One step forward - two steps back

You got him!! He accepted the offer. This is a key position and it has been open for too long. You had to pay more than you wanted to but it will be worth it. You are celebrating, high fiving, planning the party.

Then one of your supervisors comes in and tells you one of his key people just quit. Before you even start talking about how hard it will be to replace him – another one of your supervisors comes in and says that one of his key people is also quitting.

The party never happens. You are worse off than when you started the day. How and why does it always seem to work this way?? One step forward – two steps back. How are you going to replace these two employees with their skills? You had real plans for one of them. Maybe you can save him by telling him what you were thinking. Your chances are slim to none.

You already have a skills gap:

  1. Missing people in key positions
  2. Paying too much for some skills
  3. Only to lose them too soon

Employee turnover, skills gap and chronically open positions are linked together. Good or bad.

If it is bad then they work together to make everything even worse. The trend line is going down and getting steeper. You spend more money on one set of skills only to lose someone in another set of skills. You simply cannot afford to overpay again. But you cannot go without that skill. What’s the answer?

If they are working together for good - then they feed off of each other to make your life so much better, easier and more profitable. You have the opposite of the paragraph above. You hold onto people, their skills and you don’t have the open positions. The trend line is getting better every day.

I have inherited the bad trend line every time I was hired as the new VP of HR. It was all working against us. We had massive turnover, our skills were flooding out the door and every time we filled a position we lost even more people. It is a fixable problem. We went from massive turnover to very little turnover. We retained our skills and could acquire skills for market price.

Our chronically open positions disappeared and the only open positions were due to growth!! The costs of the bad trend line in nearly infinite and the profits made in the good trend line are nearly infinite if you include lost opportunities.

Which direction do you want to move in?