| 答： Staff training & retention
Should You Be Sponsoring Your Employee For An EMBA?
Advice from:
Patrick Moreton, Ph.D.
Managing Director
The Washington University-Fudan University Executive MBA Program
The most critical advice I give employers considering sponsoring employees in an EMBA program is:
Encourage and support your sponsored employee’s efforts to change roles, not employers – or risk losing your entire investment in that employee’s development and knowledge of your business.
Recognize that the color of your money is the same as any other employer’s, whereas opportunities and challenges vary. Ensure that an employee’s salary rises because their responsibilities have expanded, not because they have found a higher-paying alternative elsewhere.
The minute you mention EMBA sponsorship, start looking for your sponsored employee’s next role in your organization. Your chances of retention will rise commensurately.
EMBA sponsorship may give you 18-20 months of additional work by a talented employee you know to be at risk of leaving. It is important to recognize however that your real bargaining position vis-à-vis that employee partly reflects your strategic investment, or perhaps more accurately, your lack of past investment.
Ways to lock in your investment:
Spend time and resources helping your employee build up their internal networks – team assignments, in-house training, trips to meet peers in other offices. They will be harder pressed to write off that human capital by jumping ship.
The best Executive MBA programs encourage and substantially increase employee advancement, often from the viewpoint of a general manager. EMBA participants acquire new skills, make new contacts (and learn how much others get paid), engage in problem solving outside their usual expertise – all of which leads them to look for new challenges and better pay.
If you cannot provide such challenges, they will find someone who can.
What can your organization do to ensure that it benefits, rather than suffers, from the changes wrought by an employee’s EMBA experience?
Start with Human Resource Planning.
If the first time you think about sponsoring a specific employee for an EMBA degree is when that employee approaches you for support, then you probably need to think more systematically about the role training is playing in your HR strategy.
A good HR plan needs to remove bottlenecks in the promotions tournament, to ensure no glass ceilings exist, and to make strong, albeit often implicit, guarantees that the organization will reward an employee in the future for investments made in firm-specific skills today.
Even if you have not systematically planned and managed your human capital, sponsoring an employee’s EMBA degree can still be a worthwhile investment.
You can easily protect any tuition paid, by allowing the employee to participate in a loan program that forgives all or part of the fees over certain milestones subsequent to graduation.
In truth, these arrangements provide only marginal retention benefits, since a talented manager will have no shortage of companies willing to pay the ransom necessary to liberate them from the captivity of their loan.
One effective retention strategy is to challenge your EMBA employee to use their training in your organization as they learn. Investigate the program’s curriculum and consider how each subject may enhance the employee’s work situation and goals.
This strategy has three benefits. Firstly, it may produce results that help defray the cost of their education.
Secondly, it ensures that the sponsoring manager updates their understanding of the employee’s capabilities as they change and grow.
Finally, both the employee and the sponsoring manager become committed to planning for the future, identifying real opportunities to accelerate their career within your organization.
Losing staff is obviously far more costly than simply paying out-of-pocket fees for external training.
The real cost is the loss of knowledge capital that the employee holds, which makes them more productive than their replacement will be for a considerable time to come. |