Critical Issues!
Information and articles from around the world
At the AELC we are constantly researching and monitoring new research, best practice and issues effecting the workplace including corporate training, generational differences, graduate services and employee retention.
Information on the most important issues can be found in this section.
| It's no good concentrating all efforts on employee retention |
| Written by Arnold Kransdorff | |
| Monday, 26 November 2007 | |
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All the statistics show that the substantial efforts to improve employee retention give only marginal results. For organisations to actively support a flexible labour market and then try to reduce jobs churn at the same time is like shouting into the wind. Short jobs tenure is here to stay. As such it is more cost-effective to accept the reality and deal with the problems directly, the main one being the Alheimer-like corporate amnesia that employers inflict on themselves. With institutional-specific knowledge walking out of the front door at conveyer belt speeds, employers cannot learn from their own experiences, which is the way most organisations progress. This is an issue that nearly everyone overlooks. It also happens to be an area of huge unrecognised cost, characterised by the succession of repeated mistakes, re-invented wheels and other unlearned lessons that litter British industry, commerce and Government. According to Proudfoot, the international management consultant, the price tag for the cost of wasted productivity in the UK is 7.5% of GDP, a figure that outranks many of the other areas of our corporate deficiency. To ensure that employers get the maximum benefit from the flexible labour market, the discipline known as experiential learning has to be taught and implemented. A field that is still largely misconceived, this means that employers have to have formal processes in place to capture their exiting knowledge and experiences and then know how to turn that intellectual asset into better decision-making. The ‘asset’ is not what many organisations end up recording in their sophisticated and expensive electronic data banks. It is the implicit, ambiguous, functional and context-specific type of knowledge that is acquired largely by their own experiences. Tacit knowledge is the non-technical 'how' of getting things done, what Edward de Bono, the inventor of lateral thinking, calls 'operacy’ or the skill of action, and the late Peter Drucker identified in the use of the word techne (the Greek for 'skill'), characterised by the citation referring to the current predicament of the National Aeronautical & Space Administration: "If Nasa wanted to go to the moon again (as it is planning to do by 2018), it would have to start from scratch, having lost not the data, but the human expertise that took it there last time." If transient employees, and specifically managers, are not taught how to how to better benefit from their employers’ ‘hindsight’, the dialogue in one of English novelist J.L. Carr’s texts will continue to echo: “You have not had thirty years’ experience. You have had one year’s experience 30 times.” Sincerely, Arnold Kransdorff. author “Corporate DNA: How Organizational Memory can Improve Poor Decision-Making” (Gower, 2006). |