Employee Retention

Can employees be made to stay by stringent rules? Or can peanuts as compensation induce people to work and be productive? Fine I think I’m going overboard, but it cannot be denied that strict adherence to grating rules has become the norm of the day in several companies, but about peanuts, I’ve realised that as human beings we’ll never be completely satisfied with anything! Well, I’ve seen that there are companies where the compensation structure is way below the widely accepted scale but more often than not our salaries do match the industry standards or the actual effort that we put in! I know there are always exceptions to every case and there will be a lot in this too but salaries are not what I have in mind right now.
From what I’ve seen, I’ve realised that not all organisations have a foolproof plan when it comes to making their employees stay around for long. After all employees are any company’s fundamental asset but how many organisations actually manage to have them till retirement? Okay, nowadays no one plans to grow old with the organisation they had begun their career with, but statistics prove that proportionately only a handful even cross the five-year mark. With growing global competition almost every organisation today has revised its new compensation structures to entice the best of the talent pool. However not all manage to keep them for long. At the end of the day all of them fall short someway or another, creating quite a drain of talented, experienced personnel, incurring huge losses. So what could be the reason why this seems to be on the rise? When the outsourcing boom hit India I remember the frenzied recruitment initiatives that scoured the length and breadth of the country. BPOs made people feel that only the best would be selected and yes it did seem that way till after about a year or two later when the retention issues started to surface. Employee retention and ways to curtail outflow became quite a common topic for discussion. With experts lending their advice, organisations did start paying more attention to keeping their employees happy. But were they successful? I think a handful were but in country that holds the pride of place amongst the outsourcing nations, Indian organisations, interestingly not even one of them feature in the top 50 of employee friendly companies in the world.
It is a basic truth that happy employees make more productive organisations and stay put longer. But what will make an employee happy? Is it compensation, work-life balance, organisational culture, employee morale and the steps companies take to boosting that or more leniency? Well, a lot of factors go into keeping an employee happy, the crux is to find the right balance and ensure that the organisation sticks to those resolutions. There are certainly a million ways in which an organisation can keep its staff engaged and interested. Empowering employees is definitely one of them. But how many of them actually take pains to practice it? Boredom has become a fairly common sentiment amongst most employees today. Yes, career gurus are quick to point out that if you’re following your dreams and doing what you love and actually want to do, you can never feel bored and insignificant at work. But even a layman would agree that sometimes it is not only doing what you love but also how you are made to feel at the place where you do what you love that can be a defining factor in your future at and with that organisation.
There certainly is no dearth of ideas when it comes to making employees feel wanted, respected and making them stay around longer, but what remains to be seen is how many organisations actually implement them.