Mining the good from the goodbyes

Parting has traditionally been seen as a source of bitter sorrow, especially for the party being parted from. The stiff upper lip isn’t the only reason that someone leaving a job is usually described less emotionally, of course (calls for passion in the workplace aren’t usually meant literally: naked emotions and carpet tiles will never be a happy combination), but organisations do stand to gain from the experience.

The opportunity – all too often a missed one – is to pay real attention to the exit survey process, exploring the added value that anonymity or third party mediation can give by allowing uncomfortable truths to be spoken, and learning about both the push factors that drove the leavers away and the pull factors from elsewhere that lured them.

Organisations no longer a job for life; in return, they must acknowledge that talent will therefore tend to migrate. But if security cannot be part of the offer, how many organisations truly understand which other elements of their employee value proposition – both in theory and in practice – are actually effective in supporting their talent management and planning?

These are all issues among those that ASK Practice Director, Anton Franckeiss, explored in an article – Mining the good from the goodbyes – recently published by Strategic HR Review, a copy of which you can download here or from our Elsewhere page.

Once you’ve read the article, we’d welcome your reactions, feedback, experiences or opinion – just use the Comment box below to share your thoughts.

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The multiple faces of employee engagement

We can be a perennially puzzling species. While the majority of us almost certainly head to work intending to do our best, it would interesting to know how many of us are that generous in our assumptions and assessments about those around us – and how far any gap is accounted for by the generosity we tend to extend when we are invited to assess ourselves. But I strongly suspect that the start of any new job – something we’ve (usually) chosen to apply for, polished our cvs and interview skills, cleared the hurdles of interview and assessment centre – is a time when all of us are at our most positively intentioned. There’s a lot of hoping as well as striving in the journey from hoping to induction, and the moment of arrival is a time when we are looking to invest that hope.

That’s a view echoed in the words of Orlagh Hunt, group HR director at the RSA Insurance Group, in an interview with People Management:

We know that people show up in a new company wanting to engage. Very few people think, ‘I’m going to do as little as humanly possible and be as destructive as I can’. They start off thinking this is a shining new opportunity, and then the job they do, the leader they get, the environment they’re in either translates that optimism into having a great time and doing a great job, or not quite so much.” 

 

The Spending Challenge – or the Engagement Puzzle?

Despite the evidence from our tape-measures, we are entering an era of belt-tightening. It’s not so much ‘staying in’ that’s going to be the new ‘going out’, as going without. The recession is rumoured to be over, but the recovery is a matter of doing more with less. And – less widely spoken but just as importantly – for less. Even Waitrose – a winner during the last two years, much to some people’s surprise – now has an Essentials range. As they say in supermarket circles, every little helps (customer service and commitment to quality probably being among those helpful little things.) How different organisations and sectors have responded shows interesting differences, however, as evidenced by CIPD’s Employee Outlook Quarterly Survey Report Spring 2010 (download as PDF here). Decisions taken will, of course, be influenced by big differences in flexibility within national or local arrangements, but the figures for the latest report show a marked polarisation in a number of factors closely related to talent retention and development between the public and private sectors.