short-term career goals (for more money or prestige) by accepting it, but how long-term success may be lost forever by accepting short-term deals. Use this approach to pre-empt counteroffers. Never make a counteroffer after, only before.

3. Reduce to near zero your company’s use of counteroffers when your people leave. And if you do make a counteroffer, make it public to the rest of your workforce. That way, either they will have to be explained as an exception and business necessity or, as will likely be the case, they will be reduced even further as an embarrassment.

4. Develop a very aggressive alumni program to build relationships with all alumni so that they can refer candidates or return themselves. Celebrate every returning employee. This means that when someone leaves you treat them as if they are going away for a short time to learn new skills and return.

5. Publicize your programs in the industry and act as if it puts your company heads and shoulders above competitors, who must resort to bribery to keep theirs.

LEARN MORE: Sometimes, sweetening the pot to keep a valued employee may turn other things in your company sour.

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A change in daily schedule can be a major change for most people and a catastrophic change for some. You have employees who applied for and were hired to work a set first-shift schedule from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m., and now they must do something different. They may feel that a promise has been broken, even though one may never have been made. So it is understandable that such a dramatic transition can create bad feelings, resulting in declining morale.

I believe that most employees are willing to support efforts to make their place of employment stronger and their position of employment more secure. Although you may have gone through extended efforts to inform employees of the change and give them time to adjust, there must have been a breakdown in communications at some point.

Communication breakdowns and the absence of trust are two of the primary contributors to low employee morale. The drop in morale following the change in schedule may not be the major issue, but rather the final straw if the lacks of communication and trust are perceived by employees as the primary issues. It is in this area where we should start to explore methods to repair the damage done.

I suggest the following seven steps as a course of action.

1. Assess your process of delivering information to employees. Look at the methods of getting information to employees, the timeliness of that information, and at how comprehensive it is. Look for breakdowns, particularly in your first-line supervisor ranks. How well-informed and prepared are they to carry information to their employees? Try to determine if they share ownership in information communicated, both good and bad.

2. Every organization has a rumor mill. Assess the strength of yours. A strong rumor mill is a sure sign that you have had a significant breakdown in your communication process.

3. Survey your employees to establish a baseline for employee morale. Particular emphasis should be placed on trust in management, communications and employee involvement. Periods of low morale are good times to conduct an employee survey. These make it easy to map out areas needing improvement, as well as to demonstrate that improvement to your employees.

4. After you have secured the results of the survey, schedule focus groups to better determine the specific causes of discontent and get the employees actively involved with management to resolve issues. You may want to conduct a focus group specifically on the change in schedule, with the understanding that the company must maintain 24/5 coverage to meet customer needs. The employees may be able to propose some changes that you might like and adopt.

5. Address the issues identified. If communications and/or management skills are identified as major issues, address them with the understanding that there is no such thing as a quick fix. Commit to sustained improvement over time.

6. Create goals for improvement from the baseline to the next survey.

7. Develop a scorecard to communicate or chart changes that result from surveys and focus groups. Give credit to employee involvement for any activity implemented, process adjusted or methodology changed.

Employee morale can drop quickly and easily, but there is no quick or easy way to raise it to higher levels. That takes commitment and hard work from your management team.

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Whether these trainers are our company’s employees or professionals to whom you have subcontracted the work, the prescription is the same. First, you must define a successful training event from both an external and internal point of view.

The key is to understand that customer satisfaction drives true success, so begin by identifying the key stakeholders in your customer’s organization and designing metrics based upon what they would or would not expect from a successful event. Stakeholders might include the department purchasing your services, the human resources department, program participants and/or senior management. Because all customers, stakeholders and programs may be different, external success criteria could vary from one training event to the next. So, in the end, you may have multiple success measures based on each customer’s definition of success.

Once you have captured the metrics you believe drive customer satisfaction, you should test them to make sure they measure what was intended. It is important to validate your metrics on a regular basis and to update them based upon your customer’s expectations. For instance, if the customer is not interested in the cost per unit of service, why measure it?

From an internal perspective, your company’s metrics for measuring consultant performance and program success should be consistent and understandable. You must develop a metric that consolidates the previous metrics into one success metric (for example, overall customer satisfaction). Just because the customer’s criteria may vary from engagement to engagement, your performance expectations must allow the trainer to gauge if he/she was successful or not successful.

Your consultants should be fully aware of the expectations of both your customer and your company, and they should understand the metrics and the impact to their success. This will set them up for success by letting them know how to meet both the customer’s needs and those of your company. By clearly setting expectations upfront, you can avoid disappointing your customer and your trainers.

Once the metrics are established and validated, begin measuring and reporting on progress and or issues on a regular basis with both the customer and the training consultant. This will allow for celebration of successes and refocusing if off track.

So, the steps are:

1. Define success from your customer’s perspective.

2. Develop success metrics.

3. Test and validate the metrics.

4. Develop consistent internal metric aligned with customer success metric.

5. Test and validate the metric.

6. Communicate expectation and metric(s) used to validate success to both the customer and the consultant.

7. Measure consistently and update progress regularly.

Following these steps will help you to develop a fair and consistent approach to measuring success—both of your programs and your trainers.

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A well-designed exit survey process is an important source of information on turnover drivers. You could use it to inform your company’s retention efforts. Also, exit surveys could help organizations manage the final “handshake” with departing employees, to ensure that both sides part ways on the best terms possible.

Nonetheless, many organizations struggle with response-rate problems and issues of data integrity in their exit surveys. Both sets of difficulties stem from the same fundamental problem: Employees may not be entirely willing or able to share their true reasons for leaving at the time of departure.

Research generally has demonstrated low correlations between reasons for leaving given in exit interviews and those cited in follow-up surveys conducted in the months following a person’s departure. In exit interviews, departing employees may feel apprehensive about criticizing the organization, not wanting to compromise letters of recommendation or create difficulties for former work colleagues. Alternatively, when the exit interview is conducted, departing employees may not have yet fully examined and evaluated highly charged feelings toward the organization they are leaving.

What can organizations do to increase exit survey response rates and the accuracy of turnover-related information? Here are a few suggestions:

(1) Review communication approaches related to the exit survey to ensure that it is clear to employees why they are being asked to provide feedback and what will be done with the information.

(2) Consider enlisting the support of a third-party partner in administering the survey process, to provide employees with additional confidentiality protections.

(3) Consider supplementing exit interview data with information collected at a time when employees have placed some emotional distance between themselves and the organization. Former-employee surveys, targeting employees who have been out of the organization for three to six months, can be used to gather feedback on work experiences, current employment situations and current perceptions of their former employers.

SOURCE: William Werhane, global managing director, Hay Group Insight, Chicago, August 13, 2007.

LEARN MORE: Please read The Best Conditions for Conducting Exit Interviews for more tips.