Dead Sea effect, good employees evaporate like water in the Dead Sea, and then the salinity of the Dead Sea becomes very high, making it difficult for normal organisms to survive. When a company develops to a certain stage, employees with strong abilities are likely to leave because they have low tolerance for stupid behavior in the company and can easily find good jobs; employees with poor abilities tend to stay and have difficulty finding jobs. As time goes by, they become mid-level and senior-level employees. This phenomenon is called the Dead Sea Effect.
Source of Dead Sea Effect
Large companies, both public and private, are struggling with development, and there are many reasons for this.
The reason is that every effort must be made to find and recruit the best IT engineers. But even if great IT engineers can be found and recruited, the real question is: Can companies keep them?
In large enterprises, a reverse pattern already exists, which can be called the “Dead Sea Effect.” The Dead Sea is a large lake located between Israel and Jordan, with an altitude well below sea level. Despite the inflow of water from the Jordan River, the level of the Dead Sea continues to drop due to evaporation. This means that over time, the Dead Sea has turned into a salt lake that is eight times saltier than sea water. For this reason, almost no life exists in the Dead Sea. Only when spring comes, a large amount of fresh water is added, and the salinity of the sea water decreases, will signs of life appear briefly.
Many large corporate or government IT departments look like the Dead Sea. The management believes that it is necessary to recruit new people to supplement the company. The criteria for selecting new people are often very different, such as skills, education, experience, etc. In addition, companies mainly determine whether to recruit new people based on current needs, employee turnover, personal budgets, and the recruiter’s abilities. All things being equal, the core competencies of an IT department should be roughly the same.
But this is not the case. On the contrary, the more talented and efficient IT engineers are often the ones most likely to leave. That’s because real talent often can’t tolerate the frequent silliness and workplace problems that are part of big business. Since real talent is the one most likely to get other opportunities, it’s also easier to leave.
Those who tend to stay can be said to be the “residues” - that is, the IT engineers with the least talent and efficiency. They are very grateful for their current job and have fewer management requirements. Even if they are unhappy at work, they are unlikely to move. This group of people tends to preserve themselves, become experts in maintaining key systems, and take on responsibilities that others don’t want to take. In the end, the organization cannot do without them.
The same effect described above appears in different companies and different IT departments. Large companies have lost truly talented IT engineers, and those who remain are less talented people. This has violated the original intention of these companies: to eliminate low-talented and inefficient people and introduce high-talented and efficient people. And this effect is self-reinforcing: the worse an IT department is, the harder it is to attract highly talented and efficient IT engineers to join it, and the harder it is to retain talent. This situation will reach a critical point: the talented people in an organization are all newcomers. They may not know much about the company when they first come in, but once they get to know the company, they are likely to leave. #The phenomenon of Dead Sea Effect Good talents are constantly lost, low-quality talents are retained, and the quality of this team is getting worse and worse. The reason for this situation is actually quite simple: as the environment deteriorates, high-quality talents have stronger capabilities and can freely choose a team that meets their expectations. Low-quality talents have no more choices and can only survive in the current environment.
In modern organizations, people are the first factor of production. If the quality of talent continues to decrease, the entire team will lack combat effectiveness, will not develop commercially, and the team will face the risk of disintegration. What kind of team is prone to the Dead Sea Effect? There are several points: no pressure, opacity, and human relationships.
The first point is no pressure. When a company’s business development enters a bottleneck period, it has no vision in strategy, or it has occupied a favorable terrain in the market and has enough food and clothing, it is easy to lose pressure. My understanding of business is limited, so I’ll use the technical team as an analogy: when a technical team provides enough support to the business and the business develops steadily, then the technical team has two choices: maintain a stable state; or put forward higher technical requirements for itself. The former is comfortable, while the latter brings rewards in the long term, but is hard and risky in the short term. The former has limited team space, low challenge difficulty, and is more likely to produce the Dead Sea effect.
The second point that breeds the Dead Sea effect is opacity. This opacity manifests itself in several ways:
The second point is opacity. Is the strategy transparent to all employees? Are performance results transparent to all employees? Are team and individual performance results transparent? Are the evaluation criteria transparent?
Lack of transparency can lead to unfairness in the team.
Front-line employees cannot see the future development direction and performance, and cannot feel that individuals are respected by the organization. Maybe some people can earn high profits even though they are doing nothing, but naturally they cannot be recognized by the high contributors of the team. Google has a series of methods, including OKR transparency and TGIF (Thank God It’s Friday) all-hands communication meetings, to effectively solve this problem.
The third point is favor. When everyone works together, a bond will develop more or less over time. Chinese society pays special attention to human relationships. If you do me a favor today, I will keep it in mind and return it to you if I have the opportunity in the future.
This is of course a kind of glue and buffer for communication between people, but it is also a sign of low professionalism. The existence of an enterprise has a mission and purpose, and creating a big family atmosphere is certainly not part of its mission. A small team can be managed in a family-like manner in the early stage, but once it gets on the right track, it must be managed in a standardized manner.
Favor is actually a violation of standards and systems, and the normal operation of an enterprise requires compliance with standards and systems.
Paying attention to human feelings will also damage responsibilities and evaluations, which will lead to unfairness and the Dead Sea effect will arise. I admire Alibaba very much for this. It has a well-known job rotation system. Management cannot hold the same position for a long time and needs to be rotated regularly.
This ensures that key talents are mobile within the company and will not be locked into specific positions. This also avoids favor accounts and internal small groups caused by long-term lock-in.
How to escape the Dead Sea Effect
There are several methods: pursuit of excellence, system and transparency, talent standards and flow.
I once communicated with a candidate, and his words impressed me deeply: When the company’s business develops rapidly, there will be no complex management problems.
This is an ideal situation.
But business development takes time. After entering the bottleneck period, if you want to continue to maintain the vitality of the team, what should you do?
This opens up space for team and individual development. Once you have the belief in pursuing excellence, you can still resist the Dead Sea Effect even if your business develops slightly. High-quality talents often leave because they feel wronged, so a fair system and transparent implementation are particularly important. Guarantees are not transferred by the willpower of an individual, but can function like a machine and can be calculated like mathematics.
This needs to be implemented from top to bottom, otherwise it will be very difficult to implement.
As an example, if most members of the team adjust their performance goals at the end of the month and receive higher ratings. Then those who insist on not adjusting may receive lower ratings, which is not a situation that individuals can influence.
Without top-down push, institutions and transparency can only be a breath of fresh air.
Finally, there is talent standards and mobility. The flow of talents is not a bad thing. It is like human physiological cycle, absorbing beneficial substances and eliminating harmful substances.
This cycle must run in a forward direction, setting reasonable admission standards and elimination standards, high-quality input, and low-quality elimination. The elimination system at the end sounds cruel, but it is actually widely implemented, such as Alibaba’s 3.25 assessment and Tencent’s elimination of one person at the end of the year.
For most non-family companies, if a black sheep really appears, shouldn’t they be eliminated? Elimination should be institutionalized so that everyone can see and take it seriously, rather than doing it covertly for fear of causing collective unrest, which is more likely to generate speculation and worry.