Create a growing environment in order to hold on to your top performers
No company would ever want to lose its bright employees to its competitors. Even during the slowdown, companies tried to hold on to their key performers because they help organisations stay afloat. “All companies are facing an increasingly complex and ever changing landscape in their efforts to acquire, retain, motivate and develop the talent needed for their organisations to operate efficiently and competitively.
Talent management strategies enable employees to get a better sense of belonging to the organisation,” shares Aditya Arora, COO, Base Corporation Ltd. Therefore, it has become imperative to work on some retention strategies that can help you retain your key employees. Here are some points to focus on.
Offer scope for learning
Even employees at the senior level can be trained to take charge in new areas that interest them, other than their routine operations. Thus, it is imperative for any company to provide an environment that promotes learning. For example, a senior member of the marketing team might be interested in knowing about finance or HR, which he believes would contribute significantly to developing his holistic understanding of business functions. Therefore, a company should facilitate such learning opportunities.
Empowering employees
Empowering your top employees by giving them the freedom to experiment and take calculated risks can help retain talent. This could also foster a culture of innovation, where every employee can pitch innovative ideas related to products, services or business processes. “Many employees at the senior level look for fresh challenges, and if an organisation fails to offer challenging opportunities, there is a high chance of talent seeping out to either join another firm or to start on their own. We have given full freedom to our senior employees to take crucial decisions as and when required. They are always welcome to give suggestions and ideas that can help the company to grow,” informs Sunil Jain, vice president, Microtek International Pvt Ltd.
Talent management initiatives
Talent management is a proactive and continual process. It is designed to ensure that an organisation performs effectively by identifying, assessing, developing and moving around talented personnel who can deliver sustained, superior business results for the company. For this, various initiatives need to be taken up by the HR department like succession planning and career path development sessions, which enable employees to fully understand their roles and visualise their growth paths during their association with the company. “Everybody within a company has a sense of achievement when something is achieved, but there is also a sense of failure when we lose a good employee to our competition and the way out of these oscillations is talent management,” says Aditya Arora.
Values and ethics
This is one of the points on which a company earns its reputation. A talented professional would want to stick in a company only if practices and values ethics that are of the highest order. Similarly, a talented individual would only want to join a company if it is perceived well in the outside world.
Creating a healthy inter-department environment
A healthy environment at the workplace is one of the key reasons companies are able to hold on to employees for long. While working within a multi-department setup, the importance of interacting with each other cannot be ignored. If the decision making capacity of an individual is restricted because of others, this may lead to delays and, therefore, become frustrating for an employee. Says Sunil Jain, “Sometimes, decisions of one department may need approval or inputs from another. Therefore, we have always made sure that our key employees from different departments help each other whenever the need arises.”
—By Nitasha Chawla
