Holding On to Your Flight Risks

By Andrew R. McIlvaine 不管经济发展的情景是好是坏，那些高绩效的员工仍然是非常紧缺的，作为人力资源管理者，如何留住这些高绩效职员确实是一个很重要的问题，作者就针对这个问题提供了一些好的解决办法。

For most people, the economy continues to be adrift in rough seas. Those lucky enough to be employed are generally holding fast to their jobs as if they were life preservers. But top-performing employees may be clinging to them a bit less tightly, because they know they have options. At Cincinnati-based Chiquita Brands International, top performers get great results year after year, regardless of market conditions in the volatile food business. At AMD Corp., they're the employees who have a proven ability to thrive in whatever area of the far-flung technology firm they're sent to. And at Ciena Corp., top performers not only meet or exceed their goals for at least three years in a row, but they exhibit the ability to quickly master new skills at the increasingly global company. Top performers are, in short, the workers who -- more than anyone else -- determine whether your organization will thrive, survive or join the long list of failed businesses that are little more than some faded letterhead and distant memories. And they're getting restless. PricewaterhouseCoopers Saratoga's 2011/2012 U.S. Human Capital Effectiveness Report found that among employees overall, the voluntary separation rate -- which represents both retirements and resignations -- has continued to trend downward, from 10.4 percent in 2007 to 7 percent in 2010. However, the trend is moving in the opposite direction for employees rated as high performers, with turnover rates among this segment increasing from 3.7 percent in 2009 to 4.3 percent in 2010, according to the report, which is based on proprietary information from more than 300 U.S. companies in

12 industry sectors. Amid this churn, it might be prudent to ask yourself whether you have a plan for developing and retaining your organization's existing top performers, not to mention those who exhibit the potential to become ones. But do you even know who they are? Based on the latest research, there's a good chance you don't. A survey of 426 business leaders from companies of various sizes and industries by the Seattle-based Institute for Corporate Productivity and Human Resource Executive earlier this year found that only 9 percent strongly agreed that they do a good job of identifying and tracking high-potential employees. Just

20 percent agreed or strongly agreed that their organizations have formal, transparent processes to identify and develop hi-pos. Most companies either don't have a standard definition of what top talent is, or they lack a common talent-management strategy as to how to retain these people, says Jason Averbook, CEO of Minneapolis-based consulting firm Knowledge Infusion. What's needed is for HR leaders to pull together all the functional areas of HR to ensure the department is working in tandem to identify, develop and retain top performers, he says. Taleo's James Harvey, vice president of the Dublin, Calif.-based technology vendor's talent-management products division, agrees. Until HR begins to unify or better coordinate the functional centers of excellence, it's going to have a hard time solving the retention of star performers, says Harvey, who recently spent some time in a room with HR leaders from some of the world's largest companies, all of whom expressed concerns about losing top talent. It's not a problem that one center of excellence, like compensation or recruiting, can solve -- they have to be coordinated. At most companies, the process for identifying and retaining top talent is (if it exists at all) slow, ineffective and often focused on the wrong things, says Jason Jeffay, Mercer's global leader for talent-management consulting. To begin with, HR is too often focused on hierarchy instead of critical roles, he says. When [HR leaders] do identify top talent, they tend to offer more money as an incentive to stay, which rarely works. Finally, they're not proactive enough. They tend to wait too long, by which time the person already has his or her foot out the door, and HR is left scrambling. It's a needlessly expensive and stressful approach. Keeping top performers from becoming flight risks isn't rocket science, says Jeffay. It usually boils down to simply letting them know that their contributions are recognized and that the company is making a serious effort to equip them for opportunities that will make it worth their while to stick around. Talent-management systems can be a big help in this area -- or a colossal waste of valuable time and money, say experts. Digitizing processes that never worked well in the first place, installing complex software that managers find every excuse in the world to avoid using and relying on systems that aren't connected to the rest of the business is a sure recipe for failure, they say. Early Alerts Retaining top performers is too vital to be left to once-a-year conversations, says Gretchen Alarcon, Oracle Corp.'s vice president of human capital management strategy. During the compensation review, everyone is suddenly very interested in their team and making the best use of their budget, but that's a once-a-year event, she says. People make decisions on a daily basis on whether they're going to stay with a company. Alarcon touts the predictive analytics tools embedded within Oracle's new Fusion HCM release as an early warning system to help companies identify their most important flight risks before they actually fly the coop. Oracle worked with PwC Saratoga to develop the algorithms underpinning Fusion's predictive analytics, which look for patterns within a client's HCM data to uncover high-performing employees who may be thinking of changing jobs. It can make connections between things that may not be obvious, such as how long the person has been in his or her grade, how long [he or she has] worked for a particular manager or whether their salary is below market, says Alarcon. By alerting managers to flight risks early on, the system gives them the opportunity to take preemptive action -- say, bumping up a scheduled pay raise or offering them a new development opportunity, she says. Users can also perform what-if analyses, such as: What if I gave this person a salary adjustment or transferred her to a different group -- how would that affect her predicted performance? If that person is a top performer, what am I doing to optimize his performance? Other HR technology vendors, including Taleo and Kenexa, promote talent profiles as an effective means to hold on to key employees. The talent-management tools within Kenexa's new 2x platform can compile information throughout employees' entire lifecycles -- from the time they first apply for a job through their latest performance review, along with courses completed and career goals -- to create a unified talent record, says Eric Lochner, Kenexa's president of global talent management. Because 2x is a unified platform that can span all HR functions, information entered into the unified talent record by employees and their managers can be used to alert the company's recruiters whenever a position opens up that matches a particular employee's career path and qualifications. This can ensure high-potentials don't get inadvertently passed over and end up leaving in frustration, says Lochner. In addition to talent profiles that are similar to those provided by Kenexa, Taleo promotes its business intelligence service, which can flag cases in which an employee with a high performance rating has a low compensation ratio and push it out to line managers, says Harvey. Managers themselves can also input their own flight-risk concerns, which can be flagg