All Our Industries Are Stupid

Anyone who’s ever run a business knows your two biggest employee expenses are training and retention.

When you get a new employee, it takes time and money to train them - some of which is because you are paying another employee to do the training, when they could/should be doing their usual work - and then, once an employee is trained, you need to retain them. You don’t want to spend the time and money of training a person only to have them turn around and go work for someone else.

But man! Wouldn’t it be great to be the someone else?

Like, imagine this. What if you never trained anyone? What if all you did was advertise jobs for people who are already trained, so you don’t have to train them? And then! Then, when the project is over, what if you just… laid them off? Like, don’t bother retaining them, just throw them out on the street and when we need someone like that again we’ll just advertise a job for a person just like the one we laid off?

Cut the training and retention from the budget, in one swell foop. That will give us the competitive edge.

This is one of the shittiest ideas in the history of shitty ideas because it doesn’t work like that.

First of all, a tremendous amount of your training expense is that your new employees don’t know how to work in your organisation. They bring with them the baggage and detritus of previous work environments, and you have to teach them how yours is different. Nothing will ever remove this necessity. Part of that training expense is the loss of productivity from having someone who doesn’t know how to work here yet.

Another part of it is getting to know your organisation and its political arrangement. When three different people ask you to do different things, and you can only do one of them, you need to know which person’s thing needs to get done. You also need to know how to tell the other two people their thing is not going to get done. There’s a learning curve to this, but there’s no real training involved - just OTJ experience. And the bigger your organisation is, the more complex this becomes.

This expense is bigger than you think it is, because most of it is concealed: it’s your employees learning not just to do their jobs, but to do them efficiently and get more shit done. To navigate your specific, individual culture and avoid breaking shit or blowing shit up with the wrong thing said in the wrong place.

Every single new employee you get doesn’t know this, and has to learn it. On the way there, they’ll have to navigate multiple pitfalls, and in a lot of cases you will lose a highly effective employee because they pulled one political fuckup. Sometimes it will be someone else’s political fuckup, but the someone else has more power and gets to roll the proverbial shit down the proverbial hill.

That’s how power works. Neil Gaiman gets to be a gross abusive pig, and when the shit hits the fan he’s still rich and the fallout mostly lands on the victims when he sues them for narcing on him. That’s one of the reasons power makes people shitty: because the power insulates them from the consequences of their behaviour. But I digress.

The notion of avoiding training costs is a pipe dream. You can’t do it. The training in question isn’t a matter of schooling and certification, it’s a matter of environmental familiarity, and your environment is different than every other.

That’s why you have to retain your talent. It’s your talent! It’s talent that is specifically adapted to your environment, that you don’t have to spend a buttload of money on training to make effective. It’s already effective. To remove it may save you some money now, but to replace it will expose you to undue risk later. There’s a lot of uncertainty.

It’s simply ridiculous to think you are saving money by throwing away your investment and making a new one in the future. The entire point of an investment is that it grows. That by having it now, you will have more of it in the future. An investment in your people is an investment in your business.

But most companies have just stopped making that investment. The business world is increasingly driven by people who simply do not know or care how businesses work beyond “output minus input equals profit.” It’s just unbelievably stupid.

Somewhere along the line, they have all lost the plot. They’ve forgotten that the money in the economy comes from real people with real jobs doing real things. It’s all disconnected from reality for them; there is a number on a balance sheet and they want the biggest number. They don’t care where it comes from; they want to make the number big and grab the cash and run away before it all comes tumbling down around them and the business goes bankrupt. And for some stupid reason, we don’t hold them accountable for all the lives they ruin.

We have confused productivity with production and it is killing us.