The Happy Future Group

We all have heard this a million times: employees are the most valuable assets of a company. It sounds great, but in the everyday life, we can see many examples of companies forgetting this nice statement.
So, in the practice, what is the most valuable asset of a company? Did I hear you say it? Yes! Money! Well, this was an easy one, because management reviews the financial weekly and monthly, while they evaluate their employees only once a year, and that is if they ever do. And when they evaluate, in many cases it is only to bring up all the “bad” things they can to discourage the employee to ask for a raise.
Well, this is what mediocre managers do. The good managers know that the quality of financials are a consequence of the quality of the motivation and therefore of the performance of their employees.
Employee turnover is a sign of the quality of the company culture, and this for a simple reason. Why would people leave a company if they are happy and that they are treated fairly? Really, there are not many reasons why they would or should. Most employees would prefer to spend their all lives in the same organization. And most employees go to work with the desire of doing a good job and thus not have any conflict with the boss. Of course, there are always employees who will look to find something somewhere else, but these are a small minority.
The higher the turnover, the lower the morale and the poorer the company culture. For the reasons that I was indicating above about the general employee loyalty and ethics, it will have to take a fair amount of frustration and actually the realization that there is no hope for improvement for an employee to decide to go browse on the job market again. It has been said before, and it is very true: employees do not leave companies, they leave their manager. Ha! That is a good one for you to ponder about when someone leaves your department, isn’t it? Of course, it takes two to tango and there are many reasons why things do not work out the way they should, and maybe another reason for the employee to leave is simply that communicating on the issues at play did not happen. So it also takes two to divorce.
Managers have performance contracts, but these contracts are mostly linked to financial results (the important asset class) and some “non-financial, which in many cases end up to be some interesting project that are never quantified when it comes to their real added-value or degree of difficulty. Very rarely will employee retention (another expression) for employee satisfaction be an integral part of the performance contract.
And this is quite sad, because employee turnover is a plague. It costs a lot, just like it costs a lot to replace a lost customer. First it will cost financially, because the company has to place a job ad, and might have to pay some severance. Then several people in the organization will have to spend time for the selection process and the interviews. Once the new employee is hired, you can be sure that time (time is money) will be spend on training the newcomer, and this period can last up to 6 months, depending on the jobs. Indirectly, it can cost you money too either because people talk and the turnover will eventually give your company a poor reputation and in some cases because the employee who left might attract with him customers away from your company.
Some managers, reading this would say that the turnover is high because they have to fire people. Well, that is another indicator of the quality of the company, as they would not recruit the right people…

Copyright 2009 The Happy Future Group Consulting Ltd.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at 12:22 am and is filed under Business Management, Happy at Work, Talent at Work, Team and Performance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.