The value of knowing the value

Something I've been musing about recently: there's a pretty high value, for managers, in knowing the value of people within a business. I'm kinda curious how many companies (and managers within said companies) actually know the value for their reports, beyond just the superficial stuff (like job level).

Motivating experience: people leave companies. Depending on how open the company is with departures, motivations, internal communications, etc., this may be somewhat sudden and/or unnoticed for some time. Sometimes, the people that leave have historical specific knowledge which is not replicated anywhere else in the company, or general area expertise which cannot easily be replaced, or are fulfilling roles which would otherwise be more costly to the organization if that work was not done, etc. Sometimes these departures can have significant costs for a company, beyond just the lost nominal productivity.

Note that departures are entirely normal: people move on, seek other opportunities, get attractive offers, etc. As a company, you cannot generally prevent people from leaving, and indeed many companies implicitly force groups out the door sometimes (see, for example, Amazon's RTO mandates and managing people out via underhanded internal processes). However, in concept a company would usually want to offer to pay what a person is worth to the company to retain them, and would not want someone to walk away that they would have been willing to pay enough to entice them to stay. That's where knowing value comes into play: in order to do that calculation, you would need the data, inclusive of all the little things which do not necessarily make it into a high level role description.

Not having been a manager (in any sort of serious sense), I don't really have a perspective on how well this is generally understood within companies, but my anecdotal experience would suggest that it is generally not tracked very well. Granted, everyone is replaceable in some sense, and companies do not want to be in a position where they feel extorted, but the converse is that effective and optimal people management means "staying ahead" of people's value in terms of proactive rewards and incentives. I'd imagine that even a company which treats their employees at cattle would be displeased if someone they would have been happy to retain at a higher rate walked, just because their management didn't accurately perceive their aggregate value to the organization.

All of this is to say: there's a high value for an organization in having an accurate sense of the value that people have for an organization, to optimally manage your business relationship with those people. If people leave your company, and you figure out later that they had more value than you were accounting for, that's a failure of management within the organization, and might be a costly one.

Addendum: Lest anyone think this is in relation to myself and my current position, it is not. However, I have been valued both more and less than I perceived my value as at various points in my career, so I know there can be a disconnect there, and I've seen organizations lose valuable expertise and not realize it until the people were gone. I would surmise that this might be more of a general blind spot than many companies realize.