Why are many organisations now failing because they are losing more key knowledgeable people than ever before?

More and more organisations are losing impetus through a continuous need to replace key people, re-group, move forward and then start the process all over again. The problem is often unacknowledged and disguised by the belief that a level of staff turnover is an inevitable and therefore an acceptable constraint to the business. The problem is rarely very far short of a downward spiral - the more effort is focused on the re-building process, the less effort is focused on retaining the people at the heart of the problem in the first place.

Replacement of key people is not simply an issue of recruitment. Team performance is only restored when the process of integration is complete. When departing key players in a football or baseball team are replaced, the team’s performance will decline until the new players develop an understanding of their role within the team, know exactly what is expected of them, develop new and effective working relationships and begin to play a key part in the team’s performance. But the problem goes deeper. The fans (also known as customers) are key team players. If they see too many ‘stars’ leaving, they will begin to question their own loyalty to the team and find another outlet for their contribution. How many times have you seen that happen?

The continued erosion of the concept of ‘jobs for life’ has resulted in people becoming more self-reliant and creating their own situations to satisfy their personal aspirations. The importance people attach to loyalty is on the decline because of these changes in the psychological contract, and the reality is that the best people can always find a good job. People have been burned too many times to be concerned about loyalty. They are now facing up to the fact that they need to look after themselves rather than hoping the organisation will look after them as it may have done in the past.

More and more technical workers go into organisations and learn skills that make them saleable in their market sector. For these people, moving is not an issue any more. To add to this, more intense and more aggressive headhunting is giving people acknowledgement of what they have to offer and the realisation that they have value in a world beyond their current employer.

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With the continuing rapid pace of change, organisations find themselves employing relatively fewer people with appropriate technical experience and knowledge. Within this climate of change, they often make redundancies without considering the knowledge base they are losing - often because they are not aware of the knowledge base they are losing. There is often little clarity about the contribution the business needs from its people to be successful. If you don’t know what you need, then you can’t know the value of what you’ve got. If you don’t know the value of what you’ve got, then you can’t acknowledge it and retain it to achieve your vision.

THE WAY FORWARD

If you have read this far, you probably agree that this problem exists within your business. If so, ask yourself these five questions.

• Do you have a clear vision of where your business is going?

• Do your people share a clear vision of where you are going?

• Do you know exactly what you want from your people in order to achieve your vision?

• Do your people know exactly what you expect of them in order to achieve your vision?

• Do you encourage your people to stay with you by acknowledging and rewarding their contribution measured against a clearly communicated framework of expectations?

If you have answered ‘Yes’ to all five questions, congratulations! You are ahead of the game and are already recruiting the best people from your competitors. Read on anyway and feel good about the way you manage your business. If you have answered ‘No’ to any or all of the five questions, you will want to read on in the hope that you will find some answers.

The first steps in the way forward are to acknowledge the way people are now reacting to the job market and accept the need for you to put retention strategies in place. Key to these strategies is a process that will ensure that the contribution of your people is aligned to the achievement of your vision. This will achieve two amazing results. Firstly you will achieve your vision! Secondly, your best people will stay with you all the way.

Human Asset Profiling (© JNP Consulting 2000) is a process drawn from the best practice of successful organisations and pioneered by JNP Consulting across a wide range of industries. It provides a structured and consistent approach to improving the value and contribution of human resources towards achieving and exceeding corporate objectives and strategic goals. Human Asset Profiling provides a framework for effective performance management, personal development, training, succession planning, recruitment and selection - overt processes that encourage contribution and loyalty.

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The Human Asset Profiling process will enable you to:

• Do whatever it takes to be absolutely clear about your vision, values and corporate objectives and strategies.

• Define the behaviours, the technical competence and the knowledge you need within the business to achieve the vision.

• Design and develop a living and adaptable framework that defines behaviour, technical competence and knowledge across the whole business and at all levels.

• Match every role in the business to the framework, creating clear expectations to your people.

• Profile your people against the framework to identify strengths and weaknesses and redirect performance to align your people behind the vision.

• Identify specific individual training and development that will enable you to gain measurable value from your investment in training.

• Incorporate measurement of ability in your management of performance as well as measurement of results.

• Recruit and select the best people for the right jobs through objective assessment of their value.

• Create career strategies that will enable you to retain your best people and maximise their contribution to business success.

Organisations both large and small are less stable than ever before. Those that learn to manage the instability of change will survive.

By creating a framework to manage this instability, you will harness the power of your human asset and successfully manage its contribution to achieve its full potential. You will not only halt the spiral of losing key employees but will increasingly obtain more and more value from what may well be your most expensive resource. You will be attractive as a potential employer within your market sector and able to recruit the best. You will have given yourself the basis to successfully manage change in an unstable environment.

When businesses fail, the failure is usually attributed to lack of vision on the part of top management, changes in the market, financial problems, inadequate technology, loss of key personnel and any number of other plausible factors. Rarely is it attributed to inadequate management of the human resource - the key asset in nearly every business. The majority of employees genuinely want to do a good job. Unless they are clear about what a ‘good job’ looks like, they will invent and define it for themselves. As a result the majority will under-perform against the corporate vision and the best will look elsewhere for the clarity of expectation they need from an employer.

THE MESSAGE

The human asset in every organisation needs continuous education in where that organisation is going and in how they can contribute to achieve personal success through realisation of the corporate vision. The key to success into the millennium lies in providing that education.

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