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HR FOCUS
Retain and Gain: Making your Superstars Stay in the Company Rajiv Misra R Square Consulting
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s an MSME owner, you would have faced the challenge of recruiting, high performing and high potential employees for the organization. Since your company may not be well known or your brand may not be powerful enough; to attract key talent that would prefer working for better known brands. Even if you are able to attract and hire such team members, you are unable to retain them for long due to a number of reasons. As a result, most MSME owners go back to the tried and tested formula of hiring average employees who would stay with the company for long. The cost of having these average employees is paid by the owner / founder in terms of his time, effort and slow growth in business as most critical jobs have to be done / supervised very closely by him. As an owner of Medium and Small Establishments, you must have gone through numerous cycles of attracting – settling – motivating good performers; only to find them fly away for greener pastures. As a reaction, some of you may have resorted to hiring only the average, who will give you the (false) sense of stability! But then you feel stifled that the organization is not moving forward as you wished. So there is a dilemma in your mind on what is the best course of action. So how can you as the MSME Owner/ Founder retain high performing and high potential employees? The first step is to understand what such employees want. In a pool of prospective employees “high-performing,
MARCH 2021
high-potential” candidates are not more than 10-15% of the total population. Due to this, they are in high demand and they know their value. Although, research on the subject lists out between 7 to 10 reasons why such employees stay in a company, let us focus on the two important ones that are critical to Retention. Interestingly, these two can be easily provided by the MSME Owner/Founder. Their Oxygen The first factor is that such employees are used to succeeding in tough situations and they thrive in these situations. They are constantly looking for a challenge and get bored and leave in case these challenging tasks are not given to them. As the owner/founder, you need to create these opportunities which challenge these high potential employees. Sense of Achievement The second reason is they seek autonomy in completing the task/challenge. What they are looking for from the Owner/Founder is the broad outcome/ level of achievement that is expected from them and then be left alone to figure out how to complete the task with the given resources and time. That
way they own the challenge and feel extremely proud on achieving desired outcomes. As explained above, if in the past, the Owner/Founder has employed only average employees, there is a constant requirement of detailed instructions as well as monitoring at each step. Such employees are dependent on the Owner/Founder to make decisions. Imagine if you put star performers in such a work environment, the result is disillusionment and disengagement of such an employee and his exit is only days away. Great achievements have only been possible where boundaries were relentlessly pushed. It requires a change in mind set to for a MSME owner to manage and retain high performers. Are you willing to let go of the way you have been working till now and take the risk of letting a high potential employee do things which only you have been doing till now? Are you willing to be a coach and mentor to self-driven employees so that they are constantly challenged and perform at a high level of effectiveness? As they say, what got you here, will not take you there!
