Ensuring Capacity for Growth - Employee Retention
I've worked with many Balanced Scorecard organizations, and when it comes time to think about Learning and Growth (sometimes called the People perspective), leaders inevitably come up with an objective called "Hiring, Developing, and Retaining Talent." The measure can be different for different organizations depending on their strategy, but there is always a discussion about whether "employee turnover" should be the right measure for the organization.
I have never really liked employee turnover because I didn't think it captured the richness of employee issues related to developing and retaining talent. The Nonprofit Times this week also addressed the issue of employee retention in an article called Staff Burnout: The 5 Deadly Sins. These 5 issues were originally identified by Mark Murphy of Leadership IQ. I'll summarize them here and give my thoughts on how they relate to strategy management. The sins are:
- Treating Everyone Equally
- One Size Fits All
- Neglecting the First 90 Days
- Letting Them Leave
- Turning Your Back
It is in this first sin, Treating Everyone Equally, where employee turnover goes awry. Employers should be most concerned about their key employees, and they should be careful to define "key employees" as those that play critical roles in their strategy. Since different organizations have different strategies, the key employee would differ from one organization to the next. There has been some excellent writing about aligning employees to the strategy and the Balanced Scorecard through job families by Drs. Norton and Kaplan in their book Alignment.
The idea of job families and simply key jobs forces an organization to realize that it does matter which employees you lose. This makes you realize that employee turnover is not as helpful as a measure like "voluntary turnover in key job positions" or a more positive measure like "staff engagement survey results of key personnel." I think the other "sins" map more closely to traditional HR, but reading about the first one really made me think about strategy execution.
June 2021
S | M | T | W | T | F | S |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
Monthly Archive
June 2014 (1)
May 2014 (2)
March 2014 (1)
February 2014 (2)
January 2014 (1)
December 2013 (1)
October 2013 (2)
September 2013 (1)
July 2013 (2)
June 2013 (2)
April 2013 (1)
March 2013 (3)
February 2013 (4)
January 2013 (7)
December 2012 (4)
November 2012 (8)
October 2012 (9)
September 2012 (5)
August 2012 (6)
July 2012 (5)
June 2012 (7)
May 2012 (8)
April 2012 (5)
March 2012 (5)
February 2012 (6)
January 2012 (6)
December 2011 (7)
November 2011 (9)
October 2011 (9)
September 2011 (2)
August 2011 (8)
July 2011 (6)
June 2011 (8)
May 2011 (12)
April 2011 (5)
March 2011 (1)
February 2011 (2)
January 2011 (4)
December 2010 (6)
November 2010 (3)
October 2010 (5)
September 2010 (4)
August 2010 (3)
July 2010 (2)
June 2010 (1)
May 2010 (2)
April 2010 (1)
March 2010 (3)
January 2010 (4)
December 2009 (1)
November 2009 (1)
October 2009 (1)
September 2009 (3)
August 2009 (2)
July 2009 (3)
June 2009 (3)
May 2009 (6)
April 2009 (5)
March 2009 (3)
February 2009 (2)
January 2009 (2)
December 2008 (2)
November 2008 (2)
October 2008 (4)
September 2008 (6)
August 2008 (5)
July 2008 (4)
June 2008 (9)
May 2008 (5)
April 2008 (6)
March 2008 (8)