Employers should prioritize retention over hiring, study suggests

Perverse incentives are borne from cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all rules thought up in rush for a due-dated result requested by a manager who's in a rush for a due-dated result (continue as per stack of turtles).

> Reward seniority and loyalty

Aware this isn't a whitepaper that deeply explores what's better and worse for a company's workforce retention, but "Reward seniority and loyalty" is dangerously simplistic.

From my limited experience with payroll systems, and having groups of employees doing the same role, all on different rates based on how long they've worked for us, is a maintenance nightmare due to the inability to automate things. Salary bands and levels etc. alleviate this, but there are necessarily fairly tight limits where a 10-year veteran's expectations are just unrealistic. There's a point where "everyone doing this role" should be paid more, rather than this individual should get a higher percentage than their peers if their total remuneration would breach some ad-hoc level of acceptability.

I think a simple description of a wickedly-complex strategy is "know your people". This requires managers that have the time and space to get to know their reports, all the way up the chain.

Just two days ago I was discussing an ex-colleague, who had a bad reputation with our previous management (I was actually explicitly told by management not to bring him into my project). He eventually moved to a new company, and is an absolute star worker there. If he was managed better at the previous place he could have been a star there as well.

Immediate thought-analogy: If Managers treated their reports as Customers; if Managers acted as Sales Reps for the company in their dealings with reports, then retention would be less of a problem (also need to know which "Customers" are worth the effort).

But it all depends on what you're optimising for, and every workplace is different. Know which roles are "soldier out, soldier in", and which require 6 months of knowledge absorption to become remotely productive.

A single rule is as efficient as it gets, but it'll rub a majority of the people the wrong way. A rule for every individual will keep everyone somewhat more happy, but it'll be murder on administrative maintenance. Find your balance point on that scale and re-evaluate based on changing macro-economic situations.

> One counterexample (unfortunately the only one that comes to mind) is sales, where performance has an immediate positive cash & profit impact that is trivial to measure.

Nope!

Two salespeople closing the same total value over a year can have vastly different impacts on the business.

Say Alice cares about how well the customers she brought in are doing. She follows up on their experience every six months. She talks to the people in the organisation who fulfills the customer desires. She makes sure there's a good customer--product fit, and her customers are just at that edge where they challenge the organisation to do better without demanding of them the impossible.

On the other hand, Bob doesn't care about how customers do. He just wants to close deals. He finds bad customer--product fits but convinces them anyway by promising rainbows and daisies. The customer is unhappy from day 1, because they never get what they were lead to expect. The organisation is stressed out trying to fulfill unreasonable demands.

Alice is a net positive contributor, Bob is at best neutral -- both close the same value, remember!

That sales performance measures are easy and instantaneous is one of the most damaging myths governing my current workplace. It's really bad.

In this particular case, I imagine that person would have left and found another job. They were certainly talented enough to do so. If so, there would've been no hard feelings on my end given that they're just going for what they deserve. If the reason was only because we wanted to but couldn't afford to, then I hope there wouldn't have been any hard feelings on their end either since we had a positive relationship and I would've made it clear to him that we wanted to retain him but simply didn't have the funds to.

> Unfortunately, most companies have fallen into the trap where if someone has a title of X they can only make up to Y, regardless of how good they are at their job or how long they've done it.

I don't agree that this is a trap. sure, leveling systems aren't perfect. but they're based on a key insight: there is usually a limit to the impact an engineer can have for a given scope. if I own a single service/component in a larger ecosystem, there comes a point where it doesn't make sense to keep paying me more money to make it even better if my clients/dependencies aren't keeping up. the only way I can continue increasing my contribution to organizational goals is to broaden my scope and start influencing the design of other services/components I interact with. it's not by coincidence that is a major part of how leveling guidelines are written at most tech companies.

This will make employees uncompetitive and shift more power to employers.