Staff retention – why the high turn-over?

A few years ago, I was employed as an Operations engineer working under a State General Manager, for an international engineering company. Our annual State revenue was in excess of AU$100m and on the books we held around 500 local staff; with a mixture of permanent full-time, project hire and contract hire employees.

The time was pre-GFC 2007-2008 and like many companies at the time, we were struggling with a very high staff turn over. It was the boom-time, and the demand for resources, an employee’s market, had led to significant churn. Or at least, that is what HR was leading people to believe during the annual senior leadership meeting.

Taking centre stage in the conference room, the HR manager delivered a short presentation on the year past. The projector flashed colourful tables full of data, including a few pie charts, and a couple of graphs to support the conclusion that; its an employee’s market, but we can do better. We had a staff turn-over in excess of 20%. Which meant 20% of our staff (or roughly 100 people) would up-and-leave and need to be replaced each year. Adding to the challenges we faced, the company was growing, so, not only did we need to hire 100 people each year, but in fact we needed more to offset our staff losses.

The problem (as I saw it at the time) was that what we had failed in two very important undertakings, i.e. to;

• Define the problem, and
• Develop a strategy to fix the problem

In very broad brush statements, managers were told that things needed to improve. That people were looking elsewhere, and they should be trying their hardest to retain the best staff. Graphs flashed across the screen showing what everyone expected; graduates who had been trained up, were most likely to depart, in a distant second came the experienced engineers and they were followed by the grey-beards.

Dissatisfied with the lack of detail, and supported by the leadership team, I embarked on a journey to challenge our perceptions. My first step, to gingerly coax the HR department to hand over all employee exit-interview data for my analysis. Finally having pried redacted data from HR’s cold-dead-hands, I undertook a detailed analysis of the reasons people were leaving, and what managers and companies could do about it.

The Method

The first step was to develop a strategy for analyzing the data. There was a mixture of 1-10 score, poor-great, categorical and multi-choice survey data, along with written statements and paragraph style responses to questions.

I settled on an approach that took both a quantitative, and qualitative view of the respective data sets. Dividing the employees into 5 year age bands, and analysing the reasons for leaving in each band.

For age-years of service, I developed a normalised heat-map which determined how long someone would give the company before considering alternatives. While the sheer number of young engineers meant their exit numbers were high, normalising the data with the banded population showed an interesting trend.

Disclaimer: I preface this conclusion by noting that the data set it not exhaustive, and doesn’t represent all companies. Furthermore, due to the limited data set for older employees, the 50+ age band can not be said to be a representative set for all behaviors.

While the trends clearly showed that young engineers were highly likely to change jobs within 2 – 5 years, more interestingly, older engineers were also hedging their bets. Alarmingly the data showed that across the board (all age groups) the Company had less than 1 year to impress their new entrants.

In reading the chart above, we can follow the orange line for a typical 35 year old entrant; here we see that the risk of such an employee voluntarily leaving the company is significantly higher within the second year of service and drops off after that. Meanwhile 45 year old employees with 3 or more years of service are at higher risk of being lured away.

For rank-style questions, I developed a heat-map for determining the score for each age band. The data demonstrated the reasons why employees were leaving the company and definitive patterns could be seen between two age bands, the <30 year old, and >30 year old. I figured this was a good split, primarily because it distinguished between engineering staff who were “developing” and those who were “experienced” . Having identified which individuals were at risk, and knowing how long a company had to make a positive impact (see above). This data could tell us what to do about it; by addressing the reasons they were leaving.

Reasons marked by employees are below:

1. Career change
2. Expectations not met
3. Not getting the recognition I deserve
4. Don’t get on with supervisor/manager
5. Better opportunity
6. Dissatisfaction with type of work I do
7. Not getting the training I need or want
8. Family responsibilities
9. Health
10. Relocation
11. My values are not aligned with the Company
12. To work elsewhere
13. Don’t get on with colleagues
14. Dissatisfaction with benefits offered
15. Dissatisfaction with physical environment
16. Furthering my education
17. Higher salary
18. Lifestyle change

For qualitative paragraph style question responses, I looked further at significant words, and analyzed the frequency of each word used. It was evident from this approach that the two age bands had different problems which needed to be addressed independently.

Under 35			Over 35
Rank	Key Word	Freq.	Rank	Key Word	Freq.
1	work	48	1	work	40
2	project	44	2	project	30
3	Training / Study	39	3	role	30
4	opportunity / challenge / variety	29	4	KPIs	23
5	role	27	5	Training / Study	20
6	KPIs	25	6	opportunity / challenge / variety	15
7	manager	23	7	leader	13
8	communication	21	8	manager	12
9	graduate	20	9	career	9
10	leader	19	10	branch office	8
11	feedback	13	11	move/transfer	7
12	alliance	12	12	support	6
13	experience	11	13	position	6
14	support	9	14	review	5
15	development	8	15	communication	4
16	environment	8	16	alliance	4
17	design	8	17	development	4
18	career	7	18	environment	4
19	review	6	19	procedures	4
20	job	6	20	path	4
21	move/transfer	5	21	recognition	4
22	pay	5	22	executive team	4
23	mentor	5	23	feedback	3
24	contact	5	24	job	3
25	position	4	25	pay	3
26	procedures	4	26	relationship	3
27	clarification of role	3	27	isolation	3
28	flexibility	3	28	clarification of role	2
29	path	2	29	experience	1
30	travel	2	30	design	1
31	assistance	2	31	mentor	1
32	branch office	1	32	flexibility	1
33	recognition	1	33	travel	1
34	relationship	1	34	graduate	0
35	cadet	1	35	contact	0
36	executive team	0	36	assistance	0
37	isolation	0	37	cadet	0

Conclusions?

These technique demonstrates the relative importance of the various aspects of one’s life in the office. The type of Work and Projects on offer were most critical across the board, and significant weight was placed on Training, new/better opportunities, the role being undertaken and the KPI review process.

Clear differences exist as we progress down the list of words; people under 35 were interested more in training and future opportunities. They were heavily focused on the graduate development program, obtaining feedback, good communication, the experience they were getting and their manager and team leader. The responses also indicated an interest in having the right support and development.

People over 35 focused on areas such as their role and the KPI review process first, closely followed by new opportunities and similarly their respective Manager and team leader and career path. Other issues included the location of their work, and the lack of opportunities in the a particular branch office.

What was also clear is how infrequently money really came into it. Again proving that money is a maintainer, and not a motivator.

Future work?

It is worthwhile pointing out that companies, and their managers need to develop a meaningful understanding of the issues present amongst their workforce. Only by identifying problems and working through a range of solutions can plug the holes which create high staff turn over.

It’s important to realise that these conclusions are not immune to market forces. In fact, a slow economy with fewer business opportunities is more likely to lead to job dissatisfaction; making it a real challenge to keep hold of the guru’s who are critical to a business’ success.

Feel free to share your thoughts on how to keep these people engaged, active, motivated, and happy.. or even share your own thought on the conclusions or data herein.

Auslan To Go – Now Available

Announcement by Ology Interactive, Auslan To Go – Now Available.

Auslan To Go is now available for download on the Apple App Store. View it in the App Store here. 

Auslan To Go is a mobile dictionary based on the printed book; The Auslan Dictionary for Teachers, Parents and Professionals : 2012 Edition.

It includes over 2000 unique signs, each clearly illustrated in line art.

The dictionary is presented in Alphabetical order under the main English word for each sign. It includes description of how to perform each sign and is still the only dictionary to include context usage information (e.g. ‘can’ has 2 listings. 1 for ”I can” and the other refers to the ring pull can); to help ensure users clearly understand the context under which it is appropriate to use a sign.

LinkedIn to Fraud

This is a public safety notice for all those of us who use LinkedIn to build and maintain our professional network.

1 month ago, I receive an invitation to connect on LinkedIn, from an unknown individual (lets call him, Fred). Fred and I seemed to share a number of shared connections. Open to new acquaintances, and given Fred’s 20 years in the engineering industry and 300+ contacts, I was happy to connect if only to understand what this persons’ motivations were, and whether there was a mutual benefit to be gained.

In subsequent correspondence from Fred I found that he was an out of work Construction Manager working out of the Philipines. He asked for my help to put his CV in front of my company’s HR department. Before I agreed, I had a good look at the CV deciding whether to aid in his application or not.

The CV was poorly structured, and difficult to read, so I asked Fred to revise it. A request he didn’t have time to aquiest. So I asked him to go onto my company’s website and at least identify which positions he thought he was suitable for. Instead of one, I got a whole list.

At this point, I made the wise decision not to support Fred’s request, instead requested he make the application through the online portal. The message I thought I’d given was “go away”. I thought more about adding people on LinkedIn and whether I needed to re-evaluate the risk, but put my thoughts aside and went back to work.

Less than a month later I got this email from Fred.

“Am sorry for disturbing you, I made an Emergency trip to Madrid for a short business trip with Faulkland oil and Gas production company, I have been a share holder with this company over the years and was invited for their annual convention, and am short of cash right here, I went to the bank to withdraw and was informed that i cant withdraw from my account in some country due network errors, so am wondering if i could get a quick loan of 1,150euro or what ever you can afford immediately so i can quickly clear some little and also take a cab to the airport, as soon as i get back home i will refund the money.”

Obviously I had stumbled into some kind of scam. So I dug a bit deeper. I stripped the originating IP address from the email and found enough information to confirm my suspicions.

Regarding 196.29.210.4, and IP lookup had this to say
Host  : 4.210.29.196.client4.directonpc.net      (196.29.212.30 )
Country  : Nigeria 

Already pretty dubius, I decided to investigate further. I responded to Fred telling him I was happy to transfer the cash to which he responded with request for me to remit the funds via Western Union.

It was about this point that I asked Fred how it was he was in madrid but his emails were originating from Nigeria.. and since then.. I havent heard from Fred.

Disclaimer: All names and some information has been deliberately omitted/changed and if you know a guy named Fred, it’s probably not him. Unless your friend is in Nigeria and his real name isn’t Fred, .. then there’s a very small chance it is. Also, Fred may or may not be female.

Managing Changes

Change is all around us, it can be long-coming like climate change, regular like the four seasons, or even sudden, chaotic, or as seemingly random as what your date fancies for dinner. One thing about interesting about change is that it brings with it the challenge of adapting, and this is a challenge that can sometimes overwhelm even the best of us.

Have you ever been on a date with someone who can’t seem to decide what they want for dinner? It starts with “I might have the…, oh wait, maybe the…” and after a few iterations you might have whittled the list of possibilities down to a selection of two, the steak or the chicken, only to have the fish come in a the last second and win out, even when it didn’t even get a say-in during the process?!

Situations like this can, quite acceptably, drive one crazy. Particularly if you are not one for change. And this scenario is all too familiar for those of us aiming to keep a project on track.

Enter: Change Management
Managing change is a process of preparation, planning and implementation, and reinforcement. Each of these stages is important to the success of our project (in this case, our ‘Date’).

Firstly: Preparation
Preparation is about doing your homework, finding out who you are dealing with, understanding the parties involved (in this case, your future partner), and what he/she likes or wants out of this experience. Assessing your date and understanding the motivators and behaviours that this person brings to the project is key to defining how much change there is likely to be, and what approaches might need to be catered for.

Typical issues in the Date project might consist of, how hungry your date is, what food preferences, allergies, or other limiting factors exist, how much time you have, and what budget you or you date might have.

Secondly: Planning and implementation
Planning for the Date project takes all that homework you’ve done, all the online Facebook stalking you’ve attempted, and any other investigative work you’ve performed like, talking to the potential date, or their friends, and relating this into an action plan for the evening.

He/she loves italian food? Plan = go to an italian restaurant
He/she specifically only likes pizza = go to an italian-pizza restaurant

Refining your plan to accommodate for the date is key to minimizing time spent dealing with issues like, “i love pizza, but what about we try pasta instead..”, through to, “do you think I’d prefer this over that”, naturally these are difficult questions to answer on a first date, and one’s taste is usually their own.

Implementing the plan is pretty straight forward, but you should realise that even the best plans can go a little pear shaped, and that’s why you need to also prepare yourself for the inevitable. All plans are out the door as soon as you try to execute them. So now its time for you to put your second plan into action.. dealing with change.

You need to be able to adapt, and if you havent got a plan for “how to adapt” then as they say; “fail to plan = plan to fail”. Think about the strategies you’d employ if your date got distracted by the plethora of options your italian-pizza restaurant was suddenly now offering, including healthy list of pasta options, none of which your indecisive date had tried. Had you prepared yourself for this situation, you’d be quietly speaking to yourself and saying “its ok, take your time, there’s no rush, we knew this was going to happen, its ok… really”, and instead of getting frustrated with your date, you’re now probably trying to help them.

So.. be prepared.

Finally: Reinforcement
this involves looking at all the evidence, reviewing how the date went, determining where you are at in the relationship and deciding the best path forward. In this stage we need to recognise that there may have been some failure on our behalf, and our date might also have some inconsistencies which could have been better dealt with. But all in all you’ve probably navigated yourself into a position with the option of a second date. Having tested the water, you are now better prepared for round two, and let the planning begin.

Wrapping things up
As you will have figured out by now, this is not a tutorial on change management, nor is it a plan of action for you to implement in any way. Rather it is a reflection on the correlation between change management in the engineering projects I manage each day, and how we already seek to do a similar thing in everyday life (even without thinking too hard about it).

I hope this has been an entertaining read, and I wish you a pleasant Project (date).

Feel free to comment, and share, I’d love it if you’d share.

The Flow of Work

In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi outlines the theory that people are happiest when they are in a state of concentration or complete absorption with an activity at hand. Describing a state in which people are so mentally involved in an activity that nothing else seems important, Flow is that state we enter when even time, and self are typically ignored.

Many gamers understand the feeling playing a challenging game in which your skills are balanced by the difficulty; being engaged to a degree that the whole world around you disappears. Leading many parents to expressed lament that their children can find nothing better to do.

Interestingly, Flow isn’t only experienced by gamers, it is experienced in a wide range of life experiences including;

• Education / Research / Searching
• Sports (ever been in the zone? where your actions are perfectly timed, weighted and effortless?)
• Music (ever listened to song after song and forgot you had something else to do?)
• Browsing the Web (who hasn’t sat down to look at Facebook and emerged a few hours later wondering where the time went?)
• Writing (ever sat down to write an article and disappeared into it only to realise you’ve written the entire thing and half a day has passed? – I’m doing that right now)
• Chatting (a few weeks ago I went to a coffee shop with a friend, it took four hours for each of us to drink one coffee)

And finally the one activity I’d really like to focus on today;

• Work (how do we achieve Flow at work, and why is it important?)

Perhaps none of us will ever have a job that is truly satisfying until we figure out this little problem. Some companies work hard at designing their office and their environment to achieve various harmonic states of being, with the view to creating a productive working environment for their people. However, Flow is just as much about challenge as it is about environment. It’s not unreasonable then to start wondering how to create an environment that is challenging and fits the skills of the individual.

I’m a project manager, an engineer and a developer, and my experience lets me see how the concept of Flow is lacking in many corporate environments. For me, the reason for lack of engagement is typically related to work content; I don’t find it challenging. I find that my busiest days are usually the most challenging; requiring me to make use of the time management, logic, and planning skills that allow me to be a project manager. On the other hand, I disappear down a rabbit hole and reemerge hours later when sitting in front of a computer with an idea for a new iPhone app. I live for challenge, I ache for responsibility, accountability, self driven projects.

Working for an international engineering firm has given me many opportunities to develop the skills I need for work, but the more you develop these skills the easier work becomes. When we relate this problem back to computer games, we see how some games fail and others thrive. The key to a good game is to slowly develop the skills of the player, while progressively increasing the challenge, keeping the balance. Why is it then, that many companies don’t do the same for their employees? Sure, we have ‘career paths’ which are meant to give you a choice in where you go and how you get there, but the problem with larger companies is that their processes often get in the way. If career progression means moving along the line from A-B-C-D, and you are positioned at Level A, with skills at Level C, surely you are going to start looking elsewhere for a new job at level C.

I’ve previously analysed why people were leaving one of my previous companies, and the story is very much like this. Give us challenging work or say goodbye.

If you are a people manager, you should be giving the concept of Flow some serious thought. Maybe if you think hard enough about it, you might also enter a state of Flow as you determine how you can increase the challenges to your team, and maintain their satisfaction with work.

Questions for the readers.
When do you experience Flow?
Has it ever been at work?

 

41 Million Pixels and Counting

If someone told me last week that I could buy a reasonably priced camera which could capture Forty One Million Pixels (41 MP) I’d have contemplated that person’s definition of “reasonably priced”.

If that same person told me that I could buy a smart phone which could capture Forty One Million Pixels with its onboard camera, I’d have contemplated whether this person was insane.

Fortunately noone told me these things, fortunately I didn’t have to question the sanity of my friends, because it was the surprise of stumbling onto Nokia’s latest invention that made me start to question my own eyes.

I give you the Nokia 808 PureView

It has a revolutionary camera inside a rather ordinary phone, but some people are absolutely going to love it. At least until the competition picks up their photographic game.

I still question the need for such high resolutions. Firstly each picture’s file size is going to be 5 times larger than the 8 MP camera in most new phones, and transferring these pictures is going to be a lot longer. Can you imagine emailing one of them? You certainly aren’t going to be posting the full resolution image to Facebook, nor are you going to be sending on in an MMS.

The pictures will need to be compressed first and, quite frankly this is a little time-consuming for mobile CPU’s.

I guess there are a lot of pro’s and con’s to such a device, but ultimately, beauty is in the eye of the phone holder.

What do you think? Would you buy one? I’ll be sticking to my 8 MP Camera Phone for now, but I wonder if this will really hit the right mark with some photographers.

Surface by Microsoft – Tablet

Surface by Microsoft

Today at Microsoft’s new product event, the company unveiled their new tablet to rival competitors like Apple’s iPad. The tablet “Surface” comes in two versions and a range of memory configurations.

Posting from the event Melissa Perenson of PC Advisor gave live udates via DemandMedia’s CoveritLive software.

OS: Windows RT
Weight: 676 g
Thickness: 9.3 mm
Display: 10.6” ClearType HD Display
Connections: microSD, USB 2.0, Micro HD Video, 2×2 MIMO antennae
Case: VaporMg Case & Stand
Memory: 32 GB, 64 GB

OS: Windows 8 Pro
Weight: 903 g
Thickness: 13.5 mm
Display: 10.6” ClearType Full HD Display
Connections: microSDXC, USB 3.0, Mini DisplayPort Video, 2×2 MIMO antennae
Case: VaporMg Case & Stand
Memory: 64 GB, 128 GB

Its clear to see that the future of computing is Mobile and all the big players are now heavily investing in this future.

PC Advisor + Microsoft + Something Fresh

Microsoft is unveiling something new today. Perhaps a new tablet, phone, OS, Xbox, something. In keeping up with the Apple’s of the work Microsoft is releasing their news in the same way. Letting the Hype build before an event by releasing only the minutest of information and letting people speculate.

The relase is being broadcast live today on PC Advisor’s website; http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/tablets/3364534/live-microsoft-la-press-event/

Where Melissa Perenson is giving a blow by blow of what she sees “live” by some kind of text service. And believe it or not, that is what I want to talk about today, not Microsoft.

Demand Media’s “CoveritLive” technology is driving real-time status updates from Melissa, inside that room. Yes, the one which is closed doors, invitation only etc.

http://www.demandmedia.com/coveritlive/

One of the great features of the technology is that it seems to integrate well with their existing web page, and random folk can post comments, ask questions and get live feedback from someone right there. I love the way the internet has made sharing so easy.

I havent seen this before, so its interesting to see an event covered like this. Who care’s what Microsoft release today? CoveritLive cares!

AusSign gets a facelift – AuslanToGo

More news from Ology Interactive today as the integration of Bilby Publishing’s data and the AusSign platform reaches practical completion.

AusSign gets a facelift – AuslanToGo.

Images received, deadlines looming, happy days

Happy to post that Ology Interactive recently received a few gigabytes of images from Bilby Publishing over the weekend. The AusSign platform will get a bit of a design revamp, with a few extra features at Bilby’s request, and with their gorgeous images, and a completely new database, I now have a 2~3 week period in which to apply all the necessary changes before submitting to the store. We are now aiming for the app to be commercially ready and submitted to Apple in July. I suppose that means in the iTunes store by August?

Watch this space.