Novell slashes cost of employee 'churn'

By ADAM GIFFORD

You start a new job. Freshly scrubbed, keen as mustard, but day one was a bit frustrating. They showed you a desk, but the laptop had not arrived, and you spent half the day waiting for someone to get you a phone extension. And you could not go outside until your access card arrived.

A week later, the laptop has arrived, but you keep being denied entry to the databases you need on the intranet to get the job done.

Most of the time on the phone seems to be spent talking to those increasingly unfriendly people in information systems.

Bringing on new workers is something companies do all the time - even more so as the average length of time people spend in jobs decreases. A recent United States survey, by Deloitte Consulting, of what was uppermost in the minds of chief executives found that 55 per cent considered their main priority to be finding, hiring and retaining employees.

Software company Novell set out to measure the cost of employee "churn," including getting new staff slotted in and productive.

New Zealand manager Peter Revell said the results made it not only review its practices but look at how its technology could tackle the problem in other organisations.

He said 35 per cent of Novell's employees who left between November 1999 and July last year had been in the company less than 18 months.

With data showing that it could be several months before a new staffer was productive, Novell could see that churn was costing millions of dollars.

Its response was Zero Day Start - a methodology built around Novell's DirXML metadirectory tool.

Looking at its human resources systems, Novell saw that 17 systems needed to be manually updated every time a new employee came on board. Data on things like building access rights and network privileges were kept in multiple applications and databases.

The work fell on the information systems staff and could take them three weeks to complete.

Novell integrated the relevant directories and databases using DirXML. Information about a new employee is entered once and DirXML automatically updates all other directories. It now takes Novell less than two hours to bring on a new staff member and information systems is not involved.

Mr Revell said Novell calculated that IT productivity had increased by about 15 per cent and it was saving $US743,000 ($1.8 million) a year.

He said the cost of induction, in terms of lost productivity, used to average $US3224. It's now $US124.

Novell was also able to cut its helpdesk from 18 to eight people.