Who was the most sensible among the three employees?
Answers
Explanation:
Many companies spend a great amount of time money investigating the causes of employee turnover—for example, through programs of exit interviews. Usually the intent behind such studies is to find out why people leave—the idea being that if a company can identify the reasons for terminations, it can work to hold terminations, and turnover, down.
While a company may obtain very valuable information from termination interviews, this kind of approach has two signal defects:
1. It looks at only one side of the coin—the termination side. If a company wants to keep its employees, then it should also study the reasons for retention and continuation, and work to reinforce these. From the viewpoint of a company’s policies on employment and turnover, the reasons why people stay in their jobs are just as important as the reasons why they leave them. An obvious point in evidence is that one individual will stay in a job under conditions that would cause another to start pounding the pavements.
As an analogy, consider the divorce rate. If one were really interested in doing something about it, he would have to understand why some people get divorced and why others stay married—the reasons for the two things are entirely different. Furthermore, the reasons for getting a divorce are not merely “just the opposite” of the reasons for staying in wedlock. He would have to do some real spadework on both sides of the fence to get a complete picture of the divorce phenomenon. Equally, in the corporate setting, there are definite rationales for terminating and definite (although sometimes unconscious) rationales for continuing.
2. This approach also tends to assume a perfect correlation between job dissatisfaction and turnover. Many a company works for low turnover because it thinks a low rate implies that its employees are pleased with their jobs—and, a fortiori, productive. This is not necessarily true, by any means. A low rate may just be the effect of a tight job market. Or perhaps the company has put golden handcuffs on its employees through a compensation scheme that emphasizes deferred benefits. There are many factors involved.
In itself, the fact that an employee stays on a payroll is meaningless; the company must also know why he stays there. We shall show, in fact, that some carelessly conceived methods of maintaining a low turnover rate can be detrimental to the financial health of a company and the mental health of its employees.
To get a more integrated view of work-force stability, we mounted a study to investigate the motivations to stay and proper ways to encourage it. (The study is described in the sidebar, “Background of the Study.”) This is the picture that has emerged.
Why do employees stay? The brief answer is “inertia.” Employees tend to remain with a company until some force causes them to leave. The concept here is very like the concept of inertia in the physical sciences: a body will remain as it is until acted on by a force.
What factors affect this inertia? There are two relevant factors within the company and also two relevant factors outside the company.
First, within the company, there is the issue of job satisfaction. Second, there is the “company environment” and the degree of comfort an individual employee feels within it. An employee’s inertia is strengthened or weakened by the degree of compatibility between his own work ethic and the values for which the company stands. The employee’s ethic derives from his own values and the actual conditions he encounters on the job. The company’s values derive from societal norms, formal decisions by the board of directors, and the policies and procedures of the managing group. A widening gap between these two vantages weakens inertia; a narrowing gap strengthens it.