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The other day, we discussed a company that sees its workers as assets to be cherished and nurtured. Sadly, there are a lot of companies that see their employees as "human resources" to be used up and cast off. Maybe those enterprises need a better means to evaluate the wisdom of that tack.
Common Dreams reports
Employee turnover costs businesses millions of dollars each year. However, many employers don't accurately track this expense, which could be reduced by improving workplace conditions. To help business owners understand the cost of turnover, the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP) and Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) have released an updated turnover calculator.[1] This dynamic tool allows employers to calculate turnover costs by responding to 10 simple questions.
When employees leave or are laid off, companies incur numerous expenses searching for and on-boarding their replacements; these include advertising, recruiting, background checks, benefits administration, training, and lost productivity while new employees become proficient at their jobs. Taken together, these costs can have serious implications for bottom lines. The turnover calculator allows businesses to input wages; weekly hours; and recruiting, hiring, and training costs to determine the financial impact for different categories of workers.
[1] The link(s) in the article redirect. I have provided a direct link in the summary.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday May 19 2015, @06:44AM
were we to receive on-the-job traning, rather than expected to use our own time and money staying up to date on new tech, we might have some loyalty to the employer.
I've been programming on Apple platforms since 1986, I worked at apple twice, once as a contract programmer, the other as a white badge employee. Not long ago I attended a job interview where I was unable to convince the hiring manager that I knew how to write Mac OS X gui applications.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2015, @06:53AM
Well let's see, on the one hand, you're as self-aggrandizing as any young hipster brogrammer, but on the other hand, you're old.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday May 19 2015, @07:19AM
were we to receive on-the-job traning, rather than expected to use our own time and money staying up to date on new tech, we might have some loyalty to the employer.
Sadly, no. As soon as you train them, they jump to a better job.
My last job, they decided to hire green as grass newbies and started training them up. Most left within the year. Management finally figured out that it was only the journeymen who remained, (because it was an interesting place to work, but you actually needed some skills).
As for you, I suspect your self confessed paranoia and related symptoms were your downfall.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2015, @07:31AM
Not anymore. Change is canceled. It's status quo for now and forever more. Don't even think about thinking different.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2015, @09:42AM
Perhaps your problem is that you expected them to work for "green as grass" pay after you trained them?
That was close to happening at a company I used to work for. Everybody was promised training that would allow them to work as SAP consultants, and they would get a 3% raise when the training was completed.Or they could get 3 TIMES as much by quitting and getting jobs as actual SAP consultants (SAP consultants are expensive as f*ck).
Management tried to prevent this by having the training accompanied by a no quitting for two years contract. When somebody went and told them that such a contract was actually illegal, the training was scrapped, and SAP consultants were hired in.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Katastic on Tuesday May 19 2015, @03:08PM
Maybe your employer should start caring about your employees, pay them above average salaries and give them interesting jobs and they won't magically leave the second they get a chance to.
If your employer spent 5% more money toward making your co-workers happy, healthy, and successful, they'd probably save 25% every year on the retraining costs.
The US (and the world?) seems to be brainwashed into thinking that nickel-and-diming actually saves money. They seem to think that if they can measure something, they've somehow captured all the variables and can make decisions. It's "business by conjecture" at its finest.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tramii on Tuesday May 19 2015, @04:21PM
Sadly, no. As soon as you train them, they jump to a better job.
Any company with this attitude is literally admitting that they are a terrible place to work. If your employees leave for a "better job" then their current job is, by definition, "worse".
Why wouldn't you want to become the "better" job and attract talent from other companies? Why accept that your company sucks and you basically have to trick/coerce people into working there? Or settle for lazy/incompetent employees? Do you really see that as a viable long-term recipe for success?
If you feel like making your company a desirable place to work is too much effort, then clearly making your company a success is too much effort as well.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday May 19 2015, @06:14PM
Why wouldn't you want to become the "better" job and attract talent from other companies?
So your solution to the problem seems merely to put the shoe on the other foot?
You do realize that you've just suggested that being part of the problem is, somehow, a solution?
The net result is that nobody will have any incentive to spend any money on training, which is EXACTLY the problem the GP (Crawford) was complaining about.
And by the way, it wasn't "my" company.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2015, @06:28PM
I fail to see how your statements logically follow from the GP's suggestion. How would striving to be a better company and employer than others lead to not spending money on training? And how would striving to be a better company make one part of the problem? The problem is that shit companies are shit companies and treat their employees like replaceable garbage, the problem is not that some companies are not shit companies that don't treat their employees like replaceable garbage.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday May 19 2015, @07:10PM
I fail to see how your statements logically follow from the GP's suggestion. How would striving to be a better company and employer than others lead to not spending money on training?
Follow the thread. Its all english, and not that hard.
Hiring talent away from others who spent money to train them, relieves you of having to provide training yourself.
It also discourages others from paying for training, because they know the employees will immediately leave.
The net result is the prospective employees have to acquire their own training.
Crawford starts his argument by saying employees might feel some loyalty if they got on the job training.
My position, and apparently yours also, is that the lack of loyalty is PRECISELY why employers prefer not to train.
It costs two or three times as much to hire a raw recruit, suffer their incompetence by throwing one or two OTHER employees into the task of mentoring them, then handle their work load for them when you send them off for training which you pay for, only to have them say, "Well, I got this new thing on my resume, Kthanksbye. All that time and money (and effort on the part of mentors) and ZERO return on investment.
I've seen many fellow employees pull this stunt. (4 out of the shop of 12 that I worked in back then). Don't tell me it's always the employers fault. I applied for training a year after these clowns pulled that stunt, and was told by management that training was simply not cost effective, and they got burned way too many times, and the training budget was being cut.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Tramii on Tuesday May 19 2015, @11:13PM
A company that refuses to train their own people is a company that doesn't care about it's employees. I was never implying that a "better" company should rely on stealing trained employees. I was saying that a company should strive to be a place where people desire to work. If a company cannot keep it's employees after training them, it *is* absolutely the fault of the company.
Why do you think those employees left the second they got their training? In general, people don't arbitrarily switch jobs. If they do switch, it's because the new job offers a significant advantage over their current job. More pay. Increased benefits. Shorter commute. Whatever. If your company couldn't keep people to stick around after training, it was because they offered poor pay/working conditions.
Companies simply don't want to invest any more. They want instant, tangible results that can be recorded on a spreadsheet. Too bad real life doesn't work that way. Training doesn't make any sense to them because, on paper, it looks more expensive. They will do anything to make a few more bucks, and then complain when their employees do the exact same thing!
The lack of loyalty is due to companies treating workers like shit. It's caused by companies refusing to invest in their employees. Now, of course, companies use the poor loyalty as an excuse to continue to treat their employees like shit. So it's a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday May 20 2015, @01:03AM
First, I was replying to the AC, not to you. Its important to follow the context of the thread.
Second:
Why do you think those employees left the second they got their training? In general, people don't arbitrarily switch jobs.
Yes they do.
People will switch jobs for 100 bucks a month difference.
Decent employees do stick around after their employer shells out $10,000 for schooling. I've always felt an obligation to stick around at least a year after being sent to school.
But I've seen a lot of employees jump ship within a month of putting that training on their resume. Training they didn't pay for, and training they never actually practiced for their current employer.
Employers have started adding a training pay-back clause in hiring agreements PRECISELY because the practice of jumping ship is way more common than you seem to think. And it stands up in Court [businessmanagementdaily.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Tramii on Wednesday May 20 2015, @04:55PM
Why do you think those employees left the second they got their training? In general, people don't arbitrarily switch jobs.
Yes they do.
People will switch jobs for 100 bucks a month difference.
Increasing your income is NOT an arbitrary reason. 100 extra dollars a month is significant.
(Well, maybe not for some people, but for many it is.)
(Score: 2, Insightful) by CyprusBlue on Tuesday May 19 2015, @10:34PM
That's because the next job is willing to pay them what their experience is now worth, while the previous job holds the fantasy that the employee is not suddenly worth that much more after gaining needed (aka marketable) skills.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday May 20 2015, @12:42AM
They don't have any experience, all they have is training, which for all the fields I have worked in is a far cry from experience.
You pay to send a green employee to school, and what you get back is a green employee lead by the hand trough some simplistic course assignments, and they are STILL just as green and inexperienced as they were the day you hired them.
I don't know what you expect from training. I've both paid for employee training, and have had it provided by my employer. I don't think any instances of employer provided training i've seen turned a green horn into a journeyman without some considerable amount of additional experience. They certainty aren't worth three times the salary they were hired at, and the companies that hired our freshly trained co-workers certainly didn't get their money's worth. (I knew their new bosses, it was a small-ish town).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by CyprusBlue on Wednesday May 20 2015, @04:31PM
If they can jump to somewhere else with those new skills, the market clearly disagrees with you, and you need to accept that and act accordingly and either pay them what they are now worth, or watch them leave for a more competitive company.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2015, @09:18AM
To be fair, just because you worked at apple and have programmed on Apple platforms does not at all show that you can write gui applications at all, let alone ones that "fit"* with OS X.
*lets face it, programming is programming. What they really wanted was someone that could make lightweight, stylistic, applications on the cheap that they could sell for premium prices, just as Apple does. You needed to sell them on your ability to do that. Even if it was impossible.