Category Archives: Talent

Top 10 Reasons That Good Employees Quit

A recent article on Material Handling Management on-line which noted that, according to the U.S. Department of Labor and Statistics, turnover can cost an organization 33% of an employee’s total compensation was kind enough to summarize the “top 10 reasons good employees quit”. It’s an important read because they’re all preventable, and keeping good employees not only lowers costs, but it maintains morale … and a happy employee is a productive employee.

  1. The Job Was Not As Expected
    The job changes from the original description to something else. The employee, who believes that his new employer played a bait-and-switch game, wonders what else the company lied about and seeks greener pastures.
  2. Work Life Imbalance
    Forcing your staff to pick up the slack when a project’s behind, when a team-mate departs, or when you just finished a right-sizing might look like a great cost-savings opportunity, until your employees get tired of 60, 70, and 80 plus hour weeks and decide to stick it back to you.
  3. New Hire Mismatch
    Square pegs don’t fit in round holes. ‘Nuff said.
  4. Management Freezes Raises and Promotions
    Generally speaking, money isn’t the top reason someone takes a job or the top reason someone leaves one, but if an employee can earn 15%, 20%, or 25% across the street …
  5. Feeling Undervalued
    No one wants to feel less useful than a door-stop. A little praise for a job well done goes a long way.
  6. Lack of Decision-Making Power
    No one wants to be micro-managed, and there’s no need to micromanage a good employee who was hired because she can do the job better than you in the first place.
  7. Not Enough Coaching/Feedback
    Good employees want a career path … and want help getting to the next level.
  8. Management Lacks People Skills
    Not only do people not want to feel like doorstops, they don’t want to work for them either. Make sure that your managers are properly trained and developed, or they might just cost you your best employees.
  9. Too Few Growth Opportunities
    If there’s no career path within, your employees will look for one without (you).
  10. Lost of Faith and Confidence in Leaders
    Make sure you always do the right thing.

A FieldGlass Update

Those of you who followed the travels of the Sourcing Maniacs on their 2008 Vendor Tour may recall that one of their stops was FieldGlass (in Chicago), a provider of an on-demand contingent workforce management solution.

A well-designed contingent workforce management solution will streamline the contingent labor requisition process, simplify the identification of qualified resources, automate the distribution of requests, standardize resource rates, automate the collection of quotes, track contracts, and insure that staffing companies and contractors always bill at the approved rate, and only for approved hours on approved projects. The solution will reduce recruitment costs, processing costs, and payment costs as well as prevent overcharges and overpayments, which can often total 20% or more at companies with a large contingent workforce and no solution to manage the process.

FieldGlass has taken the SaaS approach to application development, and instead of one big release every year or two, they’ve moved to a quarterly release cycle where they package smaller, but useful updates every quarter. Their latest release adds or improves on four areas functionality:

  • fine-grained service control
    More granular cost allocation, rate card flexibility and tracking down to GL accounts.
  • time-sheet review process
    The ability to have suppliers and local program managers review time-sheets as part of the approval process so that errors are caught, and corrected, earlier (or, in the worst case, supply managers cannot claim lack of knowledge of deceptive billing as they have to sign off).
  • improved ad-hoc approval support
    Sometimes there’s an emergency where you need someone right away and can’t follow the usual process.
  • decision wizard
    That can be used to guide you through the the process.

It was the last capability that caught my attention. With so many options to choose from in a large company: current approved staffing vendor, new recruiter, direct hire … statement of work, position advertisement, RFX … hourly rate, salary, fixed price contract … it can be hard for someone outside of HR and new to their position to make the right decision. The ability to create company specific decision trees for staffing and hiring allows a manager to walk through a series of Y/N or multiple-choice questions and quickly figure out the route they should be taking, the partner (if any) they should be using, the type of position they should be filling, and how they should be classifying it. This, in turn, allows a manager to focus on finding the right resource, instead of wasting time fiddling with processes, which is what workforce management should be all about.

Did We Need Yet Another Study To Tell Us That Slave-Driving Isn’t Productive?

A recent study from the University of Melbourne, covered by Computer World, found that workers are more productive if allowed to use the internet for leisure. Duh! Anyone with two working brain cells in IT should be able to tell you that.

Specifically, it found that People who do surf the Internet for fun at work – within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office – are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t. The explanation given is that people need to zone out for a bit to get back their concentration. Duh! Anyone who’s taught can tell you that. Every 17 to 20 minutes, you lose 1/3 of your audience if you don’t shake things up a bit, change the topic, wake them up, etc.

And even more insightful, the press release notes that it is important such browsing is done in moderation, as internet addiction can have the reverse effect. Duh! If you spend 8 hours a day following the twits that comprise the twittersphere, then you’re obviously not going to get anything done.

At least the computerworld article had the good sense to state the obvious points that should have been made.

  • It gets personal things off your mind.
    It’s hard to work distracted. If you can pop-on the internet, and get an annoyance like paying a bill, pre-ordering take-out, or getting out a message you can’t forget to deliver over with, you free yourself of distractions and this enables you to concentrate (providing you turn off those twitter feeds).
  • It converts unnecessary real-time interactions into asynchronous ones
    Nothing destroys deep concentration more than a five minute “pop-in” by a colleague who just feels the need to “talk”. If it’s unimportant, they can write you an e-mail, and you can read it later when you’re not in the middle of something important.
  • It makes work enjoyable.
    No one is productive in workplace hell where bosses spend all their time reciting garbage along the lines of “personal time steals from the company” and doing everything they can to squash happiness. Happy workers are productive workers. Productive workers create value. And that’s what sells in today’s economy.

So keep your workplace fun and free of too many unnecessary restrictions. As long as employee behavior is responsible, you’ll get your money’s worth.

What to Look for in a Talent Management Application

A recent Industry Week article on “talent management technology: automate and analyze your metrics” claimed that the combination of technology, tech saviness, and concrete planning ultimately guarantees best-in-class talent management. Although I would disagree, as this leaves out the facts that you need a solid understanding of what “talent” is and what “talent” needs to do in order to effectively manage it, technology, tech savviness, and concrete planning are still necessary conditions of good talent management and any good advice you can get on these aspects is good advice you can use.

The article provided good advice in the form of five factors that you need to consider when selecting a talent management application, which will form the foundation of your talent management activities. The factors were:

  • Establish Clear Business Goals
    What are the primary goals of your talent management — better retention, improved knowledge management, ROI? You need to understand what you need before you can select the right application.
  • Think Smart, Think Strategy
    How is the tool going to help you? Performance evaluation support? Key trend identification? Surveys? Skill / Knowledge Tracking? This helps you select a tool with the right functionality.
  • Seamless Integration
    How well will it integrate with your current HR and Knowledge Management Platforms? If you have to rekey data through manual processes, it’s probably not the right solution for you.
  • User Friendly Software
    An application that isn’t easy to use isn’t used.
  • Proven Client Satisfaction
    Talk to long-term clients of the provider and make sure that the tool is still working for them after the initial shine has worn off. You want a solution from a provider who stands behind it for the long run.

And they are definitely factors you can’t overlook when selecting any software solution, not just talent management.

People versus Technology

Consider this excerpt from a recent article on “The Big Picture” in Industry Week:

We reviewed several conveyor delivery systems and settled on cutting-edge technology. It eliminated so many positions that the payback was very quick. Parts were routed through the department and into a sorting area to be automatically picked … we were really proud of this engineering marvel. … Then, reality started to set in. We weren’t ready for cutting-edge technology. It required engineers to program and mechanics to maintain all the little switches and gates. … The downtime had gotten so bad that we positioned full-time mechanics on the line. … We were missing cycles on the main assembly line and having to manually run interiors over to catch up with product. There was considerable capital investment and lots of sweat equity.

So the company brought in TBM and Shingijitsu lean consultants and started to study the Toyota Production System. They started with a week long kaizen event focussed on one component that resulted in a U-shaped cell delivering JIT to the assembly line that worked nicely on 90% of products. Additional kaizen events totally changed the department layout to a smaller footprint that verified the methodology. Then the plant ripped out the high-tech conveyor systems and performance improved while the production footprint decreased almost 45%. As a result, the plant was able to in-source a regional distribution center that generated additional savings and created synergies across the supply chain.

Moral of the Story: technology is good, the right technology is better, but nothing beats a great team with the right training and the empowerment to do what needs to be done.