The Three ‘E’ Theory of Employee Retention: Empower, Engage, Entrust

The Three ‘E’ Theory of Employee Retention: Empower, Engage, Entrust

Setting up a business is much easier, but managing it successfully is a bigger challenge. And the main essence of having a successful business is the quality of your workforce—in case the manpower is good, skilled and most importantly ambitious enough to accept more and newer challenges, the onus is on the employer to retain them. However that is easier said than done. In other words, manpower retention or more precisely good quality manpower retention is a big challenge for the relatively smaller businesses, especially our system integrators.

The extreme question is why employees leave an organization and why an employer fails to retain? However, every organization tries its level best to hire employees and gives them opportunities to gain another level and look forward.

We can’t deny the fact that employees nowadays are well aware and are much more connected to sources and in turn fully conscious of what they want. So, they are like migratory birds, today on one branch and tomorrow flying away to another.

Perfection, that what’s every organization aims for, both for itself and also for employees. May be it can become a truth in reel life, but it’s not true in real life. Every institution has some flaws and individuals have to deal with it making certain adjustments. That helps the person to grow, but this individual growth can never happen unless your goals are aligned properly with the organizational goals.

According to the HR people, there is no elixir to retain people at work. An organization invests their time, money, training and sessions, but in many cases one doesn’t know what’s going in an employees mind.

Poaching Menace a Big Fish

In the opinion of Kailash Gupta, Director at ETSC Computers of Jaipur the biggest challenges in retaining people are poaching by peer Channel partners; Distributors and Vendors. “While it takes a lot of efforts to train the fresh people; it takes just a hefty salary hike for Distributors and Vendors to take away the trained manpower,” he laments.

“In this process; Channel is always unstable as far as experienced manpower is concerned; which is very important for stability and growth of channel organizations. Moreover; such poachings also result in customer losses due to relationship enjoyed by concerned people,” he adds.

So poaching is another big issue, with increasing cost of labor and talent and growing inflation; it becomes important that we retain an employee who is getting his skill sets improved over the past association with an organization. That often means empowering an employee by assigning him/her more responsibilities.

Harinder Salwan of Tricom Multimedia  agrees, “we have to ensure that the employee is rewarded with not only monetary benefits but also assigned more responsibility in the organization so that he is motivated to stay and continue to extend his services to the organization. So this would lead to additional cost and lower bottom line for the organization.”

Sanjay Singhania (Left)

New age thinking is another problem for employers, Sanjay
Singhania of Sheeltron Digital System has a point, he says “The new way of thinking is continuous jumping of jobs and changing it frequently. While, so called HR gurus have been teaching the new kids the same has been proved wrong. If you feel you can contribute to an organization and make it grow then better be there and grow with the organization.” It is a bigger challenge for an organization when they invest on employees and train them and they get ready to leave.

Suresh Ramani of TechGyan deals in cloud solutions in Mumbai, and for him employee retention is the major problem for his firm.     He feels, “In our case, we are a Cloud focused SP. So the skills we need are not available in the market. We are therefore forced to take fresh people and train them.  We invest a lot of time in training fresh graduates in Cloud. But since we are a Cloud brand by itself, our people get picked by other Companies who want ready made material. This remains our big challenge.”

Cloud Evangelist Sunny Sharma of Foetron stated that building a good team is the biggest challenge. In his opinion, “Young people do get distracted by the ecosystem, aspirations and inability to look at long term benefits wherein experience people come with a lot of baggage. The amount of unlearning required in the present scenarios takes its own sweet time.”

Economic improvements ironically often cause more problems in employee retention. System Integrator Shantanu Som in Kolkata of Somnetics tells of two scenarios.

There are some employees who restrict their learning acumen and don’t want to grow their knowledge and ability. These employees, who are not interested in self-development, quickly become a challenge in long term retention. And it often becomes imperative and easier for the companies to ask them to leave.

However, the real challenge is when talented freshers get trained or skilled by an SME, they are potential targets of larger organizations and often get poached. Bigger enterprises offer them a better salary, status and job glamour, which allure them. By far this one of most serious challenge we have been facing.

Another System Integrator Satish Chaudhary of Techniche is also dealing with the same problem as others, “The biggest challenge has been to retain people from migrating to other regions for better prospects.”

On the contrary, there are some business persons who are tackling it way easier than other firms; may be it is because of their special strategies. FortunePC owner in Mumbai Kshitij Kotak has a very different opinion, “Retaining people was never a challenge for us. Barring 2009 global meltdown, we have had no significant retention problems over 24 years of our existence. I firmly believe that if you have a vision, can make your team part of that vision and can encourage them to work towards your mission; you can keep them with you. Yes, we pay well too. But that has never been the reason for people leaving us.”

Some effective methods employers utilize in order to keep employees happy and part of their organization are as follows.

• Training
• Mentoring
• Use communication to build credibility
• Instill a positive culture
• Showing appreciation via compensation and benefits
• Encourage referrals and recruit from within
• Coaching/feedback
• Provide growth opportunities
• Foster trust and confidence in senior leaders
• Make employees feel valued
• Lower stress from overworking and create work/life balance

Initiatives have the power

Here taking a note of what Kotak stated is a big achievement for his firm and we really appreciate it. Others business mavens have also taken some measures to curb the problems. And they were there to share the initiatives undertaken.

Kotak shares his secret, “First and foremost, our people are NOT EMPLOYEES, they are colleagues. We treat them like colleagues. Senior colleagues, junior colleagues: colleagues - not employees. And that is a big difference.”

Its certainly true, employees do want to feel welcome, “Secondly, we are compassionate. Since 1997 we have not had compulsory office reporting system. Now we have compulsory 'Work from Home' day/s every week. In Mumbai, a person spends 2 hours to travel from home to office- 4 hours everyday in sweltering heat, dust, packed trains or endless traffic snarls roads. Working from home, our colleagues work better, more responsibly and for longer hours. They are more focused and less tired; they are comfortable. They know we care so they become even more sincere. We also have flexible time schedule - a part of our team starts work at 8:30 am and another at 11:30. This also benefits us with extended support timing for customers.”

Like every company with people friendly work culture, at Kotak’s company show their colleagues a specific career path, a vision, a mission. When they join they know exactly what is expected of them, how they are going to achieve it and in how much time. What career lays ahead of them is an important aspect and they see themselves making a difference both to themselves and to the world around them. They want to stay.

He then added “We help them certify, work on newer technologies, explore new ideas and convince seniors to look at those ideas and viability. We have a learning and sharing day every 2 weeks when everyone sits together. We want people to grow beyond our company too and we are proud when we say that our last employee to leave us has ​joined​ TCS ​with the blessings of entire team.

​ ​Kailash Gupta also thinks alike, “The only way to hold people back is to make them part of profits of company and a suitable incentive structure needs to be in place so that they are not carried away only due to monetary gains. They have to be well taken care of and a friendly environment to be maintained.” He explained.

“At the same time; instead of hiring Engineering graduates and MBA graduates; its better if we can focus on science graduates, ITIs, Diplomas and train them to our requirements . They have high aptitude for learning and have better stability than Engineering and MBAs.” he added.

HR Retention Strategies Matters

Suresh Ramani stated that only tool is the learning culture where constant focus is on learning new stuff. “Learning remains an attraction for some staff who knows that once they move out, while they will get paid better, they will stop learning new stuff. There is no end to paying higher because there are Companies who pay obscene amount to get our people.”

Opportunities for growth, in your organization can be among the most effective means of remaining competitive in a tough recruitment market.

Shantanu Som explains his companies initiative, “At Somnetics, we have undertaken four prime initiatives from the company’s end: Offering handsome compensation, providing better learning and development opportunities, putting the employees into challenging situations so that they can learn new things, and finally the freedom to work. We take this as a package so that the overall satisfaction remains high.”

Apart from these, Somnetics have an enterprise wise recognition program like “Kudos” and “Hats Off” which are meant to acknowledge exceptional performance in the workplace. Besides all above, senior and very talented people extremely are offered the stock option.

Harinder Salwan also thinks that, work culture building is of extreme help in retaining people. “We as stated have retained employees by providing a work culture which is rewarding their performance and recognizing their achievements. We also help them achieve their dream goals by moving them up in the organization and or even outside the organization if there are opportunities that would benefit the organizational goals too.”

Satish Chaudhary said, “Techniche believes in the importance of collaboration for the success of any organization. Team building activities are undertaken through constant meetings and interactions, thereby establishing a connection with the employees. They are also sent for training to constantly upgrade their skills and improve their performance. This helps them to move into the next phase of their current job profile and further strengthening their financial position.”

Sunny Sharma Company Foetron has 3 way approach of Training, Office engagement and Assigning Mentors from Industry

Singhania of Sheeltron Digital System feels the same, “We have started creating entrepreneurs within the organization and have made them partners instead of employees; if they are hard working and smart and sales personnel with fire in their bellies they end up creating their own support team. And this approach seems to be working.

Conclusion

In the ultimate analysis, the magic formula for retaining people seems to be three-fold. A good compensation obviously remains the top draw. However most sensible employees are attracted when they are entrusted with more responsibilities and treated as one who can actually make a difference to the organization. And thirdly if the responsibilities and functions assigned can help the employees draw up a clear career roadmap for himself/herself. In addition, a compassionate attitude and a lending a helping hand to sort out problems also goes a long way to help these employees.