Retaining talent, vital for organisation's success

Heads of business organisations keep promoting the idea of employee as their biggest asset and a distinct competitive advantage. Contrary to this assertion, many of their initiatives and processes to retain their best talent remain totally out of sync with expectations of the target segment within the organisation.

This is due to the organisation's inability to identify and address the root causes of the issues faced by their best talent or lack of talent-friendly policies. In the pre-internet era, the majority of the talent within the organisation was safe from poaching by competitors due to the high cost of acquisition in terms of sourcing and the long duration to hunt talent from outside.

Hiring of talent was also limited by cultural norms and constraints and many of the employees were content with their job and at many times were simply unaware of the opportunities available for their talent and its value.

Change

In the globalised flat world, the sheer volume of information has shifted the balance of power in favour of employees as opposed to the employer. The employee has now become aware of global employers, their best practices in retaining talent and perception about companies and their culture through media and social networking sites.

The constraints faced by employees to change jobs, due to lack of awareness of opportunities, no longer exist.

HR managers while promoting initiatives to retain their best talent need to factor these new changes.

Employees rarely raise questions or complain about their organisation when they get what they expect and the communication lines are kept open. They start complaining when, in their perception, the organisation recognises other employees more than them.

This happens either due to contribution of other employees becoming more valuable to the organisation due to changing business needs and deliver organisational expectations or the earlier blue-eyed boy failing to deliver what the organisation expected from him.

Of course there is a monetory aspect to it too. The problems due to complaining employees is not a new phenomenon but in the internet era it has assumed different dimensions and managing them has become more complex for HR managers.

The damage disgruntled employees cause to an organisation is much more than within the within four walls of the organisation, which is easy to handle, but beyond, through the wired world using blogs, facebook, twitter and other methods.

Any amount of assertions by HR managers about their talent retention and employee oriented strategy fails to cut ice with the existing talent.

Greener pastures

We realised that the primary concern for a majority of organisations is the fear of their top talent leaving them for greener pastures due to the increasing global nature of the talent war and better compensation in most cases.

This has been largely facilitated by hiring practices shifting from the traditional newspaper to specialised job portals and lately to social networking sites thus helping job seekers look for global opportunities.

Second, the opportunity in emerging technologies to start entrepreneurial activities with minimum seed capital also acts as a trigger for top talent to venture out.

Third, the senior management in many businesses is more involved in direct business issues and talent management is of low priority in their radar.

Many a time the management is unable to fathom the technological upheaval which is leading to talent becoming the key ingredient for success of future businesses.

Management considers all resignations with the same yardstick. Most organisations have failed to recognise talent management issues as part of business strategy and at best consider it as a passing phenomenon in their business cycle.

The choice is yours but without talent, businesses cannot survive which we all know through experience.