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I think this is neat, though I wish the article had more details! At first my reaction was obvious: "Well of course you can tell which employees are going to q
by memset 14y ago
I think this is neat, though I wish the article had more details!
At first my reaction was obvious: "Well of course you can tell which employees are going to quit! If they're not getting paid well, don't feel like they have mobility, and don't have flexibility, they will move on!"
But so much of what you read about "what employees want" is both anecdotal and highly-personalized. Some employees want to work from home and others prefer face-time. Some folks want a decent salary, whereas others (like myself) choose something less lucrative in order to work at a startup. For some, upward mobility equates to a track to management, and for others a tech lead, and yet others just want to be left alone to write some darn code.
But if we can try and predict, using actual real data, what kinds of corporate knobs (raises, promotions, job rotations, etc) can decrease attrition, then that also means a company would be increasing job satisfaction in the ways which are important to employees. Why haven't we been doing more of this all along?
- jaimebuelta 14y agoTrying to predict that with data and algorithms is bollocks... There is someone, called manager. I know, I know, it has a bad reputation. But is supposed to talk from time to time and keep an eye about how things are going. If talk is done properly, can be very useful to know if someone is not happy. I know that we are engineers, we love data, and talking to someone is awkward and out of the comfort zone. But this is ridiculous...
- memset 14y agoHow do we evaluate whether a one-on-one is productive? How can a business, in aggregate, learn from the hundreds of independent weekly manager-employee meetings to see what kinds of issues keep cropping up? This of course presumes both a good manager and an employee who is willing to speak candidly with them. This may not always be the case. (How often is it not the case? Let's examine the data and see! Maybe there is a systemic problem with trust between managers and their employees that needs work?) It is not uncommon for businesses to periodically do "employee satisfaction surveys." I don't think crunching data to measure the effectiveness of management (which affects employee attrition) is ridiculous at all.