But the dawn seems to be breaking a little. Organizations are starting to expand in targeted areas. Some strategic projects are starting to get approved instead of delayed as they were 12 months ago. Departments are starting to look around for a few good people to augment their current teams. Other organizations are looking to add strong, well-experienced team players. They're only adding just a few, and they want the cream of the crop. So they're seeking experts.
They're Seeking Your Experts.
If your best and brightest have been heads-down working all angles of projects to fill gaps left by recent cutbacks, they've been doing work that is not their core passion. Business analysis, requirements gathering, design, development, testing, sorting out production problems, and project management is all work that needed to get done, and given the economic climate it had to get done, but your big hitter isn't thrilled to be covering all of those bases.
Retention needs to be a topic of conversation in your organization today. Even if some of the leadership suggests that the budgets are still too tight to support retention activities, it needs to be done. It may not seem like a burning issue yet, but a small investment today will offset huge costs in the near future. This is when you need to apply the proverbial "ounce of prevention".
The cost of retaining an expert must be weighed against the costs that you will incur should he or she walk. Consider the following areas:
Chaos and Momentum Loss - Just the amount of wasted time that is incurred in the week following the announcement is expensive. This is the cost of discussing the change, and the potential organizational impacts. The water cooler is buzzing. People start to chatter about the news rather than focusing on the work at hand.
Recruiting Time - An expert is someone with a solid skills and significant experience. You can expect that a replacement is not hanging around near the bus stop. It will take a significant investment of time and energy to find, recruit, and negotiate the hire of this person.
Spin-Up time for the replacement - On day one, the new recruit won't be particularly effective. In fact, the new recruit may not be particularly effective on day 180. It can take up to 12 months for a new person to understand the technology and business landscape of your organization. If he's only half-effective, the cost of half of his salary is sunk into this learning curve.
Costs to acclimate to the cultural landscape - Your culture is another area where the new guy will need to spin up. Understanding which executives base decisions on hard data versus who is more likely to make gut decisions is important. Knowing how to navigate through barriers in your project life cycle smoothly is a valuable skill to gain. Even worse, the replacement may never find a mesh with your culture and ultimately leave your organization, too. This resets the clock and the budget to square one.
Small shifts in Direction and Guidance - No two experts have the same approach and views about any subject matter. If your experts spend a good deal of time advising, instructing, and mentoring your staff, your staff will need to adjust to shifts in direction. This is a cost multiplier across your staff with each member burning hours adjusting to new ideas and guidance.
Loss of a Single Project - If amid all of these issues, your newly hired expert makes a mistake (and who could blame them if they did?), that mistake may result in the loss of a project, or in a result that will need to be refactored in the future. What would the cost of that be? How deep could that money pit grow to be in the future?
All totaled, the costs are very high. If your leadership is suggesting that budgets are still too tight to consider doing something to improve retention this year, I'd suggest you ask how much larger those budgets will be in the future when they'll need to address the results of this short-sightedness.
Lose any good experts lately - let us know in the comments.
photo: Billie Hara
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