The NZ Herald report today:
Staff turnover at the Reserve Bank hit a record high of 21.7 per cent in the year to June .. More than one in five staff left the bank in the financial year – the highest portion since at least 1993 when online records began. The Reserve Bank, in its just-published annual report, explained, "As Covid-19 restrictions relaxed, turnover has increased .. This increase is attributed to low unemployment & competition for talent across Aotearoa NZ and is consistent with the experience of other organisations .. We monitor reasons for our people leaving through our exit interview process. In 2021/22, the main reason provided was for development opportunities followed by remuneration."
Why the endless propaganda from the vast RBNZ communications machine? A hallmark of totalitarian regimes is the never-ending spin put on every event that transpires. Let's be clear - identifying precisely why people are quitting an organization is extremely difficult. It could be due to a raft of factors, including dissatisfaction and a loss of faith in the place. To properly identify the causes requires a sophisticated statistical analysis. The RBNZ have not proved, not in any remote way, that their record high staff turnover is due to "low unemployment", "competition for talent" and "Covid-19". Those are ad-hoc observations, made-up lines. The "exit interview" process they describe is not scientific. People regularly don't tell the truth in those interviews. Why should they? They may be scared of the consequences of critiquing their employer. They may just be nice people who don't like speaking badly of others. I once worked at the RBNZ - those exit interviews were regarded as a joke. So why present them as scientific evidence?
I don't recommend any of my students to work at the RBNZ anymore. Why? One reason is that its hard to find a single serious economist in the entire senior leadership team, as well as on the Board. The managers just want we economists to do the hard work to make them look good - work they can't do themselves - whilst many of them "work" from home. They want to call us "analysts" - label us nerds - and put us on low pay whilst they take the big bucks and status. Shame on the RBNZ for keeping down the technical experts - Elon Musk at Tesla / SpaceX is a nerd, as is Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook; Bill Gates is a computer geek and Jeff Bezos was a really techy guy who met his (former) wife at Princeton University. At the RBNZ, they would have all been lucky to progress beyond "Senior Adviser", due to the argument they were clearly all unable to "manage" people, let alone money.
The reasons for the high staff turnover at the RBNZ are almost certainly not what the RBNZ communications team tell us it is. How dare they try to mislead the public, the nation, in their annual report by asserting that the Bank knows the truth behind why staff turnover is so high? Why not simply report the statistic for what it is?
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