As soon as recognizing talented employees’ intention to leave the organization, managers immediately find ways to keep them by promising to provide attractive promotion and other tempting benefits… However, brain-drain still occurs in organizations. Fortunately, this chronic disease can be avoided with the remedy “Prevention is better than cure.”
What are the most common symptoms?
Before quitting job, employees tend to take annual leave regularly (to go to interviews), ask for promotion or salary raise (as their potential employer offers much higher pay) and make use of all benefits of the company…
It seems that they’ve found out a better place to advance their career and almost make up their mind to leave the organization. The manager can decode these symptoms easily and then apply these old strategies: probing for the reasons why these employees are dissatisfied, promising to provide them with promotion and other tempting benefits… However, those are only temporary solutions for the “brain-drain” disease.
How to prevent?
Most people don’t want to stay with the same company for a long time without any opportunities for promotion, learning new skills or developing their current knowledge. This is especially true to talented employees: they never want to miss any new opportunities to advance their career. Hence, leaders must definitely work out good solutions for the brain-drain disease in their organization.
Complicated tasks are often a source of inspiration to talented employees who consider them as interesting challenges to overcome. Role rotation will create more satisfaction that encourages the talent to fully develop their ability and achieve higher achievements. Why? Role rotation can improve the employees’ diversified knowledge and unleash their hidden talent.
Empowerment especially works very well for talented employees. By empowering your people to do their jobs and be fully responsible for them, you show your trust in their capability and create opportunities for them to prove their ability in fulfilling challenging tasks. This is the basis for a promotion, thus a source of inspiration for them to advance their career.
From time to time, the HR department should conduct surveys among staffs to improve the company’s policies. Good policies are considered as a useful tool to attract and retain talent. These surveys should be carried out by external service to ensure the confidentiality and encourage employees to speak out their own opinion. This clear and precise statistics is the reliable basis for your company to make appropriate and practical changes.
