Can a math formula help retain employees?
Employee retention: Is a math formula the next big idea?
We all know Google for their great work-place benefits – the stock options, free food cooked by chefs. What we didn’t know is that the company is struggling to retain its staff.
And in typical Google fashion, the company is now developing an algorithm which will be able to identify the employees who are likely to quit from its 20,000 workforce headcount.
Scary? Or even a little incredulous? Perhaps. While the Google officials are reluctant to divulge more information, it has confirmed that there is such an algorithm and that the formula is still being tested. Collecting input through information from surveys and peer reviews, the Google algorithm has already identified employees who felt underused – i.e. the people most likely to quit.
Edward Lawler, director of the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California, says Google is one of the few companies that are early in taking a more quantitative approach to personnel decisions.
“They are clearly ahead of the curve, but a lot of companies are waking up to the fact that there is a lot of modeling that can provide you with critical data on human capital,” says Lawler.
Google’s algorithm may help the company get inside people’s heads even before they have the intention to leave, but is it too late? Concerns of a talent exodus has revived amid the departures of top executives, while mid-level employees have been decamping to hotter start-ups like Facebook and Twitter.
Current and former Googlers attribute the company’s loss of talent to impersonal HR programmes. Some said the employees feel they can’t make the same impact the company does, while others said Google provides little formal career planning.
“They need to come up with ways to keep people engaged,” says Valerie Frederickson, a Silicon Valley personnel consultant who has worked with former Google employees. “If Google was doing this enough, they wouldn’t be losing all these people.”
While HR has often been referred to as a combination of art and science, can a math formula really deduce who is going to leave? And if it is effective, would you use it in your company? Or do you think relying on a math formula is hogwash and that it should just boil down to treating your employees right?
(Via WSJ)
Lisa Cheong
Lee Xieli
mavelltan
Human beings are complex and decisions & behaviours are results of permutations of varied factors. Just like free chef-cooked meals, benefits, etc., the math formula is likely to be relevant only to some of the employees.
I cannot imagine that there is a one-size fit all strategy on staff retention. I am a strong believer that the strategy should be layered in line with the Maslow’s triangle of needs. There should be generic benefits that affect all eg. healthy work space/environment and personalised benefits that are sensitively tailored to “some” individuals without marginalising the others …. This is definitely hard work for the HR practitioners. What is harder work is that benefits should not remian static, they have to be continually reviewed and fine tune to remain relevant. For example, the free chef cooked meals was a hit with personnel when it first started – newness, different from other companies, etc… After a while, the newness wears off, people get used to it and the marginal utility decline. The company need to review the marginal utility curve movement for the company as a whole and for some critical employees the matching of benefits to their respective Maslow’s triangle is important. The bottomline is to ensure each employee come to work daily with the mindset – “Going to work feels like going on vacation!”. Everybody loves the feeling of going on vacation
Lee Sook Fung
June 12, 2009 at 11:19 am