5 ms·

the head of HR thought that the company's ~5% attrition was "unhealthy" because it was too low and in another, HR thought that the company's attrition sitting a

the head of HR thought that the company's ~5% attrition was "unhealthy" because it was too low and in another, HR thought that the company's attrition sitting at a bit under 10% was too low Can someone explain to me why fewer people quitting is seen as an unhealthy metric? Retaining employees seems like something companies should want to try to prioritize above all else, especially in this market.

csee 5y ago
Depends how good your hiring is. At the places I've worked, I'd want to see 0.1 (involuntary) attrition at least, given that mishires happened 1 in 10 to 1 in 5 times. A low attrition rate in the context of lots of mishires means we're not firing people quickly enough.
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  While I agree that one shouldn't keep mishires around I wonder how you established that the rate of mishires is 10-20%. Seems like a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You don't know the actual rate if managers aren't firing the mishires. If you pressure managers into randomly firing 10-20% of their people you can't calculate the rate. In fact 50% of one team might be mishires while another is 100% made up of great engineers.
  - csee 5y ago
    I knew the rate because I was on the ground working with the underperformers. But as to how to translate this into HR policy in a large org, I have no idea.
    - tharkun__ 5y ago
      I would venture that you really can't if you want to be accurate and fair. You were on the ground, which to me implies that you had a local view of the rate. In your area the observed rate of mishires apparently was around 10-20%. If you were in another team/part of the org you might have thought 50% or 0%. My guess is that HR does exactly this sort of thing. Someone did a study once and averaged numbers that were obtained 'somehow' and that is then simply applied. Like stack ranking. Everything is a normal distribution, right? If you ask me: What large orgs are not good at is doing what actually makes sense. It's too much work and there is so much that could go wrong anyway. The way out are blanket policies implemented by drones, bean counters, the odd psychopath etc.
      - csee 5y ago
        I observed the local rate, correct. I didn't really make a claim that a large org would be exactly the same as my local rate, so I agree with you that it could differ. But honestly, I do believe it would be over 0.1 for most orgs, just based on my experience with people in college and other areas of life. Competence at a high level is really rare and most people just are really not good at complicated tasks, even many graduates from top schools.
        tharkun__ 5y ago
        I definitely would agree that a lot of people in large orgs are unfortunately like that. I can corroborate that from having been in many of those. I can also attest to the fact that most managers don't deal with this. There is a lot of moving people around or simply ignoring the problem. Now like my earlier sibling mentions, just because someone isn't a top performer at their current job at the current time doesn't mean they can't be great in another area or can learn. I have (and had) a bunch of people on my teams that were/are not senior people but they have a smart brain on their shoulders, are inquisitive and learn. Sure they don't know our stack fully, they don't have the exact same opinion on how to write code etc. but they are able to learn and adjust and maybe teach us where our customs aren't the best as well. And we teach them too. I'm speaking of practices like at large banks where people have been hiding doing nothing but being on Facebook all day for 10 years and all that has happened is that every project manager tries to avoid getting these people assigned to their projects.
    - kmonsen 5y ago
      Maybe it was the environment, that a lot of these people could be better if supported the right way? Or to say it simply (and please understand I know nothing about you so it is not meant as a criticism of how you personally work), maybe it was because they worked with you? I would also say that throwing x% and hiring again does not work well. The pool you are hiring from is people that are not happy somewhere else. You are not getting a 90% chance of finding a "good" person.
SkyPuncher 5y ago
It implies that the company isn't pushing their employees hard enough. In otherwords, if managers are doing their job "correctly" they should either (1) be pushing their staff so hard that 1 in 10 of them quit every year (2) weening out the the poorest performer.
- tjalfi 5y ago
  Peopleware calls this the Spanish Theory of Management[0]. Historians long ago formed an abstraction about different theories of value: The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people’s backs. Then there was the English Theory that held that value could be created through ingenuity and technology. So the English had an Industrial Revolution, while the Spanish spun their wheels trying to exploit the land and the Indians in the New World. They moved huge quantities of gold across the ocean, and all they got for their effort was enormous inflation (too much gold money chasing too few usable goods). The Spanish Theory of Value is alive and well among managers everywhere. You see that whenever they talk about productivity. Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference. The Spanish Theory managers dream of attaining new productivity levels through the simple mechanism of unpaid overtime. They divide whatever work is done in a week by forty hours, not by the eighty or ninety hours that the worker actually put in. [0] https://blog.bryanbibat.net/2009/08/31/spanish-theory-of-value/ https://blog.bryanbibat.net/2009/08/31/spanish-theory-of-val...
- wombatpm 5y ago
  Weeding as in remove undesirables Weening is the process if transitioning from milk to solid food as in babies and puppies
detaro 5y ago
some arguments I've seen (not endorsing any of those) are a) it makes you inflexible (i.e. you cant readjust by constantly hiring people that fit whatever your new goals are better) b) it means you are to easy on people and keep low performers around c) b) means it also makes trajectory upwards harder for good employees, so the good employees are more likely to be the few who quit
pixelrevision 5y ago
My guess would be either stack ranking or concern about the Dead Sea effect.
paxys 5y ago
It's the same kind of bullshit as teams being penalized for meeting 100% of their goals because it means that their goals weren't aggressive enough. I can't say whether the strategy is effective or not, but MBA types seem to love it.
- andrei_says_ 5y ago
  MBAs I think see it as an indicator that they are not using g the resource at capacity.
  - rStar 5y ago
    mbas see whatever they see for whatever reasons they do. it’s usually posturing and signaling to other mba types, often with delusions of grandeur and napoleon complex, not height based.
dustintrex 5y ago
It's Neutron Jack's "rank and yank" philosophy, which says you should fire the bottom 10% performers of your org every year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve Of course firing low performers is quite different from high performers leaving, but HR doesn't see or care about these distinctions.
PeterisP 5y ago
The argument essentially is that it hints to there being an exploitable slack in the system. If you treat bargaining with employees as a zero-sum game (which it really isn't, but some companies do treat it that way) then the other party being very satisfied with the bargain indicates that they would be also willing to get a worse offer. So if all the employees are extremely satisfied with the compensation/effort ratio, that indicates that you could either lower the compensation some or extract more effort until they're satisfied "just barely enough".

csee 5y ago

Depends how good your hiring is. At the places I've worked, I'd want to see 0.1 (involuntary) attrition at least, given that mishires happened 1 in 10 to 1 in 5 times. A low attrition rate in the context of lots of mishires means we're not firing people quickly enough.

tharkun__ 5y ago
While I agree that one shouldn't keep mishires around I wonder how you established that the rate of mishires is 10-20%. Seems like a bit of a chicken and egg problem. You don't know the actual rate if managers aren't firing the mishires. If you pressure managers into randomly firing 10-20% of their people you can't calculate the rate. In fact 50% of one team might be mishires while another is 100% made up of great engineers.
- csee 5y ago
  I knew the rate because I was on the ground working with the underperformers. But as to how to translate this into HR policy in a large org, I have no idea.
  - tharkun__ 5y ago
    I would venture that you really can't if you want to be accurate and fair. You were on the ground, which to me implies that you had a local view of the rate. In your area the observed rate of mishires apparently was around 10-20%. If you were in another team/part of the org you might have thought 50% or 0%. My guess is that HR does exactly this sort of thing. Someone did a study once and averaged numbers that were obtained 'somehow' and that is then simply applied. Like stack ranking. Everything is a normal distribution, right? If you ask me: What large orgs are not good at is doing what actually makes sense. It's too much work and there is so much that could go wrong anyway. The way out are blanket policies implemented by drones, bean counters, the odd psychopath etc.
    - csee 5y ago
      I observed the local rate, correct. I didn't really make a claim that a large org would be exactly the same as my local rate, so I agree with you that it could differ. But honestly, I do believe it would be over 0.1 for most orgs, just based on my experience with people in college and other areas of life. Competence at a high level is really rare and most people just are really not good at complicated tasks, even many graduates from top schools.
      - tharkun__ 5y ago
        I definitely would agree that a lot of people in large orgs are unfortunately like that. I can corroborate that from having been in many of those. I can also attest to the fact that most managers don't deal with this. There is a lot of moving people around or simply ignoring the problem. Now like my earlier sibling mentions, just because someone isn't a top performer at their current job at the current time doesn't mean they can't be great in another area or can learn. I have (and had) a bunch of people on my teams that were/are not senior people but they have a smart brain on their shoulders, are inquisitive and learn. Sure they don't know our stack fully, they don't have the exact same opinion on how to write code etc. but they are able to learn and adjust and maybe teach us where our customs aren't the best as well. And we teach them too. I'm speaking of practices like at large banks where people have been hiding doing nothing but being on Facebook all day for 10 years and all that has happened is that every project manager tries to avoid getting these people assigned to their projects.
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    Maybe it was the environment, that a lot of these people could be better if supported the right way? Or to say it simply (and please understand I know nothing about you so it is not meant as a criticism of how you personally work), maybe it was because they worked with you? I would also say that throwing x% and hiring again does not work well. The pool you are hiring from is people that are not happy somewhere else. You are not getting a 90% chance of finding a "good" person.

SkyPuncher 5y ago

It implies that the company isn't pushing their employees hard enough. In otherwords, if managers are doing their job "correctly" they should either (1) be pushing their staff so hard that 1 in 10 of them quit every year (2) weening out the the poorest performer.

tjalfi 5y ago
Peopleware calls this the Spanish Theory of Management[0]. Historians long ago formed an abstraction about different theories of value: The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people’s backs. Then there was the English Theory that held that value could be created through ingenuity and technology. So the English had an Industrial Revolution, while the Spanish spun their wheels trying to exploit the land and the Indians in the New World. They moved huge quantities of gold across the ocean, and all they got for their effort was enormous inflation (too much gold money chasing too few usable goods). The Spanish Theory of Value is alive and well among managers everywhere. You see that whenever they talk about productivity. Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference. The Spanish Theory managers dream of attaining new productivity levels through the simple mechanism of unpaid overtime. They divide whatever work is done in a week by forty hours, not by the eighty or ninety hours that the worker actually put in. [0] https://blog.bryanbibat.net/2009/08/31/spanish-theory-of-value/ https://blog.bryanbibat.net/2009/08/31/spanish-theory-of-val...
wombatpm 5y ago
Weeding as in remove undesirables Weening is the process if transitioning from milk to solid food as in babies and puppies

detaro 5y ago

some arguments I've seen (not endorsing any of those) are a) it makes you inflexible (i.e. you cant readjust by constantly hiring people that fit whatever your new goals are better) b) it means you are to easy on people and keep low performers around c) b) means it also makes trajectory upwards harder for good employees, so the good employees are more likely to be the few who quit

pixelrevision 5y ago

My guess would be either stack ranking or concern about the Dead Sea effect.

paxys 5y ago

It's the same kind of bullshit as teams being penalized for meeting 100% of their goals because it means that their goals weren't aggressive enough. I can't say whether the strategy is effective or not, but MBA types seem to love it.

andrei_says_ 5y ago
MBAs I think see it as an indicator that they are not using g the resource at capacity.
- rStar 5y ago
  mbas see whatever they see for whatever reasons they do. it’s usually posturing and signaling to other mba types, often with delusions of grandeur and napoleon complex, not height based.

dustintrex 5y ago

It's Neutron Jack's "rank and yank" philosophy, which says you should fire the bottom 10% performers of your org every year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitality_curve Of course firing low performers is quite different from high performers leaving, but HR doesn't see or care about these distinctions.

PeterisP 5y ago

The argument essentially is that it hints to there being an exploitable slack in the system. If you treat bargaining with employees as a zero-sum game (which it really isn't, but some companies do treat it that way) then the other party being very satisfied with the bargain indicates that they would be also willing to get a worse offer. So if all the employees are extremely satisfied with the compensation/effort ratio, that indicates that you could either lower the compensation some or extract more effort until they're satisfied "just barely enough".