Developing Retention Strategy

Retention must be approached strategically to achieve measurable, sustainable, and long-term impact for your organization.

In order to develop an effective retention strategy, start with the following four steps:

1. Understand your company’s strategy
Determine what sort and type of talent should be retained.

2. Collect employee demographic data
Analyze your workforce in terms of age and career stages (for example, early career, mid-career, late career), gender, management level, etc. List any reasons why the employee accepted a position in your company from the beginning.

3. Analyze your attrition rate
Investigate the attrition rate over several years by distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary, internal and external, and dysfunctional (of high performers) and functional (of low performers) turnover. Apply the fishbone diagram or other tools to solve complex problems.

4. Conduct stay interviews

The keys to a successful retention strategy involve knowing:
• What works within the parameters of your company’s culture,
• What works for your employees, and
• What employees value about your company and their work.

Bad Vibes through Seating Arrangements

Leaving aside interview techniques, a pure seating arrangement can influence the status and power dynamics of a job interview.

Location of chairs and their height (from the floor level) can create an atmosphere of seriousness, partnership, or compassion. Besides, the chair size and its accessories may also have impact on the mood.

Typically, an interviewer and interviewee sit directly opposite one another as on the attached picture.

In this seating arrangement, the most power is exerted and a defensive and competitive atmosphere prevails. In addition, the table becomes a solid barrier between both parties.

Therefore, the competitive position almost implies that the parties are meeting to work out why they should not enter an employer-employee relationship. At the same time, the idea of a shared vision and moving together in the same direction is pushed into the background. Without a doubt, this position does not foster understanding and does not put an interviewee at ease when speaking with the interviewer. In addition, conversations tend to be significantly shorter in this position.

The competitive position can be quite detrimental to recruitment practices.

Tell me the Future

HR and Finance represent two different kinds of expertise to help the CEO grow the business.

So, for the two to work collaboratively, both should have equal weight and influence. For this reason, Liz Ryan suggests that professionals in the top HR spot should receive the same compensation as the CFO. After all, “Why would a company hesitate to pay its top people officer just what its top money officer is earning? Beats me -- unless the company doesn't value its people as much as it says it does.” Ryan writes.

Interestingly, according to Michael Page’s Salary Survey for 2007/2008, a CFO at an established company receives an annual salary of HK$ 1.5 - 3 million+ whereas the HR Director at a large company earns HK$ 1.4 million+.



This discrepancy demonstrates that:
• Firms are more interested in past harvest (apples) than in future earnings potential (apple tree roots),
• Firms value Finance’s oversight role on how and where dollars are spent more than HR’s role in talent management,
• Firms appreciate building a fiscally sound company (Finance) more than an organizationally sound company (HR),
• Finance departments are incapable of applying financial thinking to an area where value is largely intangible (HR) and therefore do not support a significant investment in the people officer position,
• HR departments are incapable of addressing the value that they create in financial terms and therefore cannot change its image of cost centers.

Yet, for both areas, there is a long way to go to be strategically significant; for HR to be able to create intangibles and for Finance to be able to grasp them in a future-oriented Intellectual Capital Balance Sheet.

Stay Interviews (Part II)

Following up on my earlier post on the role of stay interviews, a question emerged on Xing’s “Human Resources in China” forum as to the difference between the stay interview and the suggestion box.

What the stay interview and the suggestion box have in common is that both tools seek out opinions of a company’s workforce during the actual employment phase and not after and toward the very end of an employment period as an exit interview does. Furthermore, both tools also require an action plan for implementing findings or suggestions to be effective.

As to the differences, the suggestion box is definitely a more efficient way to receive employee feedback since it does not require as many resources of both the interviewee (time and productivity costs) and interviewer (e.g. consultancy fees).

Most importantly however, the stay interview and the suggestion box differ in terms of their underlining objective. The suggestion box is not specifically a HR tool and is an outlet open for comments about business, business processes, customer relationships, etc. But, the stay interview is an individual-centric HR tool; it is about the employee’s well-being, development, and their perception of the employer.

Notably, suggestions can also be requested in a stay interview (What would you do differently here?) but rather in respect to the way the company manages its people than the business as a whole. After all, asking employees to provide suggestions engages them in solving organizational problems and helps to generates support for change initiatives.

Magic in Your Workplace

March 8th is International Women’s Day. This day brings about awareness of women’s issues, recognizes achievements, and encourages leadership. Women business owners, leaders, community role models, mothers, and wives are commemorated and celebrated while pinpointing diversity, work-life balance, and glass ceiling concerns; still very dominant in the business world.

In fact, only 16 percent of all senior executives in Fortune 500 companies are held by women. Worst still, research shows that top women leaders feel like outsiders in their organizations.

But, women leaders in general excel at overtaking the responsibility for workforce performance. They strive to establish bonds with their workforce, develop genuine interest and understanding toward their staff, manage by sending signals about what is valued, and what is appropriate, etc.

On a personal note, one word connects two remarkable women I met this year. Both, Ruth Ang, Managing Director of TBWA\ and Alexandra Hynes, Co-Owner and CEO of Salzer Consulting place magic in the centre of their leadership approach. They motivate by creating magic, believe that they can achieve results through magic, and seek out magic as the highest performance level.

So, when was the last time you experienced magic in your workplace?