Talent Risk Assessor, 4: Connecting Talent Progression to Retention Risk

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Scott Kelly: Hi everybody. Welcome back to Defensible Decisions. I’m your host, Scott Kelly, a shareholder at Ogletree Deakins in the Birmingham and Washington, D.C. offices. And I’m excited to continue our Talent Risk Assessor series. Today we’re tackling episode four where we’re talking about talent progression and retention analytics. So, we’re going to continue with the same multistate employer we’ve been following through this series. You’ll recall in episode one, we looked at external selections. In episode three, we examined voluntary separations. And today we’re asking a bit of a harder question and that’s once someone is inside the organization, what determines whether they’re going to move up or to move on? So, we’re looking at time to promotion and tenure together because in the data, they turn out to be two views of the same story. So, I’m excited to be joined by members of our workforce analytics and our data analytics group here at Ogletree. Emily Botto is here. She’s a senior data analyst on the team, and then someone that our listeners will definitely recognize. I have Lauren Hicks, who’s a shareholder in our Atlanta and Indianapolis offices. Welcome to both of you.

Emily Botto: Thanks, Scott. Excited to be here. This is a topic where the data can be incredibly revealing.

Lauren Hicks: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Scott, for having us. And one quick reminder before we get started, everything here is informational. Data is so powerful in that way, but a trend on a dashboard on its own doesn’t necessarily establish a legal violation or even a compliance failure. It’s a starting point for the kind of inquiry that we’re about to walk through.

Scott Kelly: Thanks for that. Really good reminder, Lauren. So, let’s try to pick up where we left off with some of our other colleagues. In the last episode, we identified patterns in voluntary separations. There were certain job families and business units that showed higher departure rates for particular demographic groups. Now we want to ask why, what’s happening upstream that might be contributing to those departures, right?

Emily Botto: Exactly. Voluntary separation data tells you that people are leaving, but it doesn’t tell you why. When we layer in time to promotion data and tenure analysis, we start to see there’s a progression problem. If employees in certain groups are waiting significantly longer for promotions or never reaching promotion at all, that’s a leading indicator of eventual attrition.

Lauren Hicks: That’s a good point, Emily. And kind of from a legal risk perspective, it’s really critical because time to promotion and tenure are the two metrics that together will tell you whether progression and retention are connected in the same parts of the business. Neither one alone is enough to draw a conclusion, but if we look at them together, they can tell you kind of how to prioritize an inquiry.

Scott Kelly: That’s really what the talent risk assessor is designed to do is to really kind of surface those kind of connections.

Emily Botto: Yes, exactly. It’s looking across multiple metrics, selections, separations, promotions, tenure, and identifying where patterns converge. When the same job families or business units keep showing up across multiple analyses, that’s the tool doing its job, helping you prioritize where to look first, not handing you a verdict.

Scott Kelly: All right. So, I know we hear time to promotion. I think it might be helpful if you help us break that down a little bit for our hypothetical employer. Emily, can you tell us when we talk about time to promotion, what are we talking about measuring?

Emily Botto: We’re measuring the average duration for employees to be promoted, broken down by demographic groups such as gender, race, job, family, and business unit. We’re evaluating career development programs and asking are they working equitably? We’re also identifying potential disparities and we’re understanding the impact on retention. If one group is waiting an average of four years for a promotion that another group receives in two and a half years within the same job family and with similar performance levels, that’s a meaningful gap.

Scott Kelly: So, for our employer, the tool, the talent risk assessor has flagged some specific areas where that gap you just described exists. Is that right, Emily?

Emily Botto: Yes, it did. In certain job families within certain business units, we see a statistically meaningful difference in average time to promotion for a demographic group. These are the same areas where episode three’s voluntary separation analysis showed elevated departure rate.

Lauren Hicks: And I want to jump in on something here. So, the data is showing us a disparity, a gap, but it’s not telling us the cause. So, there could be legitimate non-discriminatory explanations, maybe differences in role availability, geographic factors, individual career choices, a variety of other things. So, the point is that we now have a specific data driven prompt that’s telling us we need further inquiry. So, we know exactly kind of where to look and what questions to start asking.

Scott Kelly: And that’s the real value, right Lauren, to do this proactively rather than reactively?

Lauren Hicks: I certainly think so, Scott. I mean, if an agency or a plaintiff identifies the pattern before you do, you’re on defense, right? Not knowing about it doesn’t make a problem not be there or magically go away, and it generally doesn’t serve as a defense. So, if you identify it first under privilege with the attorney, you can investigate and understand root causes and take appropriate privileged action all in a much more defensible manner before you’re opening your books up to litigation risk.

Scott Kelly: For sure. So, we’ve talked about the time to promotion. Let’s take a look on the other side of this equation and really look at what a tenure analysis shows. Emily, can you kind of break that down for us?

Emily Botto: So, tenure analysis is about understanding whether the organization is losing capable employees and where this is happening within the business. We measure average tenure by demographic group, job family and business unit, just as we did for time to promotion. In this hypothetical, the same flagged job families and business units, the ones with longer time to promotion for a demographic group, also show shorter average tenure for that same group. Same map, two metrics.

Scott Kelly: So, if I’m following you, the story the data is telling us is that people wait longer for promotion and then they’re leaving?

Emily Botto: So that’s the pattern we’d want to test. We can’t say with certainty that one causes the other based on this data alone, but the correlation is strong and it’s concentrated within specific parts of the organization. It’s not enterprise wide, it’s localized, which actually makes it more actionable.

Lauren Hicks: Yeah. And I think from a legal point of view, that localized nature is significant because it sort of suggests that whatever is driving these patterns may be specific to certain managers, certain selection process or certain cultural dynamics within that local unit. And that’s important because that means sort of targeted remediation. The good news is it’s possible and it could very likely be effective at that local level versus looking at a broader enterprise level where it’s more challenging to implement very sort of clear and direct remediation across the board in that way.

Scott Kelly: Thanks Lauren. So how would this connect to the voluntary separations that we discussed in the prior episode? And is this a legal problem that we’re talking about? Is it a business problem? Is it both? What’s your take there?

Lauren Hicks: Yeah, Scott. I mean, I think you and I, when we talk to our employers all the time, we see that this is both. It’s both a business and a legal problem. They are often seeking to solve these issues from a business standpoint and we of course are always looking at it from the legal risk standpoint. So, in episode three, we kind of saw those departure patterns develop and now we’re seeing a plausible mechanism, right? Employees in a demographic group are waiting longer for advancement in certain parts of the organization and they’re leaving those same parts of the organization at higher rate. On the legal side, that connection kind of between the progression and the retention is exactly the kind of pattern that warrants a privileged look. But on the business side, it’s a sort of employee retention problem regardless of what the legal analysis ultimately finds. So, a flag is not a conclusion, it’s a prompt for legally informed inquiry, but it also is a prompt to help the business side kind of investigate what are likely to them legitimate problems that they’d like to have some type of solution to.

Scott Kelly: That’s really helpful. I think we hear a lot about what do we start to do with this? We’ve identified the where and the what, but how do we identify where the barriers are?

Emily Botto: This is where deeper analysis comes in. We can look at whether the promotion decisions in these areas rely on subjective criteria versus objective criteria. We can examine whether high potential designations or development opportunities are being distributed equitably. We can also look at whether the pipeline into promotable roles is equally accessible. The data points us to the areas. The qualitative investigation helps us understand the mechanisms.

Lauren Hicks: Yeah. And Emily, for what it’s worth, I know that when Scott and I are working with you and your team on these data issues, this is the exact kind of situation where we find that having that expertise here in house is particularly valuable because we like to dig, right? We really like to dig and identify the patterns, look at disparities and try to find underlying causes. We kind of don’t just take the data and do a quick run of it. We really think about what we’re seeing, look to find other explanations or other avenues for further investigation. And you guys are really excellent on your team about giving me suggestions. Hey, I noticed this, why don’t we look further into that? Which I really love and appreciate because that helps us get to a better meaningful explanation for the client. And so ultimately speaking, of course, we want to help the organization, the client develop kind of remediation strategies that are effective and sort of legally defensible.

Scott Kelly: So, can you give me an example just for the listeners what a barrier might look like in practice, Lauren?

Lauren Hicks: Yeah. So, think about maybe a particular business unit, promotions to a certain level might require a recommendation from senior leadership. And if one demographic group has less access to that leadership because of maybe just purely informal networking patterns or simply because there are fewer leaders from that demographic group in a position to sponsor anyone or kind of relationship build, that requirement itself can sometimes operate as a barrier, even though, Scott, it’s completely facially neutral, right? It didn’t have sort of an intent on its face to cause any type of gap or disparity. And so, the data surfaces that disparity for us and it’s the investigation that revealed the mechanism. That allows our client to then decide whether they want to modify that process and what might be an effective strategy to do so.

Emily Botto: And a lot of these processes tie into each other. So, if we think back to episode one where we looked at internal selections, some of those same selection processes feed into promotion decisions. So, when we see disparities in time to promotion, we may be seeing the downstream effects of selection patterns we identified back in episode one. The talent risk assessor is designed to make these cross-metric connections visible.

Scott Kelly: So, it really does give us a holistic view of the talent life cycle.

Emily Botto: It does, and that’s what makes it so powerful. No single metric tells the full story, but when you look at selections, promotions, tenure and separations together and you see the same areas appearing across multiple analyses, you have a compelling case for focused attention.

Scott Kelly: All right. Well, this has been a really helpful conversation. To recap for our listeners, time to promotion and tenure, when you read those two things together would help HR and legal prioritize where to look for barriers to advancement and retention risk in the same parts of their business. They can connect back to the internal selections we discussed in episode one and the voluntary separations that we discussed in episode three of this talent risk assessor series. And really they matter twice over because losing capable employees is a business cost in addition to being a legal one. So, in our next episode, episode five in this talent risk assessor series, we’re going to focus in on performance. We’re going to look at how performance ratings and calibration data can either reinforce or challenge some of these patterns we’ve been seeing. If people aren’t promoted, is that because of a performance difference or does the performance data tell us a different story? So, until then, I want to give a shout-out and a thank you to Emily and Lauren for joining me today.

Emily Botto: Thanks, Scott.

Lauren Hicks: Thanks, Scott.

Scott Kelly: All right. And thank you all for listening to Defensible Decisions. We’ll be back soon with the Talent Risk Assessor episode on performance.

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