A Ford employee says he lost his job after being accused of stealing a $1.95 cookie, only for the company to later realize he’d actually paid for it.
60-year-old Kurt Kromm had worked at Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant for 11 years, but told Shifting Gears he was fired after the company believed security footage showed him taking a cookie from the break room without paying.
FIFY.
Their actions are not even competent by their own worldview - this kind of corporate management invariably sacrifice long term hard to measure yet large positive outcomes for the company (such as the gains from keeping highly trained personnel who stuck around because of goodwill towards the company rather than having the constant hiring and training costs as well as lower productivity from high turnaround) for miniscule but easy to measure immediate gains (like saving the equivalent of 1% of a single average worker’s salary by not providing free cookies).
There really is no point in penny pinching if its going to increase employee turnaround in a domain were experience makes a significant difference.
Loss of experience isn’t a trackable metric, you can’t put it in a spreadsheet, so it doesn’t exist to the company.
You can absolutelly put it on to spreadsheet. Its just that its not a metric companies calculate normally.
I recommend everybody who is training new employees to track the time the training really takes, how much it takes away from your normal work effiency and how long it takes until newbies are ready to work shift solo. Do it enough times and you get average for new employers and you can calculate real life cost for new hires.
Then compare that to numbers the experienced guy would get during that time and how much money the employees training newbies would make. You get clear monetary difference between training new vs. keeping the old. If the experienced guy is competent they will always get better numbers on short term.
Then calculate median time people work in that position.
Now you can show a number that says: Hey, fire this guy and on average you loose this amount of money for new hire and if you want new employee who stays in the house as long as this guy you are firing has stayed, you need to go trough the training process this many times on average.
The cost of hiring and training a new employee is something a company of that size should know, and it’s definitely more than the cost of a $2 cookie.
Most companies i have worked in have just decited in a meeting a number for how much they think new hire costs.
That number rarely is even close the real number.
Exactly.