Employers should be wary of retaining any more than 15% of their workforce in their jobs for more than five years, a workforce analytics expert has warned an audience of HR professionals.

Speaking to SuccessConnect 2011 on 20 May, Peter Howes, vice president, SuccessFactors, acknowledged that high retention is usually considered a positive. But Howes contended that “low turnover can be a much bigger problem”. Often, he said, 10% of the workforce will have already “retired in their jobs”.

“You don’t want more than 15% [of the workforce] in their jobs more than five years,” he said. Employees who stay in an organisation for five years “probably won’t leave”, he added. At the same time, organisations can experience high attrition among high performance, highly engaged employees when career opportunities
in their areas waned.

Different initiatives are needed for different segments of the workforce to analyse factors affecting the future availability of particular kinds of talent and skills within an organisation. “There is not enough diagnosis of what is going on within different parts of the workforce,” said Howes, an Australian academic who founded workforce analytics software and performance measurement firm Infohrm.

“We don’t know what we don’t know about our workforce,” he said.

He urged his audience to shun any attempts to measure for “average” figures in their organisations’ workforces, contending that such figures were “useless because you can’t do anything with it” and “dangerous if you try to do something with it”.

Workforce analysis initiatives will turn up little useful information if undertaken organisation-wide without any segmentation, he said. He went on to say: “It is better to look at the same kinds of groups in different companies.”

SuccessConnect 2011 was held in Amsterdam by business execution software firm SuccessFactors.

DeeDee Doke reporting from Amsterdam