Ep125 - Employee Cost: Wrong Thinking, Prof. Peter Cappelli with Nina Sunday

Manage Self, Lead Others: Emotional Intelligence and Leadership for Managers

This episode is with Peter Cappelli DPhil, George W. Taylor Professor of Management; Director, Center for Human Resources, The Wharton School; author of “Our Least Important Asset: Why the Relentless Focus on Finance and Accounting is Bad for Business and Employees" https://amzn.to/3P5WTGd

Recently named by HR Magazine as one of the top 5 most influential management thinkers, we speak about wrong thinking when it comes to employee cost and value.

TIMESTAMPS

[2:02] Why do leaders see employees as liabilities instead of assets?

[3:47] Is that a failure of the imagination?

[5:50 ] Replacing my employees with contractors and with leased employees

[6:24] What's the problem with managers coming from engineering or finance backgrounds?

[11:19 ] But what they don't track is, are we hiring good people?

[12:20] What money you're going to give me to make me want to move? And they're not necessarily more successful than an active candidate. In fact, they're less successful. That's an interesting paradox.

[13:15 ] We know that active candidates are people who want to advance.

[13:37 ] For any line manager, middle manager, c-suite manager, your advice would be always advertise for a role?

[14:20] A study compared people who were promoted from within to a job, to those who were hired from the outside into the identical job. People hired from outside took 3 years to get up to speed compared to people promoted from within. And it took people promoted from within 7 years to catch up to the pay of people who were hired from outside. So you pay a salary premium and you suffer a performance hit when you fill those jobs from outside.

[16:31] The other paradox you describe how at the start of the recent pandemic when 70% of office workers were sent home to work, because the feeling was, “We're all in this together”, employees were trusted to get the job done. And they did because they were trusted. Then came a shift to monitoring software on the assumption that left to their own devices, people would goof off. So, what's the situation now?

About Peter Cappelli, DPhil

https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-cappelli-14936a3/

With expertise in industrial relations and labor economics, Peter is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and writes for HR Executive Magazine and Harvard Business Review.

Tune into his show, In the Workplace, on Sirius XM 111, Business Radio Powered by The Wharton School, on Thursdays at 5:00 pm EST, and read his monthly column in HR Executive magazine online.

Author of:

"Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs" (Wharton Digital Press, 2012)

"Managing the Older Worker" (with Bill Novelli, Harvard Business Press, 2010)

"The India Way: How India’s Top Business Leaders Are Revolutionizing Management" (with colleagues, Harvard Business Press, 2010)

"Talent on Demand: Managing Talent in an Age of Uncertainty" (Harvard Business Press, 2008)

"The New Deal at Work: Managing the Market-Driven Workforce" (Harvard Business Press, 1999).

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