C A S E : N A S A The end of the Space Shuttle program has brought a great deal of uncertainty to NASA and its employees at the Kennedy Space Center. However, that uncertainty also extends to NASA’s contractors, whose employees face the same change in the meaning of their work, but without the job security that comes with being a direct government employee. 113 One such contractor is Alliant Techsystems (ATK), an aerospace, defense, and security firm based in Minneapolis. When plans briefly called for the shuttle program to be replaced by a mission to Mars, it was ATK who was tasked with much of the construction of the Ares rocket that would catapult the Orion capsule beyond Earth’s orbit. 114 Now that the Mars mission has been scrubbed, ATK con- tinues to test the Ares components amid legislative and budgetary uncertainties. Fortunately for ATK, it approaches issues of commitment and turnover with the same tech- nical approach that it uses for its NASA work. Beginning in 2008, the company began using statistical analyses to anticipate the supply and demand for labor in future years. 115 Specifically, ATK collects data from employee departures to create a “flight risk model” that calculates the probability of turnover for each individual employee. For example, the model takes into account an employee’s age and tenure, marital status, the criticality of his or her job role, linkages to other “flight risk” employees, changes in benefit-related issues, and seasonality. This model allowed ATK to forecast unusually high turnover in one of its units last year. As the company gets more experience with, and confidence in, the model, it will begin launching initiatives to prepare for real events before they happen. For example, if the company identified a key employee as a flight risk, it could take proactive steps to boost the employee’s commitment, or engage in succession planning with a more junior person. Human resources experts note that “workforce metrics” systems like those at ATK remain the exception rather than the rule. One estimate suggests that only 20 percent of companies col- lect and analyze data to make employee-focused predictions. 116 One reason for that is that most companies gear data collection analysis to issues that can more closely be tied to “the bottom line,” such as sales or production. Another reason is that some human resources professionals chose their career path because of the relative absence of “number crunching,” relative to more technical and scientific paths. That rationale explains why a company like ATK is more enthu- siastic, given the kinds of employees that are drawn to the aerospace industry. Indeed, one of the company’s human resources executives, Cory Edmonds, majored in statistics and has taken graduate courses in the area. “If you really want to do this kind of work,” notes Carl Willis, ATK’s vice president of human resources, “the typical skill set you have in HR is not what you need. You need more of an analyst.” Still, ATK took its move toward workforce metrics step-by- step. It brought in outside expertise in the form of workforce analytics consultants, and demon- strated the effectiveness of the approach in one division before going companywide.Consider the factors that ATK uses in its statistical models to identify “flight risks.” Which of those factors seem more predictive of voluntary turnover? Which of those factors seem less important?
