Md Nazmul Hasan

“Employee turnover” as an expression is broadly used in business organization. Despite the fact that several studies have been performed on this topic, little research has been conducted on examining the causes and leading factors of turnover as well, as advising some feasible approaches, which can be applied by bosses to ensure that employees will continue in their respective organizations to enhance organizational effectiveness and productivity. The main purpose of this study is to determine the reasons and key factors in the perspectives of the relevant literature and identify to the intention of employee turnover. This conceptual paper also suggests various possible strategies on how to minimize the turnover and retain employees in the organizations. Hence, the paper has proposed a conceptual framework that shows the major variables in explaining the phenomenon of employee turnover and addressing sound retention strategies to handle these issues.

Purpose Drawing on the “ISO 26000: 2010 – Guidance on social responsibility” handbook, this paper aims to investigate the extent to which Bangladeshi small- and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) are incorporating social responsibility (SR)/sustainability into their regular business activities. It is also aimed at providing insights into how Bangladeshi SME owner-managers perceive the concept of SR, and exploring the key drivers of and barriers to socially responsible and sustainable business practices. Design/methodology/approach A mixed-method research was carried out in two sequential phases. During the first phase, 110 printed questionnaires (59 of which were eventually used) were distributed among the owner-managers of the selected SMEs. The second phase involved seven in-depth semi-structured interviews. Findings The findings reconfirm the existence of the so called “attitude-behaviour” gap. The barriers that hinder the sustainable engagement of SMEs include corruption, a weak regulatory environment, inefficient or ill-suited government and external support and a lack of awareness of the environmental aspects of SR. In addition, this research reveals that Bangladeshi manufacturing SMEs do, to a certain degree, implement SR; only those few issues that suit the owner-managers’ personal motives are addressed, while many others (e.g. environmental issues) are neglected. Finally, it has been found that the business type and size, and the owner-managers’ educational attainments have no significant influence on the degree of adoption of socially responsible business practices by Bangladeshi manufacturing SMEs. Originality/value This paper develops a tool suited to meaningfully assess the socially responsible and sustainable business activities of SMEs. By using the four key elements identified in ISO 26000, namely, labour practices, the environment, consumer issues and community involvement and development, and by using an innovative and effective technique, a sustainability score and implementation level were calculated quantitatively for the selected SMEs. The tool developed here can be used to study the sustainability related issues faced by SMEs based in other low-income developing countries.

Large scale, multi-organisational collaborations between researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds are increasingly recognised as important to investigate and tackle complex real-world problems. However differing expectations, epistemologies, and preferences across these teams pose challenges to following best practice for ensuring high-quality and rigorous qualitative research, while maintaining goodwill and team cohesion across team members. This article presents critical reflections from the real-world experiences of a team navigating the challenges of collaborating on a large-scale, cross-disciplinary interview study. Based on these experiences, we extend the literature on large team qualitative collaboration by highlighting the importance of balancing autonomy and collaboration, and propose eight recommendations to support high quality research and team cohesion. We identify how this balance can be achieved at different times: when centralised decision-making should be prioritised, and autonomy can be allowed. We argue that prioritising time to develop shared understandings, build trust, and creating positive environments that accept and support differing researcher perspectives on qualitative methods is paramount. By exploring and reflecting on these differences, teams can identify how and when to support autonomy in decision-making, when to move forward collaboratively, and how to ensure that shared processes reflect the needs of the whole team. The reflexive findings, emanating from practical experience, can inform large research teams undertaking qualitative studies to explore complex issues. We make an original contribution to qualitative methods research by arguing that balancing autonomy and collaboration is the key to promoting high quality research and cohesion in large teams.

Urban environments are key health determinants and play a critical role in improving health outcomes and equity. However, urban policies in the United Kingdom (UK) and globally frequently fail to produce healthy towns and cities. Given the highly centralized nature of UK policy, we analyzed national UK policy documents published since 2010 in two key areas of urban policy: housing supply and transport. We found that health is largely absent in narratives shaping urban development and, where health is included, it is as an assumed indirect outcome of delivering other policy agendas. Thus, we recommend that explicit direct and measurable health objectives must be integrated front and center in urban policies, and cross-sector collaboration across national government on health prevention to manage the complex linkages across policy areas. Evidencing the interactive effects between improving health outcomes and dominant urban policy agendas can incentivize shared accountability for health outcomes.