Can someone explain to me why fewer people quitting is seen as an unhealthy metric?
Retaining employees seems like something companies should want to try to prioritize above all else, especially in this market.
If you treat bargaining with employees as a zero-sum game (which it really isn't, but some companies do treat it that way) then the other party being very satisfied with the bargain indicates that they would be also willing to get a worse offer. So if all the employees are extremely satisfied with the compensation/effort ratio, that indicates that you could either lower the compensation some or extract more effort until they're satisfied "just barely enough".
In otherwords, if managers are doing their job "correctly" they should either (1) be pushing their staff so hard that 1 in 10 of them quit every year (2) weening out the the poorest performer.
Historians long ago formed an abstraction about different theories of value: The Spanish Theory, for one, held that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to the accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from the soil or from people’s backs. Then there was the English Theory that held that value could be created through ingenuity and technology. So the English had an Industrial Revolution, while the Spanish spun their wheels trying to exploit the land and the Indians in the New World. They moved huge quantities of gold across the ocean, and all they got for their effort was enormous inflation (too much gold money chasing too few usable goods).
The Spanish Theory of Value is alive and well among managers everywhere. You see that whenever they talk about productivity. Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference. The Spanish Theory managers dream of attaining new productivity levels through the simple mechanism of unpaid overtime. They divide whatever work is done in a week by forty hours, not by the eighty or ninety hours that the worker actually put in.
[0] https://blog.bryanbibat.net/2009/08/31/spanish-theory-of-val...
Weening is the process if transitioning from milk to solid food as in babies and puppies
a) it makes you inflexible (i.e. you cant readjust by constantly hiring people that fit whatever your new goals are better)
b) it means you are to easy on people and keep low performers around
c) b) means it also makes trajectory upwards harder for good employees, so the good employees are more likely to be the few who quit
You were on the ground, which to me implies that you had a local view of the rate. In your area the observed rate of mishires apparently was around 10-20%. If you were in another team/part of the org you might have thought 50% or 0%.
My guess is that HR does exactly this sort of thing. Someone did a study once and averaged numbers that were obtained 'somehow' and that is then simply applied.
Like stack ranking. Everything is a normal distribution, right?
If you ask me: What large orgs are not good at is doing what actually makes sense. It's too much work and there is so much that could go wrong anyway. The way out are blanket policies implemented by drones, bean counters, the odd psychopath etc.
Now like my earlier sibling mentions, just because someone isn't a top performer at their current job at the current time doesn't mean they can't be great in another area or can learn. I have (and had) a bunch of people on my teams that were/are not senior people but they have a smart brain on their shoulders, are inquisitive and learn. Sure they don't know our stack fully, they don't have the exact same opinion on how to write code etc. but they are able to learn and adjust and maybe teach us where our customs aren't the best as well. And we teach them too.
I'm speaking of practices like at large banks where people have been hiding doing nothing but being on Facebook all day for 10 years and all that has happened is that every project manager tries to avoid getting these people assigned to their projects.
I would also say that throwing x% and hiring again does not work well. The pool you are hiring from is people that are not happy somewhere else. You are not getting a 90% chance of finding a "good" person.
Of course firing low performers is quite different from high performers leaving, but HR doesn't see or care about these distinctions.