It is like they haven't taken the time to even make a rudimentary calculation on the costs involved in keeping the employee versus replacing them.
Employers don't know ahead of time which employees will leave and which will stay. In order to improve their employee retention, employers have to pay _all_ of their employees more, not just the ones that eventually will leave. This changes the math entirely.
For example, suppose it costs 50% extra to replace someone who leaves. In retrospect, sure, giving the sole employee who leaves a 10% raise each year to retain them makes sense. But if you have to give all of your employees a 10% raise per year, just to retain that one person, it doesn't make financial sense anymore.
To be clear I'm not endorsing this system at all! But from a pure financial perspective it makes sense to me and is why, I suspect, it persists.
Also, during a high turnover period around a year ago, we even bumped a few people up mid year when we normally do salary increases at the beginning of the year. These folks were very happy and I think it earned a lot of trust that we looked at the market rates, determined they were underpaid, and made sure they were at least getting what they'd get paid elsewhere.
He called me a few months into the gig and told me that he felt I should be making more than my starting salary and that I was getting a fairly substantial raise effective immediately.
I can't describe how good that felt, after having had to struggle to demonstrate my value at the previous gig only to be met with bureaucracy at every turn. I'm still with that company and genuinely love working with them. I make a pretty nice salary, and though I'm sure I could easily get a 20% raise to jump ship, I'm finally in a place where I can say "nah, I'm happy where I am" and not feel like I'm giving something up.
When asking people about the performance of their peers, you usually get equally positive feedback unless folks are fucking up.
You have a good point though. Perhaps managers shouldn't be asking for feedback on specific individuals, but ask individuals who they go to for help and mentoring.
But I think the more important question is: who are these key contributors? It’s perhaps easy to identify some of them, particularly those who are louder, and perhaps it is also possible to identify those who appear important but are, in some sense, bluffing. But there are also likely those who are key but whom the system for evaluation overlooks. It’s probably better for those people if they leave as they may find an employer who can better recognise their talents (and leverage them and pay them for it). I don’t think I’d do a great job at recognising such key people even among those I work closely with but maybe I’m just bad at that sort of thing.
(I don't think it's quite as hard as you're making it out, though. Who are the people you go to first with questions about how stuff works?)
Maybe we have a mismatch on what "appropriate" pay means. If the expected cost of losing someone is less than what you're paying them, maybe you're paying them more than what's appropriate. But it does sound a bit like you're falling into the same trap as GP in assuming you have to pay everyone the same rate; I could be misreading you.
In practice, most places I've been have a few people who are "obviously" key and then a lot of ambiguity.
That is their fault. I used to work in a well managed company. It was never a surprise when someone left as career progression was always an open topic between colleagues and supervisors.
You don't know when people are going to disappear if they are crouching and ducking around every corner to avoid management.
Yeah, so basically this argument is realpolitik, machiavellianism, game theory -- things that work 9/10 years, bring in profits but have enormous hidden costs that ravage companies/economies/countries in that 1/10, 1/50, 1/100 years.
The argument is "be a dick as much as you can get away with, because people are sheep and being a dick is a virtue actually". Until a lot of people start being dicks, then we cry about the long lost art of not being dicks to eachother.
I may be a bad example, but I can assure you every employer I have ever left new I was unhappy in my role before I left.
I always have frank and open conversations with my managers about my expectations for growth, wages, etc. These are not Ultimatums, but more "In 5 years I would like to be" type conversations.
Now as a manager I have gotten similar feedback from people that work from me, sometimes you have to listen closely to understand what they are saying in reality as many are not as direct as I am, but the feedback is there
I think managers just simply ignore it in most cases
Many times they've hired me as a consultant where I make 5-10x my hourly rate for several months after bringing the new hires up to speed.
Companies place very little emphasis on retention and retaining institutional knowledge. They don't seem to understand that employees who have worked at a company for years developing systems and architecture know where all of the secrets are.
When I leave an organization, my goal is for them to either directly replace me, or for them to not need to replace me at all. I do this by ensuring that I don't silo my work (by ensuring others are working with me, or under me), documenting everything I work on, and occasionally changing roles.
My specific goal is to help a company grow, not to make them depend on me.
Growth is understanding that you become indispensable by removing yourself as a dependency, because you uplift everyone around you. At higher levels of seniority, this is what orgs actually care about.
If you think you're safe because the company is so dependent on you, you're misguided. You're the kind of folks that are actively targeted.
Ignoring money, I'm also prioritizing myself, because by removing myself as a dependency, I also make it possible to take vacations, and my stress levels are low.
Totally not a real story at all...
I was on the late shift, 10-6.
Turns out the early and mid shift people hadn't turned up so CIO and HR people were manning the Service Desk until I got in.
You'd think they would then appreciate the work done. But no one appreciates a good service desk it seems.
Maybe they should tune the company food to reduce bathroom occupancy. :P