Managing your turnover has its financial advantages and requires housekeeping to deliver returns. HR Reporter’s What’s the Real Cost of Turnover? article revisits the ROI while addressing what we’ve known for a while: the estimated financial impacts fluctuate depending on industry, position, and location. Anecdotal evidence provides a range from 25% to 200% of annual salary.

Take for instance their featured example of a hospitality housekeeper in Alberta with detailed numbers. Termination, new hiring, training, and indirect costs roll up to a grand total of nearly CAN $3,200. And that’s for a position that earns only $7/hour. So you are looking at more than the equivalent of 10 weeks of salary!

One survey found poor talent management practices are a big contributor to voluntary turnover: Thirty percent of 1,308 respondents said they left their job to seek new challenges or opportunities that were lacking with their previous employers. In addition, 25% of respondents reported leaving employers because of ineffective leadership, 22% cited poor relationships with their managers, and 21% said their contributions were not valued.

So, do some detailed housekeeping on turnover to determine how you can increase your retention rate for key roles based on your organization’s industry, location, and turnover rate. Not only will you stem the natural tide of job churn in uncertain times, you’ll be surprised how much you can save in costs and gain in overall productivity.

And in these tough times, people are more uncertain than ever. Read Employees leaving? Here's why and what you can do to learn more about managing and measuring the performance of your talent while filling the pipeline of succession.

Baseball’s World Series once again elicits parallels between defining, finding, and developing talent in the sports and business worlds where performance is the key differentiator.

Back in 2003, the book Moneyball showed how the sports world began using basic talent management concepts. In Portfolio’s Homerun Hiring article, a baseball scout shares experiences that work off those ideas:

Look Beyond Looking Good on Paper. The resume used to be the primary source of candidate information. Statistics are not enough anymore. Assessments, certifications, and experience expand the view more holistically. Structured data and smarter screening reduce risk and improve success rates. And quality of hire analytics enable actual hiring batting average measurement.

Define Team Roles and Fill Them. As successful baseball coaches like Augie Garrido will tell you, the key to winning is finding people with passion for the game and putting them in positions where they will succeed. The same is true in business. Aligning talent to business starts with a strategy that envisions outcomes, defines roles, and fills them with talent that matches the organization’s culture.

Keep Feeding the Farm Team. Whether you call it bench strength or a farm team, you need to have development and succession plans in place. Your plan is not unlike a team depth chart that shows where players can play if someone is injured or otherwise cannot play.

Aligning talent to business, defining roles, recruiting, developing, and measuring performance creates an environment where people’s passion for the game can grow and drive overall business performance.

"My job is to put the players in position where they can play at their best. Then, it is up to them." — Augie Garrido

Talent drives business performance and superior employment branding attracts top talent. But what about the connection between talent management and a company’s brand perception?

BusinessWeek recently posted their Best Global Brands 2008 list. Six of the top ten and more than half of the top 50 have used talent management initiatives to attract the top talent they need to distinguish their brands. On the magazine’s Best Places to Launch a Career 2008 list, seven of the top ten employ talent management. (We know because they are Taleo customers.)

SHRM’s study, The Employer Brand: A Strategic Tool to Attract, Recruit and Retain Talent, says that organizations that define and align their employment brand will attract and retain people with a tighter culture fit.

Another talent and brand connection is employee satisfaction. In The Value of Being a Best Employer, Peter Cappelli cites Knowledge@Wharton’s Does the Stock Market Fully Value Intangibles? Employee Satisfaction and Equity Prices that says research connects how good a place is to work and the employment brand to a 2X+ return compared to the overall market.

Although any good news on the stock market is hard to come by these days, here are some bullish words of encouragement. Wells Fargo’s Chairman Dick Kovacevich takes a more positive view of the economy and the market’s immediate profit-focused misperception of relationship of talent to stock price:

“There may be doubts how long (the recovery) will take, but it will get done and sooner than most people think…Why do stock prices go up with layoffs? Why is it good to lose good people?”

Maybe more CEOs and boards will take a long-term holistic talent view that upstages short-term financial thinking?

According to PwC Saratoga’s 2008/2009 Human Capital Effectiveness Report, nineteen percent of managers and twenty nine percent of executives will be eligible for retirement within five years. This anticipated “baby-boomer drain” raises a big red flag, propelling succession planning to the front lines in the quest for future success.

Despite these demographic alarms and the likelihood of sudden changes in the executive ranks, i4cp’s Taking the Pulse: Succession Planning survey found that most organizations are not well-prepared to fill a vacant leadership position.

To address the issue, the Harvard Business Review article, Solve the Succession Crisis by Growing Inside-Outside Leaders, focuses on CEO development; while The Link Between Succession Planning and Success—Is Your Global Business Ready? identifies key skills and knowledge needed to compete in the future markets.

The reality is that the need for leadership succession is not confined to the CEO suite or even to C-level executives. Today’s dynamic, global business environment demands proactive succession planning systems and practices that reach deeper and farther.

You need to have more comprehensive knowledge on your organization’s rising stars and a wider awareness of talent outside your organization. Successful succession planning practices can also aid in the retention of top talent while protecting organizations from damaging leadership disruptions.

BusinessWeek’s BusinessExchange lists the most active news topics that are tracked and shared. On October 7, the top five were:

1. Credit Crunch 580 new articles 164 users
2. AIG 187 new articles 51 users
3. 2008 Election 408 new articles 60 users
4. Social Networking 443 new articles 102 users
5. Lehman Bros. 389 new articles 23 users

In the midst of a contentious US election season combined with the uncertain financial crisis environment, people are tapping into the power of community by connecting to their social networks. The Economist’s article Facebook for suits confirms this observation and adds a point of exclamation:

AMONG the few firms benefiting from the upheaval in the financial markets are professional social networks—websites that help with business networking and job-hunting.

The article surmises that people are updating their profiles and looking for jobs. But there is also the global market momentum where the user bases of LinkedIn, Facebook, and dozens of others are growing rapidly to include more than hip North American Generation Y and the Millennials.

What does this mean for attracting and retaining talent? The socially networked community is expanding across generational and geographic lines to redefine the concept of connected. It has become core to an updated employment brand and making the right connections.

We’ve posted many times on how organizations that focus on talent gain a clear competitive advantage, revenue growth, profitability, and better business performance:

Talent Management Delivers Payoff
Talent Quotient: Quantify the Financial Impact of Talent
HR Best Practices Drive Results in Small Firms Too
The Business Case for Performance Management

Watson Wyatt’s Human Capital Index also states the case for talent management:

“Companies with superior human capital practices can create more than double the shareholder value than companies with average human capital practices.”

Now IBM and HCI have released a study of 1,000 organizations called Integrated Talent Management that further validates the value and ROI. A key finding:

“Organizations that apply talent management practices demonstrate higher financial performance compared to their industry peers.”

The research is a three-part series about the return on investment of talent management, gaps in executing a talent management strategy, and recommendations for bolstering this capability.

Part 1 - Understanding the opportunities for success
Part 2 – Surviving corporate adolescence and reaching organizational maturity
Part 3 – Turning talent management into a competitive advantage: An industry view

The papers explain how investing in talent management capabilities linked to business strategy leads to competitive advantage and better financial performance than industry peers. Specific practices that boosted business performance included defining and supporting employee engagement and performance management.