CFO们如何留住人才？/人力资源管理

随着离职成本越来越高，留住人才已成为公司健康发展和CFO的主要职责。

在评估一家公司的健康状况时，没有什么指标比留住人才更能说明问题了。对于一家正在裁减最优秀员工的公司来说，问题不仅仅是人员流动的成本;它暴露了该公司更深层次的文化问题，进而影响了公司发展的能力。

然而，尽管人才保留很重要，但它是一个难以掌握的衡量标准，而且cfo们在这方面采取的方式往往大相径庭。

“这与其说是科学，不如说是艺术，”软件公司Harness的CFO约翰·Bonney(John Bonney)说。

 

衡量满意度

今年早些时候，SaaS提供商Workforce Logiq的首席执行官Jim Burke在接受HR Dive采访时表示，除了帮助雇主避免更换成本外，高水平的人才保留水平还与更高的参与度、满意度、生产率和盈利能力有关。

去年，美世全球奖励实践的负责人和战略主管劳伦·Lauren Mason(Lauren Mason)对HR Dive表示，当公司不能激励、调动或支持有才华的员工时，他们往往会离开。工作无聊、对经理的不满或对公司方向的失望都可能促使员工离开。

但随着疫情持续到2020年，替换有才华的员工变得更加困难和昂贵。招聘市场的冷落再加上远程培训新员工的挑战，最终可能会影响公司的运营，甚至危及公司的利润。

因此，CFO们与他们在人力资源部门的执行同事合作，将留住员工作为首要责任，并将其视为重要的KPI。

“我们看到很多人在找工作，现在团队中失去一个人是非常具有破坏性的，”新泽西州格莱斯顿的私立预科学校吉尔圣伯纳德的首席财务官Kelly Garnes上个月在一个小组讨论会上说。“有些招聘人员正在寻找员工，希望他们知道他们在一家新公司会感到受到重视。虽然我们处在虚拟环境中，但我们都必须付出额外的努力，以确保团队成员感到我们重视他们的努力。当你开始不太在意的时候，他们能看出来。”

Lauren Mason说:“雇主应该通过员工敬业度调查来了解员工敬业度，衡量员工的敬业度和留在公司的意愿。”如果这些领先指标开始下滑，首席财务官可能会考虑介入调查。

使用HR-Finance协作

一些首席财务官倾向于用非常科学和量化的方法来留住人才，但SaaS初创公司Ping Identity的首席财务官Raj Dani的方法却不同。

Dani发现，员工的参与度越高，他们的工作效率就越高，也就越快乐，而这也会产生较高的员工的留存率。“这就是我们感兴趣的循环;我们可以称之为人力资本价值链。”

他表示，“围绕人事管理的一切”是Dani在首席财务官工作中最喜欢的部分。“作为管理者，我们有责任真正去了解这些人。”

Dani的财务团队和人力资源团队步调一致。“我们积极参与员工人数规划过程，确保适当的预算分配，以及新员工入职过程。”

在Dani看来，留住员工的关键在于了解员工，在他们的日常工作之外为他们提供机会，并鼓励他们通过参与来学习新技能。

“通过这种协作方式你不仅可以做并购、尽职调查、投资者关系、收益分析或者任何这些不是你日常擅长的工作内容, 而且这种方式使你可以和那些通常不一起工作的人协作,  可以添加新的技能到你的'武器库'”他说。

Dani在非常细致的研究了每名员工的收入、各集团的人员流失统计数据、薪酬趋势、招聘成本和客户成功度，以寻找模式。

Dani说:“我更感兴趣的是变化，不仅仅是人才保留方面的变化，而是整个人力资源价值链带来的变化。”“你如何利用品牌来吸引合适的候选人?”你如何让他们参与进来?你要怎么衡量呢?”

员工留存作为一种计划工具

在为明年做计划时(他说大多数首席财务官已经在做了)，Bonney研究了年度流失率。

“作为一个基准，如果你在季度初有100人，但却损失了10人，那就是10%的季度流失率，但40%的年度流失率。这个指标的问题在于，不同的员工群体会有不同的健康的流失率。”Bonney说。

他说，跨部门的零人员流失也不健康;这可能意味着缺乏对员工的评估机制。Bonney认为每年10-15%的人员流失率是健康的，因为人们逐渐超越了某些角色。

他说:“我们明白，员工离职是不可避免的，因此我们也会追踪自愿与非自愿、被迫与非被迫的员工流失。”“你不想要减员，但在任何企业，减员都是健康的……问题是，当你看到的时候，(通常)已经太晚了。你是在将已经发生了的来推测可能发生的事。”

另一个关于留住人才的信息来源是Glassdoor，在这个网站上，现任和前任员工可以匿名分享对一家公司的优点和缺点的评价。

“如果你看看如今的风险资本市场，就融资而言，Glassdoor的得分真的很重要，”他说。“是的，你必须持保留态度，必须了解趋势，但我们非常看重(Glassdoor)，这比出现人员流失问题提前了一步。”

如果Bonney遇到负面的反馈，他首先会识别出它来自哪个区域或部门，并将其与时间维度的分数和趋势进行比较。他会问:“这是情感上的挑战吗?”“我们是根据趋势来看待它的，而不是某个绝对数值，因为某时点的绝对数值可能会让你错过一些东西。”

跟踪留存率:上游、中游和下游

 

Bonney将面向公众的聚合网站Glassdoor定义为“中游”，内耗是下游;，更上层的是通过内部分发的调查来衡量员工敬业度。

Bonney和他的团队使用有针对性的软件和调查，在内部按职能、角色和地区衡量员工的情绪，这让他们能够在Glassdoor或人员流失可能揭示这些趋势之前了解这些趋势。

从度量的角度来看，Harness将参与度、Glassdoor评级和损失率视为所有滞后指标。

Bonney说，公司的需求会随着公司的发展而改变。他补充说:“不同类型的角色的需求发生了巨大变化，如果一家公司发展非常迅速，这种变化甚至可能更大。”“一般来说，当一家初创公司接近IPO时，员工队伍会以一种健康的方式发生变化，公司也会继续非常成功。”

Bonney说，对于高增长的初创公司来说，留住员工是最困难的事情。“你的产品符合市场需求，假设产品满足了人们的需求，但当你要执行一项增长计划时，这是最难的部分。”

通常情况下，一群人会在某一阶段表现出色，一开始是“超级好斗”，然后戴着“10顶帽子”。

“当你进入后期阶段时，你不能同时戴10顶帽子;工作太多了，”Bonney说。“我们需要一个真正擅长戴三顶帽子的人。在这方面并没有真正的衡量标准，所以我们依赖于雇佣了很多人并经历过这个周期的管理团队。”

Bonney说:“确保以最高水平留住人才，是整个管理团队的既得利益。”他每周都要与公司的人力资源主管会面。

他说:“这可能过时了，但我们相信是人造就了数字，数字不能造就人。”“如果没有合适的人，没有良好的执行力，你就无法实现目标。”

他说:“从上游/下游的角度来看，我发现，从滞后指标看上游越远，你就能越清楚地看到什么在起作用。”“我看到过士气和激励方面的挑战让一家公司迅速走下坡路。幸运的是，我们有一个高素质、高士气的企业文化，所以当我们遇到困难时，我们可以调整。”

留住人才

在Bonney的领导下，公司为远程办公的员工提供工作站补贴，并每两周召开一次全体会议，以确保员工感觉到自己被倾听。

他说:“越来越重要的是，尤其是在发生巨大变化的时期，了解我们是否在某个地方遇到了精疲力竭的挑战，或者是否有某个地方的人觉得他们必须一直工作。”“我们看到了一些情况，并做了一些调整。最近，我们决定每月强制规定周五休息一次。”

Dani说:“我总是说，劳资关系就像生活中的其他任何关系一样:必须对半分，否则就注定要失败。”“在这段关系中，员工和雇主应该平等地付出自己。作为一名雇主，我努力提供令人兴奋的工作机会，比如关注收益周期、投资者关系或人们日常没有接触到的特殊项目。”

Dani说，Ping Identity投资于各种团队建设活动和合作，以及发展机会，因为它认为这是它作为雇主的责任。

他说:“离开Ping身份认证，你就会成为一个比刚进来时强大得多的专业人士。”“我们要求的回报是你在这里尽最大努力。尽管我们有1,000名员工，但我们仍然在文化和开发上投入了大量的价值，每次都得到了十倍的回报。”

原英文报道如下：

With turnover more costly, talent retention has become a marker of a company's health and a primary CFO responsibility.

KPI Closeup is a series dedicated to the key metrics CFOs heed to perform in a highly competitive landscape. You can find the entire series here.

When it comes to assessing a company's health, few metrics are more informative than talent retention. For a company shedding its best people, the issue isn't just the expense of turnover; it's the deeper cultural problem it exposes in your company, which in turn affects your ability to grow your business.

And yet, despite its importance, talent retention is a tricky metric to master and why CFOs go about it in such different ways.

"It's a lot more art than science," says John Bonney, CFO of Harness, a software-deployment company.

Measuring satisfaction

In addition to helping employers avoid replacement costs, strong talent retention levels are associated with higher engagement, satisfaction, productivity and profitability, Jim Burke, CEO of SaaS provider Workforce Logiq, told HR Dive earlier this year.

Talented workers tend to leave when their company fails to motivate, engage or support them, Lauren Mason, principal and strategic lead for Mercer's Global Rewards Practice, told HR Dive last year. Boredom, dissatisfaction with a manager, or frustration with company direction could all push employees to depart.

But as the pandemic has dragged on in 2020, replacing talented workers is more difficult and costly. A sporadic hiring market, combined with the challenge of training a new staffer remotely, could ultimately throw a wrench into operations and even jeopardize the bottom line.

For this reason, CFOs, in collaboration with their executive colleague in HR, have taken employee retention on as a primary responsibility and treat it as a vital KPI.

"We see people looking for work, and to lose someone on your team right now is highly disruptive," Kelly Garnes, CFO of Gill St. Bernard's, a private preparatory school in Gladstone, New Jersey, said on a panel last month. "There are recruiters looking for people, and wanting them to know they'd feel valued at a new company. Though we're in a virtual environment, we all have to take extra effort to make sure team members feel we value their efforts. When you start to take it lightly, they can tell."

"Employers should keep a pulse on engagement using employee engagement surveys that measure commitment and intent to stay with the organization," Mason said. If those leading indicators start to slip, the CFO might consider stepping in and investigating.

Using HR-Finance collaboration

Some CFOs tend to get very scientific and quantitative around talent retention, but Raj Dani, CFO of SaaS startup Ping Identity, approaches it differently.

The more engaged the workforce, the more productive and happier they'll be, and that leads to retention, Dani has found. "That's the cycle we're interested in; call it the human capital value chain."

"Everything around people management" is Dani's favorite part of the CFO job, he said. "We, as managers, have a responsibility to really get to know these individuals."

Dani's finance team and HR team work in lockstep. "We're actively involved in the headcount planning process, making sure the appropriate budget is allocated, and the onboarding process."

In Dani's eyes, retention comes down to getting to know the individual, providing opportunities for them in addition to their day jobs, and encouraging them to find new skills to learn just by getting involved.

"You can work on acquisitions, due diligence, investor materials, earnings scripts, or any of those kinds of things that may not be in your lane as your day job, but are a great way to network with people you may not work with ordinarily, and to add skills to your arsenal," he said.

Dani studies revenue per headcount, attrition statistics by group, trends of compensation, recruiting costs and customer success at a very granular level in search of patterns.

"I'm more interested in what changes, not just in terms of talent retention, but that entire value chain HR brings," Dani said. "How do you leverage the brand to attract the right candidates? How do you keep them engaged? And how do you really measure that?"

Retention as a planning tool

In planning for next year, which he says most CFOs are already doing, Bonney studies annual attrition rates.

"As a baseline, if you have 100 people at the beginning of the quarter and lose 10 of them, that's a 10% quarterly attrition rate, but a 40% annual rate. The problem with that metric is that different groups of your employees will have different healthy attrition rates," Bonney said.

Across departments, zero attrition isn't healthy, either, he said; it may imply a lack of mechanism for employee evaluation. Bonney names the 10-15% annualized attrition range as healthy, able to chalk up to people gradually outgrowing certain roles.

"We understand that, inevitably, folks leave, so we also track voluntary versus involuntary attrition, or forced versus unforced attrition," he said. "You don't want attrition, but there's a healthy amount in any business ... The problem is it's [often] too late by the time you look at it. You're measuring what's happened, versus what could happen."

Another source of talent retention insights — Glassdoor, the website on which current and former employees share anonymous testimonials of what's good and bad at a company.

"If you look at the venture capital market these days, for funding, Glassdoor scores are really important," he said. "And, yes, you have to take it with a grain of salt, and have to understand the trends, but we look at [Glassdoor] religiously, and that's one step ahead of an attrition problem."

If Bonney comes across negative feedback, he first identifies which region or function it's coming from and compares it to scores and trends over time. "Is there a sentiment challenge there?" he'll ask. "We look at it by trend, not as absolute, because you can miss something."

Tracking retention: Upstream, mid-stream, and downstream

Bonney defines Glassdoor, a public-facing aggregator, as mid-stream; attrition is downstream; further upstream is measuring employee engagement through internally circulated surveys.

Bonney and his team use targeted software and surveys to gauge employee sentiment, internally, by function, role and region, which allows them to understand trends before Glassdoor or attrition may reveal them.

From the metric perspective, Harness considers engagement, Glassdoor ratings and attrition all lagging indicators.

A company's needs change as it grows, Bonney said. "The needs change dramatically for different types of roles and can even be more dramatic if a company is growing really fast," he added. "As a startup approaches an IPO, generally, the workforce changes in a healthy way, and the company goes on to be very successful."

Keeping people around is the hardest thing about being a high-growth startup, Bonney said. "You have your product market fit, assuming the product is hitting a need people want, but when you come down to executing a growth plan, that's the hardest part."

Often, a group of people will perform excellently at a certain stage, starting out "super scrappy" and wearing "10 hats."

"As you get into the later stages, you can't wear 10 hats; it's too much work," Bonney said. "We need someone who's really good at wearing three of those hats. There's not really a metric around that, so we rely on having management teams who have hired a lot of people and have been through the cycle."

"The whole executive team has a very vested interest in making sure that the talent retention operates at top ability," Bonney said. He meets with Harness' head of HR every week.

"This may be old-fashioned, but we believe people make the numbers, the numbers don't make the people," he said. "Without the right people in place, executing well, you won't make your goals."

"Looking at it as an upstream/downstream picture, I've learned the further you can look upstream from the lagging indicator, the clearer you can see what's working," he said. "I've seen morale and motivational challenges take a company south quickly. We, fortunately, have a high-caliber, high-morale culture at Harness, so when we hit a speed bump, we can adjust."

Keeping talent on board

Under Bonney's leadership, Harness has given remote employees subsidies for their work stations and holds biweekly all-hands meetings to ensure employees feel heard.

"What's becoming more important, especially during periods of immense change, is knowing whether we have a burnout challenge somewhere, or if there's somewhere people feel like they always have to be on," he said. "We saw some of that, made some adjustments, and recently made a decision to have mandatory Fridays off once a month."

"I've always said the employer-employee relationship is like any other in life: has to be 50-50 or it's bound for failure," Dani said. "The employee and employer should be giving themselves equally in the relationship. As an employer, I strive to provide exciting work opportunities, like working on the earnings cycle, investor relations, or special projects people don't have exposure to in the day-to-day."

Ping Identity invests in various team building activities and collaborations, as well as development opportunities, because it sees it as its responsibility as an employer, Dani said.

"When you leave Ping Identity, you're leaving as a much stronger professional than when you came in," he said. "And what we ask in return is you give max effort while you're here. Even though we're 1,000 people strong, we still put so much value into culture and development, and that pays back ten times over every time."