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Article from Human Resources, Hong Kong, August 2000
Employee Retention
Creating the ideal job to retain key talent
Everyone possesses “embedded life interests” – the challenge for organisations is discovering what these are and how best to act on them in order to keep key employees from leaving
One of the key challenges for organisations in the new economy, particularly for the incumbent human resources director, is to introduce creative ideas to help retain key talent. Finding talent, as it is, is already tough enough – keeping them has turned out to be even tougher.
Microsoft, in the US (if not the entire world), is facing such a problem. In its case, start-ups seem to be the main pulling factor, with key executives sacrificing large amounts of stock options to join companies that may not even survive their incubation stage. Absurd? Well, you’d better believe it’s happening.
So what can organisations do to prevent, or at least minimize, the exodus? From the career counsellor’s perspective, the following could be a solution.
First, know more about your employees – much more than they know themselves – and use this knowledge to create opportunities that allow them to be happy doing what they want to do most. Deep down inside each one of us lies what psychologists Timothy Butler and James Waldroop call “embedded life interests”, or ELI for short. Once we have uncovered the ELI for those individuals we want to retain, we can use this information to create and develop the desired careers of these key employees.
Why do seemingly happy employees leave their jobs? One of the most common assumptions bosses have is that performers (i.e., those who do well or excel in their jobs) are satisfied with their work. This might be true for some, but it is certainly not true for all.
My concept of the ideal job follows the ⅓ - ⅓ - ⅓ rule. According to this rule, one-third of your job should consist of activities you need to learn in order to do well, another third should consist of things that require you to stretch yourself somewhat, while the remaining third should consist of activities you can essentially do with your eyes shut. Your performing employee could well be employed in a job where all three parts fall under the “eyes shut” category. Now you know why that employee could still be on the resignation list.
What we are advocating here is that we need to help employees find their ideal job – a job that they would give an arm and a leg for to have and retain. In other words, one that encompasses their ELI.
How, then, can an organisation accomplish this? One sure way of how not to do it is to hand the task to the folks in HR. In some organisations, line managers merrily delegate such employee-related activities to their HR departments, when instead it is they themselves who must take ownership of these duties.
Most organisations have at least one performance appraisal session each year for individual employees. This is where bosses can be coached on how to pick up signals from their staff. Here is how one conversation could go:
Boss: “Hey Annie, the new business that you single-handedly brought in this June was just terrific.
We were able to exceed our revenue projection by 18 per cent because of it. Well done – keep up the good work!”
Annie: “Thanks, Mr. Li. You know what I really enjoyed was preparing and organizing the marketing and presentation materials.
I think we did an excellent job there.”
Rather than thanking Annie for her time and ending the conversation there, the boss in the above scenario should, if he had been listening, have extended his meeting with Annie to find out whether she actually derives greater job satisfaction from preparing presentations compared to the process of closing deals. Such a conversation might prevent another potential departure from the team in the near future, since Annie, although strong in sales and excellent at closing deals, may always have been more interested in the creative side of things. As a child, she excelled in art competitions and even helped her school win the top award for an inter-school poster design competition, for example. If her boss were to uncover these interests, or Annie’s ELI, he could then facilitate her transfer to the marketing promotions department, where she might continue to excel and contribute to the success of the organisations.
Recently, there has been much public debate in Singapore over the issue of scholarships and the breaking of bonds. Perhaps we need to look at the issue from another perspective. Maybe it is not the moral (or whatever you wish to call it) issue we should be focusing on. Individuals awarded scholarships could be motivated to stay on in their sponsoring organisations if they are given a say in their career development. Many times (and I am not saying this is the case with every sponsoring organisation) it is all pre-planned. Eighteen months here, 12 months there, and so on. Instead, what we should be focusing on, in all cases, is the ELI concept, as this is the key to understanding what makes people tick and how to attract and retain them for the long-term.
Paul Heng
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