Employee Satisfaction at Pra

Overview

PRA Health Sciences (Formerly PRA International) is the 4th largest global clinical research organization in the world with its headquarters in Raleigh North Carolina. They were founded in 1982 as PRA, a Data Management Clinical Research organization.   They currently have over 70 offices around the world and more than 10,000 employees.  They perform stage 1-4 research trials for major pharmaceutical companies around the world.  PRA provides outsourced clinical development services to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry and they work to help develop lifesaving drugs. All of the documentation that is needed for these trials is shipped to the Lenexa Kansas office where it is scanned into the electronic Trial Master File and then filed in the Trial Master File.  

Preliminary Problem

Over the last year PRA has seen a loss of staff to similar organizations within the Kansas City Metro Area.  With this very high turnover rates that the company has been experiencing it has increased the work flow of the Document Management Department and has led to the institution of voluntary overtime for salary employees.  The main issue with this is that it is the same employees coming in each time it is requested and other employees are not stepping up to the task to help our dept. work as a team.  The QC Dept. has not been a welcoming area to new hires, it has been an area of unfriendliness and often quiet with nobody speaking to each other.  Now that overtime is needed there is no one new offering to come in and help because there is a strong lack of team mentality and nobody thinks like about helping out others in the group.  With no sense of team moral often a small group of people are left to pick up the slack and then this creates hostility among the team members.  Another issue that this company is facing is the fact that it is now currently hiring former employees who left for different companies into higher paying and more advanced positions within the company and causing an employee mentality that you have to leave for six months so they promote you rather than stay there and earn your way to the position. The second issue that is addressing this department is the fact that they are hiring new employees at a higher hourly rate than those who are currently employed and they are expected to train these new employees on how to do their job when they are getting paid more than them.   This has led to a higher rate of employee dissatisfaction and higher turnover rates.  With the high level of job dissatisfaction and high turnover rates then the question must be asked.  How can employee satisfaction be improved?