Can Losing Your Best Employees Have An Upside?
In an age where organizations live and die by the quality of talent they have at their disposal, it seems understandably natural to want to have the very best on your payroll. After all, it’s hard to imagine your company thriving if the best talent works for your rivals. This results in most organizations going to tremendous lengths to not only attract the best talent but to ensure that they do not jump ship to rival firms.
Expansive benefits packages are offered to make staying put as attractive as possible, while with the most important roles, practices such as non-compete clauses and trade secret protection are just some of the legal protections companies try and deploy. Surprisingly there may actually be some benefits to letting your best talent go elsewhere as a recent study found.
Providing a bridge
The key to this benefit is the bridging function these departing employees provide to other organizations, across which collaborations and other trade partnerships can be forged. Such partnerships can be vital for the success of any business, but negotiating them can be notoriously difficult, with the first step of establishing contact often the most challenging. Not only are the benefits of collaboration often uncertain, but both parties lack vital information and come at negotiations with very different aims in mind.
Recently departed employees can be invaluable in overcoming these challenges. By virtue of their ability, they often enter their new role at a senior level, so they have a degree of decision making power, and can, therefore, be a focal point of any partnerships that emerge. It is perhaps no surprise therefore that the partnerships with these bridging employees at the heart were found to be especially productive in terms of the patents they produced. As such, the gains from the partnerships outweigh the costs associated with losing and replacing the star player.
The findings emerged from a study of the pharmaceutical industry, where companies routinely strive to attract the brightest talent to ensure that their drug pipeline remains as healthy as possible. It is also a sector that has a strong culture of partnerships, with firms often collaborating in the development of new drugs, both to share expertise but also to hedge the risks associated with drug development.
Free movement of talent
It is a sector where talent frequently moves from firm to firm, with some 8,200 scientists moving between firms during the 16 years assessed for the research. Some of these transfers involved individual researchers, but it was also not uncommon for entire teams to migrate from company to company. When employees moved in this way, the probability of collaboration between the two firms rose by 33%, with this boost sustained several years after the employee moved employer.
What is more, the quality of the collaborations undertaken was also higher than normal, with roughly twice as many patents filed by these partnerships. This success perhaps unsurprisingly led to further collaborations, with the chances of multiple partnerships rising by approximately 25% when a bridging employee was present.
The study found that the bridging employees facilitate collaborations both by spotting potential opportunities for partnerships to form and by then facilitating the negotiation of those partnerships.
While it’s perhaps fair to say that not all sectors are either as knowledge intensive or as prone to collaborate as the pharmaceutical sector, partnerships are nonetheless a key tactic in a wide range of sectors. The challenges in establishing productive partnerships are significant, however, especially if the partnerships span regions or industries.
Of course, such an assessment does undoubtedly paint a purely positive view of the potential for departing employees to impact your fortunes, and there are many examples of employees taking key knowledge and organizational secrets with them when they depart. Equally, however, the free movement of people has also been shown to be tremendously advantageous to the overall health of the technology sector, with rampant movement between firms in Silicon Valley cited as a factor in its global ascendence.
A key aspect not mentioned in the research is ensuring that employees depart on sufficiently good terms to want to cooperate with their former employer rather than punish them. While the loss of key personnel is not something that should necessarily be celebrated, with the right approach and attitude it can nonetheless be turned into a positive for you and your firm. Ensure that the relationship with your departing employees remains strong and their potential as a bridge to future collaborations can be significant.
Source: Forbes
