Let's say that you are running a public company and an employee chooses to leave. The work they were doing is still important, and you have plenty of cash on hand, so you can easily backfill if you choose to do so. On the other hand, you can skip the backfill and instead reassign the work to the team, reducing costs and possibly improving the stock price in the process.
What do you do?
I'd always go with the backfill. Otherwise, you spread your team's time and attention across a larger set of responsibilities, put more stress on your team and lower the opportunity for serendipitous innovation.
Ultimately, this can lower your product quality, worsen morale and encourage more employees to leave, and cause you to miss out on the next billion-dollar idea that your employees were about to come up with during the coffee break they didn't have time to take. Worse yet, the short-term benefit of not backfilling could blind you to the long-term impact.
If foregoing the backfill works out well enough one time, what do you do the next time an employee leaves?
Orlando, I just discovered your new blog. This is an interesting post because its almost exactly the situation my company was in when I left for B-school. 6 months prior to my departure we had a round of layoffs and one of the things that came out of it was that the company wouldn't be backfilling people who left. This made no sense to me as they had no idea who would be leaving and where they would fall within the company. Ultimately I was backfilled a year later, but I agree. It seems arbitrary to avoid backfilling as a way of cutting costs.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, it sounds like common practice at a lot of companies to "do more with less." I imagine that one explanation is that when looking for ways to improve overall performance, it is much easier to do something readily quantifiable, like cutting costs, versus something softer, like trying to inspire your employees.
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