Of all the challenges businesses are faced with, one of the most difficult is rewarding and retaining key employees in a way that’s simple, uncomplicated, cuts through the red tape and lets the company stay in control. Channel Post spoke to industry experts in the Middle East region to find out their strategies in retaining and rewarding performing employees.
Key employee retention is critical to the long term health and success of your business. Managers readily agree that retaining your best employees ensures customer satisfaction, product sales, satisfied coworkers and reporting staff, effective succession planning, and organizational knowledge and learning.
Hiring the right talent
“Recruitment is a very crucial area for Help AG as we employ only highly skilled individuals who are committed to growing within an organization that is willing to invest in their professional development,” explains Stephan Berner, Managing Director at Help AG. “This is why, at Help AG the selection process is long and tedious. Oftentimes we bring people over from abroad when we struggle to find someone locally available but at the end I think it pays off because not only we are known for the highest caliber of professionals, but also have an extremely high employee retention rate. Since our inception in 2004 we only “lost” a couple of people till date, not many local companies can say the same thing. In fact, this isn’t typical for the UAE/GCC at all.”
Shishir Jha, the Head of Human Resource at Jumbo Group, says, that the recent recession was a great teacher. According to him, post-recession, the HR focus has now shifted from downsizing or right-sizing to rebuilding it. “However, the slow pace of recovery and flat growth in many sectors have brought most HR professionals to this difficult realization that our strategies, particularly the longer term ones, must consider business cycles and economic trends. Talent acquisition is just one function – the recession forced us to relook at the way we manage performance, productivity management, succession planning and employee cost.”
Jha further adds that Jumbo hired around 260 employees in 2011 across the Jumbo Group, 270 in 2012, and the company further plans to close this year with around 350 new employees. “A key change in the recruitment strategy included the use of digital and cost effective social media platforms, resulting in 62% of people being hired through this medium. We were conscious of the fact that 33% of MENA professionals in the region feel that the internet is aiding employment in their countries and additionally the internet is the most effective source for fresh graduates seeking employment,” adds Jha.
Many companies seem to have changed their HR strategies post recession. “Post-recession companies are very selective about their hiring and keen on hiring the best talent. Companies are also strategic, tackling short-term priorities than the long term future plans thereby buying time to get to a more stabilized economy,” adds Rekha Singh Chauhan, the Vice President of HR and Administration at Comguard. “As the Middle East region is talent driven, we look at various sources of hiring the right talent. Other than using the regular search engines and conventional recruitment consultants, we even source candidates from LinkedIn, Facebook, employee referral, and other social and professional networking sites.”
Retaining the talent
According to industry experts, the three main reasons why employees leave an organisation are:
- Employees leave for other jobs if they are not rewarded well for their work, do not have adequate advancement opportunities or are not using their skills to the maximum potential.
- Incompetent, incompatible or insensitive supervisors cause of job departures by mismanaging staff.
- Employees leave jobs because of incompatible work hours, heavy workloads or harsh company policies.
Whatever the reason may be, employers should make sure that their organisation is taking steps to be as amicable as possible with employees. Once you have an idea about why people leave, it’s important to actually take action to address the issues if possible. A good way to start is by concentrating on the feedback from your staff. Knowing what makes them dissatisfied will be essential to come up with ways to make them more content. Taking positive steps in response to criticism will boost morale and is also good for employee motivation.
“Despite the diverse nature of our Group which provides ample opportunity for varied exposure and opportunities for growth to employees, it has been our stated philosophy to develop and groom talent both from within and outside,” adds Jha. “This duality has helped us grow at the pace we have and is a more attractive strategy for us to retain and groom our talent than having to rely on outside sources. Retention is a key focus area and we deploy a three-pronged approach to address that. These form the pillars of our Talent Management & Engagement System.”
According to Jha, constant growth opportunities, job enrichment/cross-business exposure, differential reward mechanism enables his company to retain its key talent. “Whilst we pride ourselves on providing a great work environment which is open and transparent, a culture of entrepreneurship and learning, we have institutionalized practices to support these. We have a formal process to assess and recognize potential and a training platform which provides the necessary developmental inputs. A strong variable pay plan, customized business incentive programs, group level rewards and recognition scheme, and more, provide incentive for achievement. We firmly believe that our engagement programs play an important role in the retention efforts,” explains Jha.
While employee retention matters, organizational issues such as training time and investment, lost knowledge, insecure coworkers and a costly candidate search aside, failing to retain a key employee is costly. Various estimates suggest that losing a middle manager costs an organization up to 100 percent of his salary. The loss of a senior executive is even more costly.
“Before we hire a candidate, we analyze the job requirement and check if the current resources are able to perform the job or not. The need to hire an outside resource, costs involved, revenue or profit the role would generate, skillset required in hiring the right talent, and analyzing the various sources from where we can hire the right talent, are some of the things we do,” adds Ms. Rekha. “However, once we do hire a candidate, we build a plan for the employee’s career growth. Due reward and recognition of work is one of the key factors of retaining the key performers. Cash and kind incentives are given to the employees as an R&R initiative. Guiding the employee to move ahead in his career and help him develop professionally is also one of the key initiatives. This is also done by internal job movements, continuous training and education plan.”
Understanding what engages employees can help during all phases of the employment cycle—from recruitment to training to performance assessment and beyond. It’s also much easier to retain employees who are engaged and committed to your company’s success.
“We make sure to provide transparency and involve our team members not only in their daily tasks also from the bigger picture. We also make it a point to remind our employees how good we are as an organization,” adds Berner. “We support this by sharing the numbers, the budgets, the company strategy and make sure everybody understands where, why, we are heading and how we reach the business objectives. We believe in development that’s why we have personal development plans twice a year in place. This makes sure to get the right input and align the employee interest with our business objective.”
As Berner truly says, people need to be motivated and encouraged, too. This, according to Berner is done through empowerment and giving responsibilities to each and every member of the team. “Another important aspect is the identification of the team member with the company. Hence, we have bi-monthly social activities outside the office which is as important as spending time within the office itself,” adds Berner.
Employee rewards and retention is something that needs continued focus. It is not an area which a company can setup processes for and forget. In order to retain staff, as the external jobs market evolves, it is important for employers to recognise their place in the jobs market and continue to evolve in response to employee feedback.
