The article won the first prize and was published at MBASkool for the HR Magazine of LBSIM and also by FMS Delhi’s HRegatta – HR magazine.
Introduction
One of the most valuable assets of any company are its employees. Retaining these employees and getting the best talent possible to join their organisation should be among the top priorities of human resource organisations. Talented employees can well serve as a competitive advantage for the companies and can be a major differentiator between competing companies. Mr. Narayan Murthy, ex-CEO Infosys, once famously quoted “Our assets walk out of the door each evening. We have to make sure that they come back the next morning.” We believe that not only should the employees come back the next morning but they should come back the next day, equally motivated and energised.
The three major challenges for Human Resource professionals in today’s time are –
- How do we retain the talent pool in our organisation and reduce attrition rates?
- How do we continuously engage our employees and make them feel a vital part of the company so that they feel they are come up with creative out of box solutions to problems?
- How do we continue to motivate employees to give their best performance every day, even when some of them are working on the same mundane tasks day in and out?
Retaining, Motivating and Engaging The Millennial Workforce
The aim of Human Resource Managers should be not only to retain employees but also to engage them and keep them highly motivated, so that each one of them works to their full potential. On time promotions and increasing salary based on growth of company are more of hygiene factors that are expected by employees and the company should look to providing these. But just focussing on increasing monetary compensation and benefits to reduce attrition is nothing but a mediocre strategy to tackle attrition – A strategy that is highly short term in its orientation, which would not yield any significant results in the long run.
Below have been outlined five steps that Human Resource Managers can take to tackle the problems that they are facing -
1. Focus on a Strong Performance Management System – Performance Management is not just about the final rating that is given to the employees at the end of the year. Project leaders and managers should look at the Performance Management System as a tool to groom employees, to understand their strengths and weaknesses, to identify the right training program for the employees and to continuously motivate them through feedback and rewards. In short the Performance Management System should be looked at as a career development and motivational tool and not just as a compensation system. One of the most important things to be kept in mind while designing a Performance Management System is to have a strong feedback mechanism to ensure that both the appraiser and appraise get relevant and timely feedback.
One of the ways to ensure that managers take performance management of their employees seriously is to link the attrition rate of the manager’s project team with his performance incentives. This means that if attrition rate of a manager’s team increases then the monetary benefits he receives decreases. Companies like Hindustan Unilever and Wipro have already started this practice.
2. Instil Creativity To Break From Monotonous Work – Most employees join companies with the thought that they will get to work on something path breaking. Employees who join marketing firms believe that now they would be creating branding strategies, integrated marketing campaigns, etc. Similarly employees joining IT companies are with a view of working on cutting edge technology, developing new programs and building next gen software. However Indian IT companies’ projects are highly skewed towards maintenance and support or testing projects. Working on these projects becomes monotonous after a point of time as employees do not find the work intellectually challenging. Hence organisations should focus on increasing creativity within the projects and Project leaders must motivate employees to look at creative ways of solving the same problem. Example – Can we design an automated script that will perform the test cases instead of manually performing them? Such creative solutions will not only continuously challenge employees and keep their skills updated, but will also help increase nonlinear revenue growths for companies.
3. Listen To Your Employees – While it is important to listen to the grievances of your employees. It is even more important to act quickly on the feedback collected from your employees. This shows that the organisation is actually interested in listening to you and the employee survey is not a farce. Organisations like Tata Consultancy Services through their employee survey PULSE, have listened to their employees and also catered to their problems. Example – TCS’s Bouquet Of Benefits which allows employees to design a part of their salary structure was a result of employee feedback received via PULSE.
Entrepreneurship lessons from Harishchandrachi Factory 
