{"id":653,"date":"2007-01-17T01:00:27","date_gmt":"2007-01-17T09:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=653"},"modified":"2007-01-17T01:00:27","modified_gmt":"2007-01-17T09:00:27","slug":"engagement-insights-from-a-dumb-little-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/?p=653","title":{"rendered":"Engagement Insights From a Dumb Little Man"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hey\u2026 <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.dumblittleman.com\/\">Dumb Little Man<\/a> is the name of his website, ok?\u00a0 Coming from a non HR practitioner he has some great insights about retaining engaging employees.\u00a0 In fact, I\u2019d be impressed if some of these ideas came from HR practitioners too.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some nuggets, but then go read the whole thing for yourself:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I work in a large company and this is a problem that we have with our IT and Sales groups in particular. I reached out a to a few peers with other companies (one is an IT exec and one is actually a Group President) and as an exercise, we took a bunch of historical data and started identifying the factors that led to the annual exodus. We focused only the top 20% of the employees from a performance standpoint. It&#8217;s not that the remaining 80% is unimportant, however, from a productivity, growth, and brainpower perspective, the top 20% of any group is critical. Moreover, these are the employees that are very difficult to replace.<\/p>\n<p>To do this, we reviewed notes from exit interviews, cross referenced annual reviews and ultimately came up with 178 voluntary terminations from people that would have been considered in the top 20%.<\/p>\n<p>To try and keep focused on macro issues, we consolidated the responses and placed them into categories:\u00a0\u00a0 ((Jay.\u00a0 September 19, 2006.\u00a0 &#8220;Why Top Employees Quit.&#8221;\u00a0 Retrieved from http:\/\/http:\/\/dumblittleman.blogspot.com on December 29, 2006.))<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>Money.\u00a0 Roughly 46% of the employees that left did so because of money concerns. To be honest, I thought this would be a much higher percentage. I think the most alarming stat to me here is that only 8 out of 83 (9%) people had maxed out their pay potential. Keep in mind that these are top employees that would have received above-average pay increases. My assumption is that they viewed changing companies as the faster path to higher earnings despite the fact that there may have been additional promotions available (which was the case several times).\u00a0 ((Ibid))<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I\u2019m surprised money (or some factor of total compensation) was actually this large.\u00a0 I think the writer hits the nail on the head later in the paragraph when he states that people were leaving the company as a faster path to growth.\u00a0 Goes to your talent management strategy and understanding how you ensure career progression, career pathing and career ladders.\u00a0 These employees were lost because the company didn\u2019t fulfill it\u2019s promise to grow them, not due to compensation.<\/p>\n<p>The author makes another more tactical point about the compensation group.\u00a0 Today\u2019s comensation workd is not about the internal compensation analysis.\u00a0 If your comp group isn\u2019t doing some sort of external benchmark, you\u2019re in trouble from your competitors.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Unchallenged.\u00a0 # At what point does workplace monotony kill someone&#8217;s drive? The Stats: 42 records (23%) showed this was their #1 reason for leaving.\u00a0 ((Ibid))<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This goes straight to the work.\u00a0 Why does everyone want to go work at Google?\u00a0 In the 90\u2019s it was Microsoft.\u00a0 It\u2019s because these companies are seen as the innovators where the exciting work is happening.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Too Challenged.\u00a0 Remember we are only talking about the 20% tier so the people that listed this reason, are not the lazy people of the bunch. They are the ones fed up with bureaucracy, hiring freezes, lack of cooperation, undefined goals, and poor technology. You cannot ask someone to complete 20 tasks and then give them inferior tools and personnel.\u00a0 ((Ibid))<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My first thought was that you don\u2019t want these people anyway.\u00a0 But the author does a great job explaining what\u2019 going on and again, it\u2019s another management failure.\u00a0 This one not so much with HR, but with operations.\u00a0 It seems that this organization has some serious issues and HR needs to be closer with operations to diagnose and cure the problems.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Dead Company.\u00a0 $30K a year with a company full of stiffs is worse to me than $28,500 with a fun energetic company.\u00a0 ((Ibid))<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I love this one.\u00a0 Culture really is that important, and it\u2019s probably worth more than $1500.\u00a0 Last job I had I probably could have easily gotten a $10K raise to move to another company.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t because I loved where I worked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hey\u2026 Dumb Little Man is the name of his website, ok?\u00a0 Coming from a non HR practitioner he has some great insights about retaining engaging employees.\u00a0 In fact, I\u2019d be impressed if some of these ideas came from HR practitioners&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[21,30,10,12,20,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-branding","category-compensation","category-engagement","category-learning-management","category-talent-management","category-workforce-planning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/systematichr.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}