Turnover ... a potential indicator of longevity?

I think there's a lot of lottery-playing going on right now. Companies staffing up, raising a bunch of money, hiring a bunch of people, and burning them out in the hopes that they'll hit the lottery. ...all you have to do is read TechCrunch. Look at what the top stories are, and they're all about raising money, how many employees they have, and these are metrics that don't matter. What matters is: Are you profitable? Are you building something great? Are you taking care of your people? Are you treating your customers well? In the coverage of our industry as a whole, you'll rarely see stories about treating customers well, about people building a sustainable business. ...I don't know what percentage of tech companies have been around 30 years.

In this article from Fast Company, co-founder of 37 Signals Jason Fried, talks about building a sustainable business, in it for the long haul. He decries the tech start-up culture of burning out and churning though employees.

After reading it I was left wondering: could rates of employee turnover be an indicator of long term viability and success?

Designing The One-Week Team Sabbatical That Will Transform Your Company

The image FAST COMPANY chose to lead this article isn't quite representative of the ideas discussed. They should have chosen something more like this ...

  

This article is about getting away from it all in order to work together and plan ahead. It outlines how to organise off-site sabbaticals, how to prepare for them and even gives you the debating points to counter the nay sayers who say you can't afford the time or the people.

Key points:
- Give everyone 3 months notice.
- Allow everyone to contribute the project ideas to be work-shopped in this lead time.
- Define project vision and scope in the lead time. Allocate team leaders to be responsible for this.
- Scope projects rigorously.
- The projects should provide value for your team and clients.
- Get away from it all, the hum drum, the distractions and the routine and go off-site.
- Make sure people get to have some fun.

Cohesive teams should expect productive efforts and innovation roadmaps for the years ahead. Troubled teams should expect some catharsis.

For the full details and case studies check out: Fast Company

Best Companies to Work For 2012 - Fortune Magazine

Earlier this year Fortune magazine published it's annual list of the 100 best companies to work for in the U.S. Results are based on surveying employees. Sure, not all companies have jets or yachts to share with employees but there is still plenty to learn from reading the company snapshots.

The reasons these companies have been nominated as great places to work by those that work there are:

  1. Good rewards
    • incentives, profit sharing, bonuses, above average pay for industry
  2. Strong and clear company mission
  3. Benefits
    • health insurance, health programs, childcare facilities, generous leave, workplace flexibility, other perks
  4. Physical work environment
    • food, access to services like dry cleaning, even walking tracks
  5. People
    • considered recruitment efforts, long tenure of employees
  6. Culture
    • recognition of excellence, adherance to, and evaluation based on values, fun incentives, games and events, happiness commitees, herograms, "no jerk" culture
  7. Feedback
    • Staff suggestions implemented, feedback mechanisms and forums in place
  8. Visible leadership
    • Leaders touching base with employees regularly or based on high performance of teams
  9. No layoffs
    • The US has faced tough economic times recently. Many companies on this list avoided lay-offs 
  10. Career paths
    • Progression plans, internal promotion, investment in training and education
  11.  Acknowledging role of families
    • Inclusion of families in company events, acknowlegement of their contribution supporting employees

To see all the company snapshots go to: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/best-companies/2012/snapshots/1.html

 

 

Letting people go: quick versus slow. Lessons from the Media Industry

Helen Kapalos was sacked by Channel Ten a fortnight ago.

When Eddie McGuire was forced to axe 100 staff from Channel Nine – barely a few months into his new role as CEO – he decided to give it to them straight.Unfortunately, his HR department had other plans.Instead of letting him sit down and talk with each unlucky worker, they made him read a scripted statement to them. He was also advised not to answer their questions. ... "It was a disaster . . . the worst thing I did," McGuire confessed to his Triple M listeners last week. "These HR people come in, they have their set plays – and they never work."

Letting people go is an unfortunately reality of work life. But how to do it? Clean break? Slow release? This article about the Australian media industry provides some examples of sackings and reactions by audiences and colleagues. Needless to say common decency and truth is encouraged over cold HR strategies.

Read all the gory details at smh.com.au

Innovation Is about arguing, not brainstorming.

the idea behind brainstorming is right. To innovate, we need environments that support imaginative thinking, where we can go through many crazy, tangential, and even bad ideas to come up with good ones. We need to work both collaboratively and individually. We also need a healthy amount of heated discussion, even arguing. We need places where someone can throw out a thought, have it critiqued, and not feel so judged that they become defensive and shut down. Yet this creative process is not necessarily supported by the traditional tenets of brainstorming: group collaboration, all ideas held equal, nothing judged.

So if not from brainstorming, where do good ideas come from?

via fastcodesign.com

I heartily agree with this article. Read on for the protocols of workplace discourse and critique: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669329/dont-brainstorm-argue

Cut off social media, lose recruits: AFR

Rachel Nickless

One in five job seekers say they would turn down a job if it did not provide access to social media such as Facebook, according to a paper released by recruitment giant Hays yesterday.

A survey of 870 employers and job candidates for the white paper, Tomorrow’s Workforce, found that half of candidates already access social media for personal reasons. Of these, 13.3 per cent said they access it daily, while 36.4 per cent access it occasionally.

Meanwhile, 44.3 per cent of employers believe that allowing staff to access social media at work will help retain them. A third allow their employees access at work, while 43.2 per cent allow limited access. But 23.7 per cent of employers ban social media at work.

Nick Deligiannis, managing director of Hays in Australia, urged employers to have clear policies in place, with more than half of the candidates saying they used company devices to access social media and a quarter saying they did not know how to represent their employer.

Read the rest of the article over on afr.com where some recommendations are made for what to consider in policies.