Turnover, a fantastic chaos for Project Management
“The amount of employees leaving a company within a defined period of time” is what turnover means and I would like to talk today about how it negatively affects managing projects.
I’m sure some of you might have experienced working for a company for a while and left at some point, only to find out that a majority of your ex-colleagues are also working for some other company only after a few years time, or even months now. Obviously this is a situation that any organization would want to avoid, as it creates uncertainty in project success and introduces more difficulties in getting the right talent for ongoing projects.
Performance is negatively affected
When lots of employees leave a company, the productivity of a team drastically decreases because all the skills, expertise and experience leaves the building, leaving the project, product, goal or objective in a vulnerable state. The continuity of project is put in danger because the crucial skills necessary to continue with the project is gone. Organizations can always seek and hire fresh new talent, but again, depending on the business context in which the organization operates in, it can be a daunting task to find suitable candidates. Also it takes months, if not a full year or more, for new hires to become productive within the team. And by the time that’s done, who says that the project is still be relevant by then?
Task are left unfinished
When organizations experience some sort of an employee exodus. Many work and project activities are put on hold indefinitely. Of course remaining employees can take up on these tasks but not everything can be taken over. Tasks also get old and irrelevant with time and hiring a whole new team to continue and finish an existing project is a very audacious and almost impossible endeavor to embark on.
Costs
Having a turnover almost always results in high, unnecessary costs associated with finding, selecting and training new hires to fill the roles previously made vacant by employees that left in numerous amounts.
Another negative effect of multiple employees leaving is the fact that projects, products or other goals and objectives are possibly delayed and profit losses or missed opportunities occur as a result.
Inexperience
New employees that come in to safe the day don’t know the project, system, product or project in full detail. Simply because they were not around enough to know the reasons, motivations and other crucial technicalities behind the project, product, goal or objectives.
Negatively affects the relationship among team members
It’s not just the skills and expertise that leave the building during turnovers but also the human relationship build among team members is also disrupted. This can cause even more problems, for example, more people from the same team leaving. Human relationships and mutual respect among employees is also an aspect that takes time to build and is not something that is shown on the resumes of new employees. Obviously it cannot be bought either.
So these are some points way job turnovers can negatively affect the managing of projects. Again the reason are because performance is negatively affected due to changes in the team, task of former colleagues are left unfinished, costs increase due to the search and selection process of prospective candidates and lastly, inexperience and collegial relationships that are broken are some of the reasons why turnover is bad for an organization.