Stop stressing about good IT staff who are leaving -- the real risk is the "brain dead" employees who are planning on staying.
Staff that never contribute anything and have virtually no chance of ever getting another promotion are a business's biggest problem, a new study of workforce participation suggests.
An analysis of staff movement records from customers of talent management and workforce planning software development Infohrm suggests that despite widespread fears of a skills shortage, stasis is very much the norm in most organisations.
"I worry about what percentage of our workforce is partially brain dead and partially retired on the job," Infohrm CEO Peter Howes said at the company's annual conference on the Gold Coast this week. "I think that's more significant that the cost of labour turnover."
"Somewhere between 50% and 70% of your workforce will never get promoted again, and in around 85% of organisations you will never get more than one promotion. We've got to change the underlying paradigm of what we mean by careers."
"Many of our members have 40% of their workforce who have been in the same job for more than five years. That's far worse than turnover, and the organisational consequences are far greater."
The period of greatest mobility is typically with staff who have been in a company for three to five years. Staff who don't leave in that time frame are much more likely to stick around for the long term without developing further significant skills, Howes said.
The lack of internal skills development is especially apparent in technical disciplines such as IT and engineering, Howes suggested. "Career management is a major neglected area in workforce planning."
Despite the common reliance on external support in technical areas, that's not necessarily the best approach. "Overwhelmingly, most of the future capability that you need in your organisation can be acquired internally. It's extremely rare where you need to go to the external labour market. That's just a manifestation of poor management and poor workforce planning."
Such neglect is common, Howes said. "You're not understanding what your future capability is and you're not future-proofing your organisation. If you're not developing your technical officers and giving them much more incentive to study, you are not going to get the capability. You need to be starting now, not in five years time. It's high risk to assume you'll be able to recruit people in the external labour market."