I was recently speaking with a client about a persistent turnover problem that they were having with their front line service delivery staff. This was a small organization of about 200 total employees and half of them, more or less, were front line customer facing people. Turnover in this position was about 25%, not enough to be alarming but sufficient to keep Human Resources scrambling to recruit people fast enough to stay fully staffed (which they rarely were). We spent some time looking over the numbers and eventually decided that they were spending just a bit less than $90k every year on the turnover problem between hiring costs and training and lost productivity.

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Now in the days of tossing in $150B “sweeteners” to get a $700B bailout bill passed, $90k may not seem like a lot. But it is money spent year after year and producing absolutely no benefit. In fact the turnover was a serious drain on resources and a negative factor on morale, so the real  number was probably on the low side. But here is the thing…. when it came down to talking about investing a little time and money (and it truly was a little), they decided they were “too busy” just trying to hire people to be “distracted” from that to fix the problem causing them to be too busy hiring. Still with me here? And they did not have “the luxury” of picking good hires, they had to hire anyone who was remotely qualified to keep up with the turnover.

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Too busy scrambling to deal with the symptoms to fix the problem causing them to be too busy. Now I have to acknowledge that fixing the turnover problem would not be easy. In the short term things might get worse, and the pain might be greater. But 9 months or 12 months or 15 months later the leak would be plugged and the problem would gradually shrink down to something minor. In effect, they decided they would rather just keep dealing with the issue forever and throw the money out the window every year than make a focused effort to fix it. I wish this were a unique circumstance, but it is not. I have run into some variation on this theme many times in many organizations and in many different functional areas.

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Is there just something about people that makes them prefer to suffer along forever with “the devil they know” than to endure a short term pain and have it over with? I would sure like to figure out a way to motivate an organization to make the change when I find this sort of situation. But in over 20 years of consulting I have not found one yet. If anyone out there has, do share.