Why does quality offboarding matter so much? After all, someone is leaving your company, not joining it. The reasons lie in shifting employee lifecycles, modern recruitment, and a need to reflect company values at all personnel touch points — especially in a tight labor market.

“Design thinking” is a fairly common term. Even if the phrase is new to you, it’s reasonably easy to intuit how it works: design thinking is a process for creative problem solving, utilizing creative tools like empathy and experimentation, often with a strong visual component. The term dates from 1968 and was first used in The Sciences of The Artificial, a text written by Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon.

The office team arrives at 8:00 AM and is there every day until 5:00 PM. They work hard answering questions for clients, doing invoicing, and other important administrative tasks. The production team often shows up at 10:00 AM or later, takes a long lunch and quite often is seen leaving at 2:00 or 3:00 PM. From the office team’s perspective, they are doing all the work and the production team is goofing off.  Over time the office team begins to talk about it among themselves, feeding the sense of unfairness and inequity of their work environment. In some instances, office team members leave the organization or reduce their output and engagement level to adjust to what they perceive is unfair.

Using HR data can be legally and ethically complicated, but if analyzed with care, it can also be a team’s greatest asset. Because of these very real concerns, in the past information often went unused, but today, wise companies are turning facts into insight. When processed ethically, data can inform an office when employees will leave, where to recruit solid candidates, and most importantly, how to keep these candidates happy once they become employees. And this isn’t merely a suggestion: according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, 82% of surveyed organizations plan to either begin or increase their use of big data in HR before the end of 2018. The crucial point here isn’t simplicity but effectiveness: when HR data is braided effectively with a company’s strategic aims, wellbeing increases across the board.

Discovering the individualized reasons people work is key to helping employers understand what will motivate employees.

According to the article "What People Want from Work: Motivation" on the website The Balance, successful companies need to start with money. Paying employees fair compensation, or ideally more than fair, brings the talent in and reduces the risk of losing great employees. Money helps employees check off responsibilities ranging from taking care of the most basic necessities to enjoying hobbies to long-term planning for retirement.