Hugh Macleod’s post from last week, on the porous membrane, is popping up everywhere! I showed the picture to my wife (who is studying biology and psychology together), who immediate reaction was it looked like cells with the different chemicals moving in and out to generate an action potential. Even in this light it almost describes a blog, maybe that is where Hugh got the idea?
Anyway, Andrew (of Resourcing Strategies) put together an interesting take on the whole thing. He aligned most of (if not all of it) Hugh’s post to employment branding and the transparency within your organisation. To quote him:-
What the article says is that you need to align what your employees think the firm & job offer is all about with what the external world thinks.
So very true! When the rubber hits the road it does not matter how effectively you recruited the person, or their quality if the reality of the job you offered is not there volia the new recruit will disappear! What a great adaption of the image and post.
Let’s look at this a little further than I did before.
Think of A as management (the holders of the vision) and the outer area B as the employees (the ones he need to know about the vision). Ok you might not agree with this but most organisations are still run this way. Through the creation of conversations we break holes in membrane X employees begin to understand the vision. A greater understanding of vision then allows employees to ensure that their values match the vision, increases loyalty and in the long run creates and emotional attachment. These three factors work to give us Affective Commitment (AC) which makes up one side of an employee’s intention to stay (thanks to Colin Beames from the WRDI Institute). Yes blogs do help open up internal communications as when management blogs (truly blogs) we have a conversation that is transparent.
Now coming back to Andrew’s post. How well your organisation does to align what you are selling (by way of job postings) to the actual reality of the role helps with Job Satisfaction, the second side of an employee’s intention to stay. Ok while the alignment is not the only factor in job satisfaction but it has a very high factor in the first 12 months of employment. Now if you measure an employee’s intention to stay you have a key measure for possible turnover. Understanding possible turnover is much better than real turnover as real turnover is a lagging measure and you have already lost the employee.
Michael Specht 