Editor's Note: Every organization has its legends. Are they true? How do they, how should they impact our work? Margaret O'Hanlon tackles this Classic topic.
I've been getting to know a few new clients recently. They've been introducing me to their culture and I've been helping them learn a bit from their demographics. In writing a report for one client yesterday, I was repeating back to them a factoid they gave me. It went something like, "70% to 80% of new employees make it through the first year and tend to stay." I stopped typing.
It is exciting, but is it true? Do they have the data for it?
Every company has legends. Stories that they use to define the company as a hero. You have them in your company. You have them in HR. The thing is that, like all legends, things have been polished up a bit to build in drama. Or they may have been true once but over time the story has become more reassuring than accurate.
Or one day a few people wished upon a star.
Let legends automatically guide our decisions and over time our decisions will become dusty. This can be bad for the business, our employees and, frankly, our careers.
If people at your place of business toss around legends, especially if they involve a belief that things are just so, it's a good idea to check them out. ("We target the 75%ile" is a good one, if your market index is hovering around .6. Another is, "We pay for performance" when most employees are surprised by their performance ratings or the size of their incentives.)
Anybody out there have favorite legends to share?
Margaret O'Hanlon, CCP brings deep expertise to discussions on employee pay, performance management, career development and communications at the Café. Her firm, re:Think Consulting, provides market pay information and designs base salary structures, incentive plans, career paths and their implementation plans. Earlier, she was a Principal at Willis Towers Watson. A former Board member for the Bay Area Compensation Association (BACA), Margaret coauthored the popular eBook, Everything You Do (in Compensation) Is Communications, a toolkit that all practitioners can find at https://gumroad.com/l/everythingiscommunication.
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