“I got a little nervous,” he says. “If we’re losing talent so fast at the top, how can we get it at the bottom?”

After all, it takes senior people to develop junior people. At the time, skilled workers were being tempted across the Tasman as Australia grappled with its own energy redesign. “The market was very tight,” says Lewis.

Talent development and succession planning

To get the workforce it needed, the company had to hire at both ends—stop the drain at the top and ramp up entry-level recruiting. The company added 135 employees. During the same period, turnover fell from 22% to 16%, and employment time fell from about 50 days to about 29 days.

It was a great result. Unfortunately, it was followed by an economic recession that caused spending on the regulated electricity market to drop. Connetics now appears fully staffed, Lewis says. The natural attrition of turnover, he says, has become a carefully calibrated mechanism that takes over succession planning, retention strategies, performance conversations and leave management.

“It’s about supporting those whose time has come to move on, while retaining the people we’ll need when work comes back, so we can ramp up very quickly,” he says. “I don’t want to know how weak we are when times are hard. I want to know how weak we are when times are good, because it’s easy for inefficiencies to creep into the system.”