There has to be a snide comment on this

"We're a team (used to be "family," but not even in Japan anymore)," is the refrain that echoes down from the peaks of the executive floors. Nobody really believes it. The down-sizing of the 80s and late-90s took care of that on the employee side; the rampant, acquisitive job-hopping of the mid-80s and most of the 90s did the same for employers still potentially deluded into believing they had loyal troops.

But, as this piece (Point, click, predict turnover) from Scripps Howard News Service shows, the divide grows. Essentially, SAS has created a tool that allows employers' HR departments to make judgments about the likelihood that an employee is considering leaving based on "data such as the number of days absent, salary, age, performance evaluations and other job-related information."

All good use of technology. What SAS needs to do now is create a converse application that it can provide on a subscription basis to employees who could increase their knowledge of whether their employer is considering dumping them based on changes to data points such as pass-over for promotion, reduced meaningful work, exclusion from meetings, spurious negative performance reviews, lateral shifts to "siberian" postings, increase/decrease in tedious day-filling work, etc.

Then, optimization applications could be created to "work over" the statistical apps for best fit of the data calculus. While the computers fight it out maybe we all could do a little work.

Posted by Grayson at December 3, 2003 08:28 AM