As a manager, how do you feel if your best employees one by one leave the company? Surely, this experience poses uncomfortable feelings to you. Nowadays not only small and medium enterprises but also large corporations are facing brain drain. Once talented people decide to leave, they will not bother thinking again even if their managers try their best to keep them. So what should you do to retain talent? The answer is the right talent retaining strategy!
How do we define talent?
When an organization starts hiring their employees, they always set criteria for selecting the right talent as below:
· Suitable knowledge, skills, and abilities;
· Right attitudes and motivation;
· Cultural fit, both with the organization and with its customers.
Why does talent leave?
People do not quit organizations, people quit the management. There’s such a saying. In reality, there are many reasons why talent leaves their organizations like unsatisfactory salaries, no chances for promotion, boring jobs, micro-management, unfair performance review… In general, if talent doesn’t have favorable conditions to develop personally and advance in their career, they will surely quit jobs though from the bottom of their hearts they still love the companies.
Talent retaining strategy
Talent is so important that companies always need the right strategies to retain them. Major points you need to pay attention to include:
· Applying competitive and reasonable salary and remuneration policies
Salaries are always important to employees. However, according to Ms. Linh Lan, HR Manager of AIG Life Vietnam, organizations should have reasonable and competitive salary and remuneration policies, not “toweringly high” ones. If your company pays high salaries, then another one will surely pay higher. Companies need to regularly develop their talent via suitable training courses and reward excellent performers with cash or stocks (if your company is joint-stock one).
· Maximizing empowerment
Talent can work independently, so they will feel uncomfortable if supervisors always set eyes on their work. Empowerment should be applied tactfully so that talent can do tasks belonging to managers’ privileges once such as making decisions and solving problems. To this end, you need to encourage employees to make their own decisions and take responsibility for what they do. Never interfere too much in your employees’ problem solving.
· Establishing and developing social contacts
Fostering the growth of team activities such as football, volley ball, dancing, yoga … or singing contests will help establish and develop close social contacts among employees. These activities will infuse among staffs friendship and “comradeship”, bonding them via contacts and understanding. According to Ms. Linh Lan, one of the reasons why AIG Life Vietnam’s staffs are loyal to the company is the operation of these activities, especially the effective operation of foreign language clubs. Employees are still loyal to their companies due to their affection for colleagues and the working environment.
· Providing growth opportunities for employees
Providing growth opportunities is one of the most important strategies to retain good people. However, some companies hesitate to do this because they are afraid that employees will leave them after gaining new skills. However, in reality, most people always treasure growth opportunities provided by their employers. Therefore, you should pinpoint what skills and experience your potential talent lacks to provide suitable training courses.
· Building friendly working environments
It’s a matter of fact that poor leaders create poor working environments. Therefore, you should find out managers in your organization who often bully their inferiors, never praise them or lay the blame on other people. Such a leader will create a stifling environment, driving away talent. Hence it’s a must to identify those “hobgoblins” and apply strict disciplines towards them to retain talent.
When talent leaves their organization, this often leads to heavy losses. Therefore, instead of moaning about their quitting, managers should immediately apply practical HR policies to retain them. Just consider this: no one wants to leave a professional working environment with satisfactory salary and many chances for promotion!
