The greatest challenge of all times today is to find the right people and then to keep them.  People leave an organization for various reasons.  We cannot make them stay put or married or tied to an organization for long.  What organizations can do best is to extend the stay of an employee as long as possible.  This we term as “Talent Retention”.  This article is not for organizations that look at employees as just token numbers and are eager to hire, fire and replacements.  This article is for those organizations, employers and managers who consider their employees as an important part for their success and growth, employees as an asset and a human capital for their business survival.

Talent needs to be look at from two dimensions.  (a) The Talent that the organization is looking for and (b) The Talent that an employee has.  The chance of both being the same is less, for this reason recruiters usually look at hiring people with the right attitude and values and fill in the requirement of knowledge and skills to build the employees competency with training.

To ensure that we make the right hire or select the right talent that we are looking for, it’s important for us to do a JOB ANALYSIS and develop the right Job Descriptions and Job Specifications to ensure we know what we want and go out and find them through various sources.

On board with the right hire, it’s important for managers to know that employees do not bring just their talent, their experience, their mind and brains, but they bring their hearts, feelings and emotions too to their place of work.

Here are few ways to retain your talent or employees and to extend their stay in the organizations.

(1)  Ensure there is a professional Job Descriptions covering all aspects of the job. People need to know what they are supposed to be doing and what is expected of them to perform.  These job descriptions need to be updated regularly and a copy given to the staff.  It’s not a document just to be filed in HR Dept but an active paper to be referred to, updated at all times.

(2)  Most of the Performance Appraisals have nothing to do with Job Descriptions, for what we want the staff to do and what we assess the staff against are completely different. For this reason Job descriptions lose their significance.  What is right is to ensure that the appraisal criteria’s cover aspects of the Job Descriptions so that employees are evaluated on what they were supposed to do and what was expected of them.  This makes employees feel motivated, gives importance to their jobs and fairness in assessing them against what was expected.

(3)People have their strengths and weakness.  It’s important to capitalize on their strengths, which of course is their talents.  So while in recruitment we try to fit the person to the job, in retaining people, we try to Fit the job to the person.  In this we try to find out what type of job would make them feel good, would make them more productive and would make them to like it and do it as though it isn’t a job but a hobby.  This would require a lot of changes to package the job to the person so that they continue to enjoy the work and contribute more.

(4)  While we fit the job to harness on their strength, it’s important to recognize their weakness.  Sadly organizations wait for an entire year to pass by to share the weakness as part of the Appraisal Interview at the end of the appraisal period.  In order to retain people, tell them what they are not doing well as often or as regularly as you can.  Managers not only should give those staff timely and regular feedback of what they do well, but come out with an action plan to improve on those areas where they find the staff not good or need to improve.

(5)  It’s said that people leave the organization most often because of their immediate supervisors.  There are also instances where in even if the organization is not good, people cling on due to their supervisors.  Retaining people is more a managerial responsibility. One of the ways is to involve people in the departmental activity, planning, decision making and problem solving.  Share the performance of the organizations, the difficulties the organization is facing and seek the help and assistance that you want from your staff.

(6)  Listening to your employees is a powerful way of recognizing them, valuing them and retaining them.  Having Weekly or monthly meeting, seeking suggestions, adding more responsibility and authority to employees makes them feel important and would extend their stay in the organization. Ask them if they are enjoying their jobs and what changes would make them happy to work in your firm.  We do that with our customers, why not with our employees who are also important stake holders.

(7)  Recognize talent and merit is one of the important ways to retain people.  Money is important for all, but not all work for money. Recognizing them in small and big ways with a letter of appreciation, publishing their achievements in your newsletters, notice boards, celebrating their life events like birthdays, anniversaries, kids achievements etc., promoting them, upgrading their levels etc., are some of the ways of recognition

(8)  Fairness is extremely important.  Fairness in the way salary is fixed, solution is regular job evaluation process, salary survey and benchmarking.  Fairness in distributing work, sending them on training programs, in discipline by maintaining uniformity of rules and regulations.

(9)  Work Life balance is the latest initiative towards talent retention.  It’s important to have rules and regulations in an organization.  But these rules need to make it easy for staff to work and contribute and not make them unhappy and push them not to work or stay in the company.  So ensure that work life does not affect the personal life.  Unfortunately some organizations consider employees as bonded labour that they have no life other than work and it is in these organizations you will see high  labour turnover, disgruntlement, unethical behavior of staff, termination and such other labour issues.

(10)  Last but not the least is for employers and organizations to identify the values for their firm and to hire staff that have and believe in those values.  If there is a value match, the chances of employees sticking on to those firms is far greater.  It’s also a great idea for organizations to have regular value clarification workshops to ensure there is an alignment among the staff towards the organizational values more so where you have multicultural staff from different cultures, religions and value sets who work in an organization.

For further consulting and to get in touch with the author you may email to sv@solomon-mc.com