Re. turnover. One of the biggest pet-peeves I have is responsibility dodging. Though the article focuses on Human Capital, it does not mean that others are not responsible for keeping and growing good people. Great teams are everyone’s responsibility! If anyone uses excuses to dodge accountability, they simply don’t belong in rapid-growth environments. They can go work for government or one of those dying large companies.

We are also dealing with a very rapidly-changing and challenging legal climate. People do funny things when they feel their security is in jeapardy. You can have an open door policy, a people policy, a confidential complaint procedure, and an anonymous tip line and still find yourself on the wrong end of a harassment suit because one person takes something said by another person out of context. You can lay someone off for perfectly valid reasons and still have to defend yourself in an age discrimination suit. These are not “old school” HR answers. These are practical matters that I wish were not true, but they ARE. If you think you can avoid them by having a “human capital culture,” I applaud you. Good luck and congrats! (just make sure you have a good employment lawyer’s business card in your rolodex)

So couple of points to answer your post:
1. Accountability for turnover is part of a bigger picture. We don’t have a problem figuring out how to reward our sales teams for return business, there shouldn’t be a problem making HR/HCs accountable for turnover. It is a variable in the formula. People know when you are gaming the system.
2. Good recruiter won’t bring in those “bad” employees in the first place. It is part of the talent those “truffle nose” recruiters I consider CRUCIAL part of any team have. Don’t hire them in the first place, so you won’t have to fire them later.
3. Turnover is bad, it costs money, it costs time, it costs other resources. In my experience, well run organizations usually have almost no turnover. Why? It is extremely hard to get into those organizations and once people are in, they are treated and rewarded so well, you can’t hire them away.
4. HR/HC needs to focus less on “control” and more on serving the organization. I don’t think it is the job of HC to develop employees or even provide tools for managers. I do believe it is their job to listen to what the organization needs, find the best talent, and make sure people they find are the kind who look for opportunities to grow. Ops team works on org development with executive team and provides resources for further development of talent. Professional development is the job of an employee and no one else, we (as a company) should just provide the tools.

If you hold people accountable for keeping turnover low, you’re providing incentives to retain both the good apples and the bad ones. Even worse, the good people will get recruited away and the bad people will stick around…FOREVER! It’s a recipe for organizational mediocrity.

Anyway, bottom line is that turnover can be a very good thing, despite the fact that it’s only know for being expensive.

Also, you can’t hold people accountable for others’ performance if they have no ability to influence people’s behavior after they’re hired. Hold people’s managers accountable for their performance. Hold HR/HC professionals accountable for giving managers the tools they need to effectively coach and manage their people. By way of example, you don’t hold finance accountable for poor investment decisions made by business leaders.

Just my thoughts. And absolutely agree that HR needs to be closer to the business and to the customer. Also, I am of the mind that most HC challenges are really operational challenges. Have HC report to ops (particularly with an enlightened ops leader), give them access to ops tools, thinking, frameworks, and you could see some very cool, very interesting dynamics develop.

mike’s last blog post..My Big Technology Decision