Why Your Top Performaning Employees Quit

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Why Top Employees Quit

In a large company this is a problem that we have with our IT groups in particular. I reached out a to a few peers with other companies (one is an IT exec and one is actually a Group President) and as an exercise, we took a bunch of historical data and started identifying the factors that led to the annual exodus. We focused only the top 20% of the employees from a performance standpoint. It's not that the remaining 80% is unimportant, however, from a productivity, growth, and brainpower perspective, the top 20% of any group is critical. Moreover, these are the employees that are very difficult to replace.
To do this, we reviewed notes from exit interviews, cross referenced annual reviews and ultimately came up with 178 voluntary terminations from people that would have been considered in the top 20%.

To try and keep focused on macro issues, we consolidated the responses and placed them into categories:
  • Money
  • Unchallenged
  • Too Challenged
  • Dead Company
  • Watch your Levels (and the BS)


Here is the breakdown of the categories. I know someone is bound to ask why it doesn't add up so... Please keep in mind that this will not add up to 178 because several people insisted on listing 2-3 reasons when the question only asked for 1 reason.

Read on: http://www.dumblittleman.com/2006/09/why-top-employees-quit.html

There is hope for the world

Best news I read this week: Whoohoo!
 

 
 

"Metacrap" is a very strong, coherent, pointed critique of the dream of metadata.

Cory Doctorow - People are lazy, so they misclassify because they can't be bothered to properly classify.  We can't all agree; everything is miscellaneous, as you say, so we can't all agree on the best way to classify information, and so on.  So, that's a kind of sampler of the reasons that the idea that we'll all make it all work is so flawed.

They are just a lot of categories of information that we can't draw lines between. . .
 

The Web destroys categories, disciplines and hierarchies

"IT" Has Made Everything Miscellaneous 
 

Higher education industry is becoming a racket...

Buy our product or be condemned to life of penury, and our product can easily cost well over $100,000.

Higher Education Conformity - Is a college degree really a sign of competence? Or is it chiefly a signal to employers that you've mastered the ability to obey and conform? College degree chiefly as mark of one's ability to obey and conform. Whatever else you learn in college, you learn to sit still for long periods while appearing to be awake. And whatever else you do in a white collar job, most of the time you'll be sitting and feigning attention. Sitting still for hours on end -- whether in library carrels or office cubicles -- does not come naturally to humans. It must be learned -- although no college has yet been honest enough to offer a degree in seat-warming.

Or maybe what attracts employers to college grads is the scent of desperation. Unless your parents are rich and doting, you will walk away from commencement with a debt averaging $20,000 and no health insurance. Employers can safely bet that you will not be a trouble-maker, a whistle-blower or any other form of non-"team-player." You will do anything. You will grovel.

College can be the most amazingly enlightening experience of a lifetime. I loved almost every minute of it...
 
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