13.7 Staff retention and exit#
Success in recruiting the right staff for the job in an NSO is partly due to clearly and attractively making known what the statistical office can offer. For example, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) “Career” page (🔗) starts with the message:
If you want your contribution to count and to work where you’ll be really valued, come and join us.
We know that excellent results can only be achieved by investing in and retaining the people who work for us. Therefore, our people count in more ways than one.
Apart from crunching the numbers that shape big decisions, we look after the interests of our staff. We invest in training and development to enhance skills and also offer a good work-life balance to improve well-being and staff retention.
As well as a competitive salary, you’ll enjoy …
Retaining staff is one of the major challenges for statistical office, whether large or small, well or poorly endowed. The smaller and lower capacity the office, the greater the loss sustained when a talented individual leaves the office. The loss is even greater if the organization has invested much in the training and development of talents. Several methods of retaining staff are worth exploring, but none is fool proof. Ultimately, losses of employees to other offices and the private sector must be included as part of the expected cost of running a statistical organization.
A talent management strategy based on performance, learning and development assessments would help the NSO identify, develop, and retain high calibre staff (see Chapter 13.5.1 — Learning and development strategy). An example of a forward-looking strategy for staff retention is to have special programmes that involve recruiting qualified persons (such as the “cadet” programme of the Australian Bureau of Statistics) in which the statistical office pays for the education and training of talented future statisticians. Some NSOs provide educational scholarships to staff who in turn have contractual obligations to serve for a pre-specified number of years after obtaining the degrees or diplomas.
However, it is evident that an NSO, as it happens for all employers in the public and private sector, cannot keep all its most talented people forever. One strategy would be to convince government departments to attract talented professionals with quantitative analysis abilities and place such people in the statistical organization for a while on a secondment basis or any other staff arrangements. Moreover, such sharing of staff will help the statistical organization sort out its priorities, connect the agencies and create a better basis for ongoing dialogue. Since these features are always valuable, the initial stationing of people in the NSO as well as an ongoing exchange policy could become permanent features of a government-wide personnel management programme. Another way to reduce staff turnover is to provide positions of increased responsibility to young and talented people as soon as they have demonstrated their capability. While this strategy implies some risk, it is preferable to retaining talented staff members than mediocre employees. Another option is to form a contractual relationship with recruits that will deter them from leaving the statistical organization for frivolous reasons. In Suriname, recruits would spend their first year on a particular assignment, after which they would have the possibility to participate in a specific training programme, provided they have signed up for a stay of at least three to five years in the statistical organization.
Traditionally the problem of staff retention has been the sharpest for experts in information technology (IT). The rapid developments in IT and data science applications have created a huge demand for skilled individuals in these areas, particularly in the private sector.
However, the supply of qualified people did not increase as quickly, and thus it became virtually impossible for a government institution to compete with the private sector, the banking sector, or international companies. Government institutions could not offer competitive salaries, and what they could offer - job security - was not an overriding concern for the young and mobile professional with the desired skills. The standard response to this situation, which has shown no great variation in the recent past, was to recruit ever younger, less- experienced technicians and provide them with training. However, this policy, in addition to consuming resources, converted statistical agencies into an unrecognized training centre for the private sector. As soon as recruits were trained, some other enterprise stepped in, offering to double or triple their salaries.
It is considered a good practice when an employee leaves to conduct an exit interview which could provide insights on reasons for leaving. The interview would also provide an opportunity to identify staff who the NSO could encourage and support to be advocates for official statistics in the agencies or companies they move to. Maintaining this relationship could also be a means for attracting them back to work with the NSO—this time with additional experience and competencies.