Letting People Go

When someone gets taken on by an organisation, they put their best foot forward and the organisation does the same in a bid to make a good impression. When it’s time for this relationship to come to an end, both parties will want to end it in the same gracious way, out of respect to one another and to themselves.

If the organisation and individual can between them work out the best flight path through which the worker can exit the company, this individual is more likely to have a smooth landing as they come out of this stage in their career and life. Consider the difference between being on a plane that’s descending through a clear Caribbean sky and being on one that’s descending through heavy European rain clouds. The former descent will be far less turbulent than the latter. When you let someone go from your organisation, you want to do so using a process that creates as little turbulence as possible.

Is letting people go the best litmus test of how an organisation is? A lot of people wish to come to the UK and live and work here because it is a diverse, tolerant and just society. People are presumed innocent until found guilty and there’s a national health service that treats the sick with both expertise and respect. It’s this kind of thing that defines a society and a culture. Similarly, the way in which an employer lets people go defines its organisational culture and gives people an idea of whether or not they want to come and work for that company, just like some people want to go and live in a certain country.

Too many organisations see the process of individuals exiting from the company as nothing more than a financial settlement. It’s known as cheque book management—simply writing a cheque to wave the worker off with, as if that’s enough of an exit process in itself. This is a million miles away from treating someone like a human being.

When someone’s preparing to leave an organisation, they’re preparing for the next stage of their life and work life. An organisation that values its employees will want to help them in these preparations when it’s time to go.

Employers need to recognise that when someone joins a company, they will, at some stage, need letting go—be it because their performance isn’t adequate enough anymore, because the business needs to downsize or re-structure or because the individual themselves wants to leave. The old model of just kicking people out with a cheque in their pocket is still around, but needs kicking out itself.

Organisations need to plan their employees’ exit path out of the company, just as airlines plan their flight paths. It’s time for business to have a massive rethink around this issue and our Letting People Go Webinar (on the 27th March, 2-3pm) will provide plenty of food for thought.

To learn more about these challenges join us for our Letting People Go Webinar, which you can find more information about through our Employment Excellence LinkedIn Group. 

By Simon North, Founder of Position Ignition

Knowledge Retention is Key: We Cannot Lose Great Wisdom

Knowledge retention is a fundamental issue, which cannot be ignored. The number of people we lose as they leave an organisation or move into retirement and the amount of information and learning that have on board but that doesn’t get transferred is vast. This is a waste and can be managed much more effectively.

Older workers hold a lot of knowledge, insight and expertise that they have built up whilst working for the organisation. As they move into retirement, it is possible to support them through this transition and to help transfer some of this knowledge to other members of their team or elsewhere across the organisation. But - are we doing this effectively enough? Do we have the right processes in place? Is it HR’s responsibility to get this right and can it be done in-house?

The business will have moved on since these workers joined and the organisation will continue to develop but this does not mean that all of the experience someone has built up so far is useless. A lot of intricate and in depth know-how about the organisation, about how it functions, who does what, how – may all be inside one key person’s head. If that one person leaves the organisation, that’s a lot of information lost and which will take many years for another to gain. There would be costs in recruitment, in skills development and in training, which could have perhaps all been avoided if only we were smarter about keeping that key player involved.

We need to ask ourselves – is there a way that we can retain that knowledge and keep that person connected? Position Ignition’s knows that there is a way. We also know that it is fundamental to do it and to do it well. It is key for the sustainability of the organisation and to ensure continued shareholder value. It can however, only be done with real interest and insight into the individual’s world. It is also not on HR’s shoulders to come up with a solution for each person by themselves. It requires more sensitivity. A person’s journey beyond their work and into retirement is personal and the considerations can be complex.

We will need to find innovative ways to keep key individuals connected to the organisation and also perhaps mentoring others in order to keep the knowledge they hold circulating and in order to keep the machine alive. Are some of your most valuable workers soon to leave? Do you have a plan?

Author:

Simon North co-founder of Position Ignition. Simon is an experienced businessman, coach and career guide.

The Need to Retain Talented Employees Increases Every Day

In a workplace where the war for talent is making it tough to find good workers and where key skills getting more scarce, the need to retain your most talented individuals by treating people well, increases every day.

It is far shrewder and more economical to work at keeping your top employees than to let them go and spend money on recruiting and training new people who are going to take a while to get up to speed. Losing esteemed colleagues can also have an impact on the rest of the team, department and business. Other workers may well feel demoralised if they see the best talent being let go too easily.

Look at the wider, demographic picture and you'll see it presents another reason to hold on to your best. With baby boomers nearing the end of their careers, they're leaving a big skills gap that's hard to fill. Skills such as science, mathematics and engineering are predicted to be particularly sparse in the coming years. If you already have individuals who are in the prime of their working lives and who have these skills covered, do not underestimate how important it is to retain these employees.

Retention of crucial talent is so key to the continued growth and success of your business that it is well worth investing the time and effort into ensuring these individuals are happy to stay put and develop within the company instead of looking elsewhere for professional opportunities. Your best employees enhance the company in several different ways-by ensuring customer satisfaction, maintaining balance and productivity within the workplace, and driving product development and innovation onwards and upwards.

Retaining employees-even ones that seem engaged and dedicated to the organisation--requires a sensible and sensitive approach to the way that people work. Giving colleagues a sense of the direction of travel that they and the team overall are taking, plus consistent and regular communications about what needs doing as well as how they are doing in terms of their feedback are fundamentals to keeping your best and most involved workers. A lack of feedback in particular can lead to an employee feeling lost and directionless. It's vital that workers are given an idea of what they're doing right and wrong, so they can feel in control of their own improvement, development and destiny.

Tune in to every individual on a regular basis. This does not have to be formalised and structured as part of the standard appraisal process. This is much more about day to day management and supervision. People leave supervisors and managers rather than leaving organisations. The management and supervision of your top achievers must be as high quality as the achievers themselves if it is to meet their needs. As a line manager, do not underestimate your role in holding onto your best workers. Employees will stay or go because of you, not in spite of you. Avoid over-measuring --whilst it is important to measure outputs and performance, over-measurement can be a real irritant to high-performing individuals and may reduce their level of desire to keep doing what they do.

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Generations Gaps: A Great Source of Learning

What an opportunity exists if we can understand and innovate around this subject! In the 21^st century, we tend to laud youth; its beauty, its energies, its technical knowhow and how much the young seem to know, relatively, to previous generations at the same age. The way that they have grown up with their technology, and how central it is to their life, whether academic or for fun, is awesome. There are many effects.  Not least is young people’s ability to be so connected and supportive with another.

Within the same society that praises that generation, we must not deny the wisdom of experience. Earlier simple communities and societies show us the importance of wisdom and age to the smooth running of those societal/organisational models. And therein lays the opportunity for us to learn to build across these different generational gaps.

There is one issue that you can predict would come up if you were to ask a young person about what they believe is the most fundamental issue for them in any inter-relationship with another human being regardless of generation. That issue is respect. The implication is that one needs to be listened to and understood and that one’s opinion has equal value; whatever your age. So if you now imagine a pie chart or a cake with equal-sized slices that come from different ages and different generations within a working environment that is rapidly rising to within a 50 year age range from youngest to oldest, you have  to assume that every member believes they have equal value. They do as an individual and as a worker. Of course the value is different for each; as unique as each person is the skills, knowledge and capability that they bring is unique also. Also, each individual is likely to be differently valued in terms of their positional power and the amount that the organisation pays them for their labour. Notwithstanding the realities of the organisation’s and team’s work, the fundamental point of individual value should not be lost in seeking the source of great learning across generations.

Another concept which will damage this endeavour is speed, or pace. Younger people have always been in a tearing hurry but generation Y and younger generations believe even more so it is their right to ‘have it now’ and there is an impatience for waiting for anything. Those of older generations might be considered and have a mindset of ‘we need to take our time’ or ‘I wouldn’t if I were you’. Recognizing the different paces at which people are thinking and doing is important to any aspiration to learn across the generations. We’ve always known that the learning style that suits us is not always that which suits other people. So what works best for me needs to be tempered by ‘but it may not work for you’ and indeed, recognition of the earlier point of listening and understanding that giving people the right space and the right tempo and the right mode of learning are all important to opening up the real opportunities for learning.

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Are We Ready for an Older Workforce?

Up until the middle of the last century, when a worker retired the expectation was that they would not live for long. Sadly, but in a minority of cases, that circumstance is still true. What is much more normal though is that employees will have a longer period of life when they finish work. In 2011, those born in 1946 will be 65 years old. They are the oldest of the cohort called babyboomers and many of them will be retiring. Considering the average UK life expectancy is now is nearly 80 years, we can expect this demographic to be in retirement for around a decade and a half. One of our country’s biggest challenges in society is how to fund pensions, healthcare and social security for an increasing proportion of people over the age of 60 or 65 relative to the people who are working in the population.

One of the Government’s answers to this conundrum has been to phase out the default retirement age (DRA), giving older workers the option of working longer. Organisations will no longer have the right legally to end the employment of their older workers. This relieves some of the pressure on the state and also economically benefits the employee. The individual can retain earning their income and taking benefits from their employer, although these benefits are likely to change over time and there is the opportunity to continue contributing to their pension fund, if they are in one, and benefit from any tax efficient opportunities that may also exist in the future. By not drawing their state pension, these people can take advantage of drawing it later and at an enhanced rate.

If employers are smart about how they use more mature employees and allow these individuals the flexibility they need to carry on working, it will also ease the strain on our medical services. For instance, the smartest organisations will allow their older employees to work from home as well as in their normal office space, thus reducing the amount of commuting, which increasingly takes its toll on both mind and body as we get older. The individual thus expends less energy and is able to stay in work more easily. Being able to continue working in a way that is better aligned to our health, mentally, psychologically and emotionally, should see a reduction in the amount of need by this part of the working population for GPs and subsequent specialist health services.

Another advantage to allowing older workers to work for longer is that public and private organisations alike continue to benefit from these individuals’ skills—skills such as maths and engineering that are worryingly a dying art amongst younger generations. Some well-known international companies have struggled to find graduates in particular disciplines who meet the exacting standards that they require. However, people can’t work forever so what are we going to do about the skill shortages when the babyboomers finally do retire?

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