Snippet: Bored People Quit ☇

Rands with an oldie, but goodie:

You call on the motivation and retention police because you believe they can perform the legendary “diving save”. Whether it’s HR or a well-intentioned manager with a distinguished title, these people scurry impressively. Meetings that go long into the evening are instantly scheduled with the disenfranchised employee.

It’s an impressive show of force, and it sometimes works, but even if they stay, the damage has been done. They’ve quit, and when someone quits they are effectively saying, “I no longer believe in this company”. What’s worse is that what they were originally thinking was, “I’m bored”.

Boredom is easier to fix than an absence of belief.

Even though this post was written in 2011, I came across it recently and it had me thinking about all the frustrating and annoying things in the world of technology. Granted, this can be applied to an even larger scope, but there’s a lot of companies that were once mighty that even as a customer (or user), I’m finding myself no longer believing in. In another way, you may have noticed some silence on this site for about the past month—outside of the HomePod launch, there just hasn’t been much that has interested me. This site isn’t going anywhere, but a little hiatus from time to time can be a good thing.