PRO EMPLOYEE RETENTION

There are many times in life that you never get to see that some known most of the times own parents have ever hopped in their professional career, have never seen him /her change -0 at dawn, at dusk, night time, noon, at 10, at 30 and finally at 60. Today it is evident knocking at every second door in the neighborhood. Employee retention refers to the ability of an organization to retain its employees. Employee retention can be represented by a simple statistic (for example, a retention rate of 80% usually indicates that an organization kept 80% of its employees in a given period).

Talent management is one of the primary management tools for 21st century human asset management because the significant resource for firms competing in this century is no longer land, capital and other tangible assets but the human capital necessary to adapt organizations to global competition and maximize the benefits associated with the current technological boom. (Cappelli,2008).

Employee retention isn’t solely a concept or a cause to explore, it is a way forward for the corporate to achieve organizational goals, identifying the employees best suited to develop those competencies, then helping them in their progression and, finally, finding ways to measure success. Engaging a job-fit worker would demand the leader to emboss the feeling of job security and job satisfaction in the mind of the workers. While the security that comes with a full-time job is, in many ways, undisputed, an increasing number of young professionals are electing to work as freelancers or in other words become their own boss.

In the course of this, there are numerous clients who were unhappy paying the costs that come attached with the services of such well-known firm and instead, offered to pay all expenses and a reduced fee for the same work. This makes the person personalized and answerable to no one but self. Alternatively, those who prefer full –time jobs offer arguments that will perhaps, continue to hold a significant place in an increasingly competitive job market.

Effective (four-way or eight-way) communication helps worker to be a part of the decision making process and further commitment to the output, strengthening industrial relations and creating a good work culture. This helps in developing a way of loyalty and evolves a lot of economical and effective work force operating towards a much better productivity for the organization. Various studies have shown Career Development Enablers seeking to restore and maintain the retention abundance. Some of them are listed below, in a bid to go beyond the conventional, intervening more directly to tilt the odds on the work front because the whole thing is based on staying on schedule.

• Talent Management
• Succession Planning
• Structured Career Management
• Leadership Development
• Manager One Removed Conversations
• Online Learning
• Career Mapping
• Self Assessment

Low talent retention plays negative on the corporate resources, management performers need to know which practices work and what they should focus on to retain and motivate their workforce. For instance, a talent management strategy that allows employees to build a network, seek and find mentors, and help them grow and develop while feeling more connected and engaged is one means of retaining talent. There are a few suggestions to develop peoples’ skills with a major continued commitment and investment through human resource capital asset department.

• Encourage innovativeness in day-today operations. Today most organizations know performance appraisal (performance planning, analysis and development), potential appraisal, feedback and counseling, training, job-rotation, career planning and development training as exercises as mechanisms of development. The manager-to-messenger and the visiting industry experts experiments have shown a good degree of innovativeness in HRD. It is basically to come up with as many new ways as possible of helping employee development and also help them in implementing. HRD staff then will have scope to learn from managers.
• Intra Company networking is essential. To collect innovative practices and disseminate to other employees so that they could get inspired by these practices and in turn develop many new practices, constantly learning from experiences. But more importantly team members want supervisors who set clear performance expectations, deliver timely feedback on performance, live up to their word and promises, and provide an environment where the employee can grow and succeed.
• Process orientation should be strengthened. Where employees are encouraged to express their ideas and opinions freely encouraged to be pro-active and risk-taking; where people are authentic and trust each other; where people try to help each other and have concern for their team and their organization. Most of the time employees are so much concerned with accomplishing results they tend to neglect the human process means that are being adopted to achieve these goals. The leadership styles, “we” feeling, initiative, team spirit, work-motivation, decision-making styles, management of mistakes, management of conflicts, goal setting, job involvement etc constitute human processes in organization.
• Offer a competitive compensation package – Any team member wants to feel that he or she is being paid appropriately for the work he or she does. Be sure to research what other companies and organizations are offering in terms of salary and benefits. It is also important to research what the regional and national compensation averages are for that particular position. You can be sure that if your compensation package is not competitive, team members will find this out and look for employers who are willing to offer more competitive compensation packages.
• Employee Recognition – Recognizing and rewarding an employee’s performance reinforces positive behavior and encourages additional positive behavior. If a team member feels that he or she is appreciated atleast acknowledged in front of members of management for the good work done it is likely to repeat their behaviors in the future and even put out more effort than before helping to retain more employees. This can reduce the tendency for employees to feel that their supervisors take all the credit for their hard work.
• Employee Reward Program- Organization can make a provision of Monthly like the Best Employee of the Month or time period like Annual Award based on performance of the employee. The award can be in terms of gifts or money. If it is money then it should be divided into two parts, first part to be given with the next month salary and the remaining after 6 months. In this way he/she can be retained for 6 more months. These rewards shall be considered at the time of appraisal.
• Loyalty Bonus- Organization can introduce a Loyalty Bonus Program in which they can reward their employee after a successful completion of a specified period of time. This can be in the form of Money or Position. There are age old and newly established renowned companies which dedicate time-scale loyalty bonus to make them feel fascinated and grounded, engaged/ married to the job.
• Frequent get-togethers of entire staff esp HRD staff and periodic surveys are useful – With a decentralized set-up to exchange notes and should keep on examining the roles they are performing and create self-renewal processes .Organization should also let their employees enjoy in a light mood. They can take their employees to a trip or for an outing every year or bi-yearly. At the same time organization can involve their top management into some of the fun activities along with the other employees so that everybody is same. Gifts at some Occasions-Movie tickets, gift certificates, or an engraved gift are excellent rewards for an employee who has excelled or put in the extra effort to make a project happen. Gifts at the time of birthday, marriage anniversary of the employees making them feel good and understand that the management is concerned about them. Getting their spouse to office especially in case of working couple has taken a leap in this regard.
• Lifestyle choices – As the tourism industry have large numbers of young employee and younger workers expect, perhaps even demand, far more freedom than companies have been accustomed to providing. So, if companies are to accommodate them for lengthy spells of time they will need to be flexible.

There you have it: a perfectly matter-of fact, unvarnished evocation of how attrition-free or pro-retention approach existed and still prevails, married to the office/ organization fascination with all that we can’t explain but remember the good times and try ourselves to recreate the essence, whether it’s possible to conjure up human resource and management, yet not believe in magic.

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Salla Vijay Kumar, National Award Winning Lecturer, IHM Ahmedabad.