When you do not retain people, you create a situation where there is too much competition, where it is a case of: ‘I feel I need to impress my party bosses. I must be loud and prove that I can denigrate the other parties better.’

A company that is not able to attract, motivate, and hold men of talent and competence will not survive. Increasingly, this will mean attracting, motivating, and holding the knowledge worker. Unlike the manual worker of yesterday, the knowledge worker does not, however, look just for a job. He looks for a career. He looks for an opportunity.

In technology companies, when the employees disappear, the spiral begins: The company declines in value, the best employees leave, the company declines in value, the best employees leave. Spirals are extremely difficult to reverse.

If you don’t clearly communicate to everyone else why someone was let go, the people who remain at the company will come up with their own story to explain it.

When things go poorly, all those reasons become reasons to leave. In fact, the only thing that keeps an employee at a company when things go horribly wrong — other than needing a job — is that she likes her job.

It is high time that our government start to acknowledge that we have a labor-export policy and rid the industry of unscrupulous labor recruiters and protect our migrant workers. We already have enough, ripe reasons to initiate a government- to-government arrangement for labor migration since we have long seen the reality of labor exodus of Filipinos to other countries. The Philippine government can no longer deny this.

there is no need to have completely uniform HR practices across your company.
each department (eng, marketing, sales, etc.) can be its own mini lab to run experiments … and when they work well, you can roll them out to the entire company

It’s unfortunate when someone you carefully trained leaves; but it is worse if you don’t train them and they stay.

morale at the company was undeniably higher, and turnover had dropped markedly. But Jeff was adamant that it shouldn't go away completely: “If no one is leaving or being asked to leave, then we're probably not truly living these values.

While to a certain extent, I do agree that organizations will thrive with a more diverse workforce due to the difference in experience and the ways in which we all think, we not only have to focus efforts on recruitment but also retention, and to do the latter, there needs to be a cultural shift at the organizational level.

So goes the leader, so goes the culture. So goes the culture, so goes the company.

Start by empowering everyone to make decisions on their own. If the company is full of people whom nobody trusts to make decisions without layers of managerial review, then the company is full of the wrong people.

My approach was to hire, train, test, and then fire or promote quickly, so that we could rapidly identify the excellent hires and get rid of the ordinary ones, repeating the process again and again until the percentage of those who were truly great was high enough to meet our needs.

There is clearly a need for a protocol for managing change in the public sector particularly when getting it wrong can have serious consequences for the health and wellbeing of the public.