| 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. |