Skip to main content
Back

Turnover: Inevitability or Reactivity?

 

It is increasingly common to see the concept of turnover classified as one of the central issues in today’s Human Capital Management. The frequency and triviality of the theme lead many professional, with whom I discuss it, to approach it with an attitude of total resignation, as if it were an inevitable or insurmountable scourge. I remember, a few years ago, the scenario was precisely the opposite. Many of us, who had the mission of managing Human Resources in companies, longed to have, at the end of the month or quarter, some positive turnover rate that would prove the existence of a certain level of “oxygenation” of the teams at that time, mostly characterized by very high averages of years of service.

Today, the scenario could not be more contrasting. Longevity of employees is rewarded again, as it becomes an increasingly scarce characteristic, especially for the range of professionals starting their careers, who, by definition, would have the mission to renew the teams we manage with “new blood.”

In the field of Human Resources Management, it is great to have various barometers that effectively summarize the trends we should take into account when it comes to Human Capital. Interestingly, the analysis carried out by Deloitte in the 2019 Global Human Capital Trends lists, as the main trends in Human Resources management to watch in 2019, some that, in my view, should have been at the top of the strategic concerns of leaders in our organizations for some time. Themes such as the “Gig Economy,” whose relevance has already prompted the European Union to challenge Member States to incorporate changes, into their labor legislation, that allow the effective processing of this emerging reality, comparable, according to some experts, to a “New Industrial Revolution.” Additionally, we are witnessing the entry into the labor market of “Generation Z”, who interpret the labor paradigm completely differently from previous generations, requiring an unprecedented level of autonomy and flexibility for many sectors.

I could list several other factors that we currently encounter and that are completely redesigning the way professionals behave in companies. However, only the two I mentioned earlier are already enough to point out that the “labor shortage” – recurrently pointed out as the origin of the difficulty of attracting and retaining teams – is far from being the main cause of unsustainable levels of turnover.

Certain organizations, examples of good strategic vision, have proactively made efforts to reinvent themselves by refreshing their cultural paradigms and interaction with Human Capital. Yes, they are reinterpreting their talent management from A to Z. Yes, they are reconfiguring how they attract, communicate, reward, and even bind to emerging generations of professionals. Like them, I deeply believe that the scourge of organizational turnover is mainly due to a dangerous reactive posture, where only the serious consequences of not assuming that the management paradigm of yesterday is clearly not that of today, and much less that of tomorrow, are remedied.

Written by João Silva Santos

April, 2019

This article was published in Ambitur. You can access the online version here.

Let’s move your business forward

Leave a Reply