Need a good argument for why thinking about employee retention is worthwhile? Via Auren Hoffman’s blog comes a slightly different take on it than you’re probably used to. The story goes something like this:
- Man wants to work for company X
- Man ACTIVELY CAMPAIGNS to work for company X (including setting up a website/blog specifically for the purpose)
- Blog becomes big hit at company X
- Man gets hired at company X on “its most important project”
- Project is killed off
- Man is fired
- Man goes on 3 month vacation with severance package
- Man comes back from vacation
- Man is hired back at company X on a different project
My view on the lessons to be learned from this:
- It’s worth knowing who your best and most talented employees are (performance evaluations)
- It’s worth doing what you can to retain these highly motivated people (pay for performance / feedback, etc)
- It’s worth knowing what competencies are needed at your company and which employees have them (competency evaluations) – so you don’t get rid of people who are needed and
- It generally (there are exceptions) makes no sense time-wise, cost-wise or productivity-wise to fire someone you think enough of to hire back at a later date.
Any other thoughts?
February 21st, 2007 at 11:01 am
Regarding your Instant Poll
Definately is not a word
March 4th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Max,
In some cases its not just a matter of retention. There are many cases where talent is moved out of the company because it is talented. I know of a company that brought its top young talent from each division onto an ERP project. Many of these managers they had sent through MBA school. This team spent almost a year becoming intimately familiar with the business and defining the future processes of the company. Then they worked together to perform an ERP selection and plan the implementation. At this point they found they were going to be short on their numbers and so they cancelled the project and laid off the project team. I wonder how powerful this management team would have been in a few years after they completed this shared experience. Instead they systematically removed their top talent from the business. The company has not yet recovered. The lack of competency based talent management is staggering.
Dennis Stevens
CEO, Synaptus
http://www.synaptus.com
March 7th, 2007 at 8:19 am
The key is that most organization do a terrible job of design jobs. Most organizations “job descriptions” are years old, and focus on what an HR rep feels are critical to the job. For example, Company X has 2 Director of Product Management jobs open, and using the job description we are going to hire very similar individuals. What organization must do is define what the activities, outputs, competencies, and business objectives are and then identify the best candidates that have complimentary skills so that we have A players in the positions where sum is greater than either individual is on their own.
Next we have to make sure that we are also hiring for the future skills of the organization and needs of Product Management not just for today.