PRLog- Today, even the most forward thinking companies are struggling to keep their employees. Surprisingly, most employees aren’t leaving because of the numbers on their paycheck. According to Leigh Branham, author of ‘7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave’, limited career growth and lack of training are among the top five reasons employees leave their jobs.
A recent Harris Interactive poll says 74% of US workers are looking for a new job. An alarming report from the US Dept. of Labor reported recently that 2 million workers quit every month and an amazingly, 43% of American workers credit Lack of Recognition as the number one reason for their on-the-job unhappiness in a survey by Mercer’s.
This is not a rising tide; this is a tsunami that threatens to wipe away productivity and innovation over the next decade.
Artificial Business Intelligence, the new book by Doug Richards, showcases a method Richards calls <Hack Your Company> that tackles this crisis head-on.
“Leaders have long known that training is one of the keys to employee retention,” says Richards “but employer certified training programs are routinely competing with YouTube, Howcast and Wikipedia for employee attention.”
Richards calls this largely unobserved trend in the workplace “social training.”
“Unlike social learning — which is natural, constant and easily described as on-the-job training,” he argues “social training is a self-managed path to information that bypasses the company’s ability to influence or, most importantly, learn from.”
“For instance; your controller may be interested in migrating to new accounting software. In the past, they would have relied on the company vendor relations team to research and select the appropriate tool. In today’s world of always-on, bring your own device to work, that controller now reads industry forums, downloads free trials and learns how to use the software by watching YouTube videos.”
None of this, Richards explains, is necessarily negative – quite the opposite. “Social Training is highly effective. It allows the learner to work at their own pace and participate in rapid-learning; just-in-time information streams. What fuels the retention crisis isn’t open access to free information; it’s what happens when that intelligence leaves the organization. And it will leave. Social training provides instant expertise and can add tens of thousands of dollars to an employee’s market value, but when it happens without organizational oversight the employee has to struggle to justify that to their employer. It’s just easier to leave.”
Enter <Hack Your Company>. Using best practices from Gamification, Disruptive Innovation and adult learning theory the system provides a way for companies and employees to dialog and recognize social training. Using a simple 3 tier system of validation <Hack Your Company> lets companies eliminate a large portion of the expense of traditional training by providing employees a way to co-author their own career path using a net of resources of their choosing.
“I am excited to bring something to the table that I believe is unique and mutually beneficial. This isn’t just a ‘new 100 dollar bill’. Employees win by earning the recognition their new knowledge deserves and employers win by deepening their commitment to retaining the best talent,” adds Richards.
Artificial Business Intelligence; <Hack Your Company> is scheduled to be released November 2013 and is currently a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo; go to http://igg.me/at/hackyourcompany to pre-order the eBook, autographed print copies or half-price workshops for 2014.
