Get The Poison Out

I spend a lot of time advising Human Resources professionals regarding the calculation of the return on investment of their Strategic People Programs. There are a variety of ways to assess if the money you are paying vendors is contributing to revenue producing behaviors. Much of our conversation analyzes the value of retaining top talent.

How much does it cost to hire and train new talent?
How much production is lost when tenured employees depart?

It would be a perfect world if Succession Planning started on our date of hire. Essentially, streamlining the Human Resource functions of hiring, on-boarding and exit strategy (for lack of a better term) into Performance Management. But, that's about as likely as eliminating performance reviews.

Performance Reviews are a necessary legal document that are in place in the event you need to fire someone. They do not motivate, but they are not going away.

Succession Planning should not be predicated on the average retirement date of Baby Boomers. Nor should we pretend the preferred style of leadership as applicable to Generation Y matters more than developing Generation X leaders.    

With all the focus on retention one interesting question has come up:

How much attrition is healthy?

People who hate their job ruin company cultures. Some of them are top performers who others look up to. Others are highly-tenured employees who have deemed themselves the keepers of the flame.

Would it be insane to have a member of your staffing department assigned to help actively disengaged employees find another job?

There is never an easy way to off-board an employee. Forcible exit may cause a lawsuit and managing out can sour an employee to your organization for life. None of us want bad Glassdoor reviews.

So what if your culture was so strong that your employees simply wouldn't stand for negativity? Would the actively disengaged be crowd sourced to the exits?

Sometimes our greatest talent are the least vocal because they have been over-shadowed by those who have assumed the conch through tenure. If our employees believe so strongly in the organizational cause, the complainers will eventually fire themselves.

Don't Forget to Remember!

Dave