What Color Are Your Employees? Wed 28 Feb 07

Losing experienced employees is never pleasant.  You've invested a lot of time and training effort with them.  They have a lot of valuable job related expertise and institutional knowledge that can not be easily replaced. 

Have you ever experienced the following scenario?

Joe:  I just heard that Sam just quit.

Pete: This is going to hurt.  He was my best employee

Joe: Yeh, he was good.  What a shock.

Pete:  I'm not too surprised.  He wasn't happy with his career opportunities here.

If you're Joe, at this point you bite your tongue and wonder, "If you knew he wasn't happy and might leave why didn't you do something?"

A recent newspaper article outlined what one company, Convergys, is doing to retain valuable employees.  Every week, supervisors use 50 indicators such as increased tardiness or declining performance to assess employees and assign a color code of red, yellow or green.  Red indicates that the employee is likely to leave.  If an employee is assessed as yellow they have regular meeting with the employee to gauge their outlook.  If an employee is assessed as red they have an immediate intervention to address the particular situation.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't list what the 50 indicators are.  However, if you meet with your employees on a regular basis and are attuned to what is going on you may not need them.  I don't believe the scenario I described above is all that uncommon.  There are usually signs of employee dissatisfaction if you take the time to look for them.

So although the formal assessment process of Convergys is great that is not where the real benefit is in my opinion.  The real benefit of the program is that it is a call to action to respond to the situation.  Too often we sense a potential problem but don't do anything about it.  Sometimes it because we don't know what to do or there is not much we can do. 

Presumably, since Convergys has set up this program they have also established processes to deal with the situation once it is identified.  Ignoring a possible problem never solves it, you have to act and act quickly.  A key element is communication.  Open and honest discussion can give you clues to the underlying issue and possible way to resolve.  Sometimes just having the conversation is enough when the employee just wants to be heard and know they are valued.

Too often a supervisor may be aware of the situation and want to take action only to be stymied by rigid policies.  Want to give some a sabbatical or extra training or flexible work hours to keep them in their job.  Sorry, thats against policy.  Fighting the policy parrots can be exhausting and you don't always get a lot of support since your boss decides that is policy is not worth the political capital required.

So what to do?  First, don't wait until you a critical situation arises.   Most organizations can't react fast enough to change policies quickly enough to be of much help.  Second, work with your boss and the Human Resources department to explain what you are trying to do and get their support.  If they understand the goal they will work with you even if what you want to do goes against existing policy.  If you get them on your side you can get the policies changed.

I'd love to hear what your doing to retain valuable employees and how you went about setting up your program.

If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• Scaling the Heights
• Change Martyrs
• Or the posts in the "Organizational Development" category