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Since you referenced me (“the new CEO”) in your comments, I wanted to respond to a few of your concerns. Clearly you're frustrated about a recent organizational change that impacted you in a personal way, and I’m sorry for that. It appears we could have done more to help you understand the context of the change so that you could see it more objectively and accurately even if you didn’t like the outcome. Since you didn’t have perfect visibility into our thinking and process for making these kinds of decisions, it’s understandable how your interpretation of the situation could be different than what we intended or know to be true. So I wanted to set the record straight on a couple of your key points.
First, it’s clearly not my plan or intention to chase off institutional knowledge or outsource all work to China or India. That’s simply illogical and probably wouldn’t do anything for my own job security. On the other hand, as a global company with operations and offices in more than 30 countries around the world, we do have an opportunity to be very thoughtful about where we choose to place certain types of work and the people who support that work. While it may be tempting to assume labor-related cost is the exclusive driver of our location strategy, in fact it’s a much more complex puzzle. Labor and other employee-related costs are certainly one set of factors, but we also have to consider the nature of the work itself, the availability of relevant skills in the local labor force, office capacity, proximity of the work to other contributing resources, proximity of the work to key customers, local language capabilities, transition-related costs—and the list goes on. Admittedly our location strategy is fluid as the needs of our business evolve so we’re constantly evaluating and reevaluating our options. That’s why decisions that didn’t make sense five years ago, might make sense today.
Secondly, we are intensely committed to making Morningstar a great workplace for members of all genders. No doubt it’s the law, but more importantly we know that diversity leads to better business outcomes. So we continuously look for ways to create more diversity, not less. If you look at the facts, I’m quite confident you will not find any bias at Morningstar against “middle aged women” and in favor of “20-something men.” Implying otherwise is inaccurate and misleading. Similarly we have not experienced a disproportionate loss of experienced, longer-tenured team members as you suggest. Over the past 12 months our company-wide turnover rate has been about 14%, which is pretty typical for most companies like us and consistent with our turnover rate for the past several years. During that same period the turnover rate for employees who have been at Morningstar for 8 or more years is 8%, substantially less than the all-employee average. Because longer-tenured employees may be in roles with more visibility and broader impact, their departures tend to attract more attention, but the data suggests experienced talent is turning over at a rate that’s lower than other employee groups—nothing out of the ordinary. It’s also worth noting that the involuntary turnover rate (people who leave Morningstar due to performance issues, job redundancies, etc. rather than personal choice) was 2.5% for women and 3.7% for men, meaning men are somewhat more likely to be managed out of Morningstar than women are—a further indication of no bias against women.
It is always our goal to part ways with employees in a positive and dignified manner. I’m sorry your experience didn’t match that goal, and I wish you well in the future.
