|
What's more, firing is costly. When you add the costs of paying severance, hiring contractors, and recruiting and training a new hire, it can add up to 250% of the departing employee's salary to replace him, says Diane Berry, managing vice president at Gartner Inc.
On the other hand, keeping the wrong person in a job can cause major problems. A poor performer "sets a low standard for everyone else," says Andrew Walker, a research director at Gartner. And tolerating lower standards leads to lower morale and productivity, which may cost more than simply replacing the problematic person at the outset, he says.
When they face the question of whether to fire or retrain, CIOs at larger midmarket companies can probably count on help from their human resources departments. But CIOs at smaller companies are less likely to have robust HR departments. Worse, CIOs themselves are less likely than other executives to have management training. Chances are they learned what they know about management by observing their own bosses. "If they had a bad boss and learned from that, they're going to repeat those bad habits," Walker says. In the context of personnel problems, bad management habits include ignoring festering problems and, on the other end of the spectrum, firing people when it's not necessary.
Humberto Quintanar, CIO at Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster, Calif., maintains that firing poor performers at the outset is the easy way out. Quintanar likes to assume that most problem employees can be rehabilitated. "These people have talent. They have probably been in the company for a long time. Just because you happen to come in as the new CIO, or they got moved in [under you], doesn't mean they can't do work," he says.
In fact, a smart CIO will recognize that some staff members have important institutional knowledge. In Quintanar's case, some of his customized clinical accounting applications use an older version of software, which Quintanar is upgrading. The hospital also uses legacy systems such as a materials management system for the emergency room. "To find somebody in the marketplace that has that skill that is specifically related to the way software is used in our hospital is very difficult," he says. The nearest qualified applicants probably live in Los Angeles, which is 80 miles south.
"The challenge is to find the right work for these people. What is it that makes them thrive, that gets them excited, that is going to turn them on and gets them to start producing? That's what I normally do with people: put them in the right place, see where they shine. I believe in giving them chances, coaching them and communicating with them."
There are rewards for doing this with tact and care: If a CIO can reassign an unhappy worker, the worker is more likely to transfer his institutional knowledge and will remain on staff as a sort of emeritus expert.
|
 |
|
|
