What We Don't Measure about Human Resources

Revision with unchanged content. Low retention of valuable employees and difficulties in finding qualified candidates for recruitment are two issues in the high growth markets, and a growing concern among consultants and Human Resources (HR) managers around the world. The managers¿ focus is often on the easy-to-measure data, like turnover data and number of employees, largely ignoring ¿intangible¿ variables like the job satisfaction. We suspect that a number of current HR policies, like training and hiring, are inefficient because of misperception of work related attitudes when designing policies addressing retention. Although literature shows the training does not directly influence work attitudes like job satisfaction, many managers falsely assume a causal link between the two. On the other hand, policy makers focus often on hiring to replace the loss of specialists, but they don¿t measure the real causes behind the turnover. This book presents a case study of the Romanian market and it builds a System Dynamics model that tests HR policies. We show that improving commitment is done by taking into account the intangible variables in HR management.