Welcome to our Metric Monday series. Each Monday, we’ll provide a cutting-edge or cool emerging metric that can help to improve your workforce analytics capability. These metrics have been vetted through real-world workforce planning and analytics projects, so the value has been shown in real business settings already.
Today we’ll look at turnover of what we call “SuperCritical” employees.
Cute superhero kids.. just because.
**Disclaimer: we don’t advocate hiring three year olds, however cost-effective it might be. We just Google image searched “superheroes” and thought it was adorable.
As we learn about people’s workforce analytics practices, a common theme is that they start with turnover. This is a very logical and valid place to start. It’s very easy, however, to get down into the weeds when analyzing turnover. It’s an easy trap to want to slice it by every potential view possible, to the point where you’ve got hundreds of of graphs and tables in your turnover report. If you’re presenting these to executives, most of them are “so what?” metrics.
It’s always important to make sure the workforce analytics you’re presenting tells a story and/or answers a significant business question. Ask yourself, when your leadership thinks about turnover, what do they care about? It’s likely that they care about losing good, experienced people in critical jobs. And that’s exactly what a SuperCritical Employee is.
SuperCritical employees
SuperCritical employees are employees that meet all three criteria above; top performers with tenure in critical roles. These are the people that make the business hum. They’re future leaders, internal role models, sources of knowledge and examples for other employees. When a manager loses a SuperCritical employee, it’s a major setback. It keeps them up at night. This is what leadership cares about. SuperCritical employees are a perfect example of the 80/20 rule – this is the 20% of your workforce that you should be devoting 80% of the effort for maximum business impact.
The majority of companies, at least medium to large companies, have the data to determine who is SuperCritical. Performance reviews are commonplace, tenure can be extracted from HRIS, and most companies know what their critical roles are. Even if critical roles are loosely defined, pick a definition and go with it – “to sail the ocean requires the courage to leave the shore”.
Take a look at turnover of SuperCritical employees. See what jobs you’re losing them from. Which locations. Are there strong predictors of SuperCritical turnover? Knowing this will tell you where and how you should use your OD, learning, and recruiting resources, which is how you move from “nice to know” to “actionable”.