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 the 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 majority of the talent within the organisation was safe from poaching by competitors due to high cost of acquisition in terms of sourcing and the long duration spent to hunt talent from outside.
Hiring of talent was also limited by cultural norms and constraints. Also many of the employees were content with their job and many times were simply unaware of the opportunities available for their talent and its value.
Employee stronger than employer
In the globalised flat world, the sheer volume of information has shifted the balance of power in favour of employees as opposed to 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 on 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 for the organisation due to changing business needs and able to deliver organisational expectations or the earlier blue eyed boy now failing to deliver what organisation expected from him. Of course there is a monitory aspect to it too.
The problems due to complaining employees is not a new phenomenon but in the internet era have assumed different dimensions and managing them have become more complex for HR managers.
The ability of disgruntled employee to do damage to organisation image is much more, not merely within four walls of the organisation, which is easier to handle, but beyond through the wired world using blogs, Facebook, twitter and others.
Any amount of assertions by HR managers about their talent retention and employee oriented strategy fails to cut much ice with existing talent, compared to relatively fewer negative messages but within targeted network by unhappy employees. Top talent still leaves for greener pastures
We realised that primary concern for majority of SL organisations is the fear of their top talent leaving them for greener pastures due to increasing global nature of the talent war and better compensation in most cases.
Hiring practices
This has been largely facilitated by hiring practices shifting from traditional newspaper to specialised job portals and lately to social networking sites thus easing job seekers looking for global opportunities. Second, the opportunity that exists in emerging technologies to start entrepreneurial activities with minimum seed capital also acts as a trigger for top talent to venture out.
Thirdly 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 same yard stick. Most SL organisations have failed to recognise the talent management issues as part of the 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 thru experience.