Personnel Mobility Assessment Using Survival Models for Strategic Workforce Management

• Activity Number: 173
• Type: Topic Contributed
• Date/Time: Monday, August 10, 2015 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Risk Analysis
• Author(s): Xiaomei Qiu* and Thor Osborn
• Companies: Sandia National Laboratories and Sandia National Laboratories
• Keywords: personnel ; workforce ; management ; mobility ; organizational behavior

Abstract

Regardless of sector, purpose, environment or business model, enduring organizations experience a continuous flow of personnel entering, exiting, moving within the organizational structure. These flows are commonly considered in the contexts of hiring, retention, and personnel development, where organizational effectiveness depends on crafting working conditions and incentives that encourage appropriate rates of movement. Short-term aggregate measures of these rates are often misleading due to sample size and fluctuations in the business environment. Such movements can be viewed as a series of transitions between job situation states, with associated residence durations, the endpoints of which may be known or bounded. Consequently they are suitable for analysis using survival methods to yield probabilistic models reflecting persistent organizational characteristics. The application of parametric survival models to personnel transition data enables exploration of environmental or demographic influences on employee behavior. Practical benefits of this approach include a deeper understanding of the relationship between personnel flows, management decisions, and environmental shifts.