There are almost certainly some people in your business who if you were to loose them you won’t cry about it. There are others who are the life blood of your business however, perhaps in Project or Executive roles and when they go, it can be a big problem!
In many businesses, succession planning for high performers and talent management is done through a process like making sure you have where possible, at least one off site a ¼ then having drinks with those people you’re a little worried about, to find out what the true story is around their ambitions
The problem with this kind of process and it may not look exactly like this, as it might be a six monthly thing, or you might get one of your team a person you know really well to find out things for you.
Consider four ways of ensuring you know exactly where people are up to on your team, so you don’t get nasty surprises.
- Setup agreements with your people so that you’ll let them know if you were ever going to make a move somewhere else with some decent notice and be specific. Ensure in this moment that they also commit to letting you know if they were getting itchy feet or wanted new opportunities, and make sure they commit to giving you the same notice period.
- When new people start after 4-12 weeks consider having an up front “Performance Management” style type meeting, this is not to tell them they need to pull their socks up, but more to set the scene for the future, and yes you might even address some tiny niggles early.
- Keep the dialogue open between all your team members and understand where your market is at. Are there many opportunities and head hunters calling daily in order to try and snap up your best people. Or is the market really quiet in your neck of the woods.
- Find out what your best people value most and make sure you are delivering them what they value. In Sales environments part of this might be about money, but ironically often it may be more about recognition, and often people miss this, until it’s too late.
Have a look at what Jack Welch from GE says about the treatment of people, and just have a think about whether
1) You Agree
2) If you do, is your business treating its people like this? If you don’t, do you have a process that’s really working?
If you are in a business where you often have your people leaving and whether they are good or bad start to look more carefully at what you are and are not doing to mentor your people. The true cost of most team member losses is hidden in many monthly financial reports, why is this?
Well in the past financial reporting has not been smart enough and even today is not able to track the “True cost” of losing a person. Below are some things to consider, the numbers are rough but start to have a think, if you are losing people its probably costing you far more than you imagined! Below the salary is only $70K and being conservative true costs might look like.
If we were to track the true cost to the business of people leaving you would need to consider things like:
Person Leaving Average Salary $140K = $12K per month
- Recruitment Costs
– Cost $16K - The time it took to get them to full competency (4 months)
– Cost $48K - Time other people “Internal Trainers” spent to get them confident
– Cost $30K - The time peers in the business spent with them (2 months)
– Cost $24K - All the Managers time $200K Salary spent (2 weeks across a year)
– Cost $10K - Loss of productivity from down time while you the role filled
– Cost $20K - HR Team member costs
– Cost $10K
Total Cost $168K
Now that’s only on the outgoing person who may have only stayed 12 month’s to two years, you will now need to incur all these same costs on retraining the new recruit and if you get it wrong again…
Author: Hunter Dean see https://www.linkedin.com/in/hunterdean/ for LinkedIn Profile
Based in Melbourne Australia www.hunterdean.com
Peopleformance 