Applying Game Theory in Talent Retention

Applying Game Theory in Talent Retention “If you will fail to retain your Vibhishana’s (Character from Hindu Epic Ramayana; refer: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibhishana) because of your egocentric and supercilious approach; and if you will also fail to bring Krishna’s (One of the most popular deities in Hinduism; refer: - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krishna)onboard) onboard because of your ignorance, lack of understanding of required skill-sets & competencies and basic flaw in your recruitment and selection process, you will continue to lose the war on talent. Your loss will be gain for others and their win”.

Last 18-24 months were not so great for the business world across the globe. Many countries saw steep increase in percentage in unemployment rate. North America and Europe found itself in the midst of crises but even Asian markets couldn’t remain untouched. Even in this turbulent phase, where on one side tens of millions of jobs were curtailed and people became jobless, those few companies that were hopeful and farsighted were busy in retaining their key people - the core talent pool of their company at any cost; whereas many companies were prepared to start all over again, for them survival for the moment was the key. They knew that once those dark clouds would shred away, they could immediately start their forage into the market and begin to do what they are good at – profitability, increase in market share, growth and sustainability.

Do you know what the greatest loss is for any company? It’s not marginalized market share or shrinking margins of profitability or dipping share rates but losing its key people and talent. That loss becomes exponentially high when they lose their talent pool to competitors. It is this fear of losing talent that gives sleepless nights to many CEOs. Your ability to retain your talent pool could be the key difference between success and failure of your business; between survival and soaring profits; between being a developing and developed nation. It is not that those companies that retain their talent pool do not hit the rough patch, they do, but they recover fast and return to the stream that they belong to and stay ahead of others.

So, what is the key to talent retention? What do these companies do to retain their talent? How do they develop the talent pool in their organization? We will discuss these questions and many other related questions in this write-up.

Identifying Key Roles with Key Skills

First thing first, no company retains or even tries to retain all the people that it hires. That is absolutely absurd and unwanted. Its 20:80 ratio or in some industries it can be 30:70 ratio and can never be more. It also means that these 20-30% people of the company are those pillars on which the company actually stands. Further this ratio is passed on to each Department, Business Location and Business Unit of an Organization. How do you hire this people and on what consideration? You cannot hire family members, friends or relatives to occupy such a key position but rather a professional with a proven performance record. Remember that you do not create roles for people but rather hire people for roles. Also, you don’t bring in skills and competencies and then look for appropriate use of each of those but rather you identify the right skills and define the right set of competencies for a role and then bring in the right individual. Once you identify KEY role and positions for your Organization/Department/Business Location/ and Business Unit along with right SKILLS and COMPETENCIES then you hire and retain that person.

Retaining the Key Talent Pool of Your Organization

It is an irony of our advancement, growth and our ability to solve complex problems that we have forgotten our basics. Employee Retention is not as complicated and troublesome as we have made it. It is only that we are overlooking our basics. Having taken more than 500 Employee Exit Interviews in last 10 years, I have prepared a list of factors that were highlighted by them as their reasons to quit the organization. Unfortunately, employees don’t wish to list these issues and factors in their official Employee Exit Information Form as they are scared that it may hamper their Exit process and Future References.

1. Fairness - Irrespective of our geographic location, industry, growth stage and size of the company, let’s accept the fact that we differentiate and discriminate among our employees on the basis of our race, creed, religion, language, comfort level and emotional closeness. Consciously or unconsciously, we have been unfair to our people. All employees want fair treatment at workplace.

2. Feedback – At times, some employees came to me and said, “Sir, I am not getting any feedback of my work” or “I did something 6-7 months back and now my manager is saying that my work was not good enough and because of that I will not get an increment”. Employees want “honest” and “timely” feedback of their work. They are matured enough to understand that they can’t be excellent and perfect all the time and hence they also look for corrective measures, advices, suggestions and coaching from their reporting managers to improvise their performance.

3. Appreciation – There is an old saying, “Appreciate your employees publically and criticize them privately”; even now also it holds true. It doesn’t take much time to say, “Well Done; Good Job; Great Performance; your work was Incredible; Your Suggestions and inputs on this assignment were of great use and etc”. How much time does it take to say these words? But these can do wonders to motivate your employee and boost their confidence level.

4. Open and Timely Communication – Communication is a key for employee retention. Honest and timely communication can do big wonders in setting-up integrity, credibility and trustworthiness in work relations. On the contrary, if you lie in your communication; do not keep your words and promises and delay communication then there are chances that your employees will not trust you and leave the organization at an appropriate time.

5. Trust – Trust at workplace is a two way process. You give trust and you get trust. You trust your employees and they will trust you. It plays an important role to increase team cohesiveness and bonding. It fetches your respect and credibility. But, if you say that you don’t trust your employees and you want to police them then they too will not trust you and will be suspicious about everything that you may say or do and this will not work well for any of you.

6. Career Growth Plans and Career Advancement – Everybody wants to grow in their life, both professionally as well as personally. Therefore, if you are providing growth and career advancement opportunities to your employees than there are chances that your employees will not leave the organization but rather be committed to stay there for a longer term. Employees like to see what lies ahead of them and also how they can reach there.

7. Opportunities to Learn, Get Trained in New Skills and Development – We are living in a very dynamic world where technologies and business permutations and combinations changes and gets upgraded every other quarter (in not month). New technologies get introduced and older ones become obsolete. Employees of an organization also want to keep-up with the pace, learn new skills, upgrade existing ones and grow within the organization. They look forward to training opportunities and sponsorship from the company. Some companies are spending millions and billions of dollars in their training and development programs for their employees and whereas many others are not even willing to spend a single penny. People are likely to leave those organizations that do not take care of their development and look for those that can.

8. Freedom of Expression – At workplace, you do not communicate your ideas, strategies or policies rather you sell them. Your team-members and subordinates may not agree with everything that you may say and they may like to discuss and debate about it. They may question you and seek your clarifications. You may be required to prepare a sales pitch and may also be forced to rework on it. This should not be seen as rebelliousness, defiance, or insubordination but rather as an opportunity to buy the confidence and dedication of your team. Employees should not be threatened of dire consequences for questioning your idea or policy. (It took President Barack Obama more than 12 months to SELL his healthcare plan to the Congress).

9. Clarity in Performance Goals, Performance Measurement Criteria’s and Associated Rewards – Time after Annual Appraisal is the time when many employees leave their organizations and look for other opportunities. The main reason for this is that employees are not satisfied with their appraisal. Many times, employees came to me and said that they don’t know what has been measured and how; there was no clarity, neither in performance goals nor in criteria’s for performance measurement or associated rewards. This has been one of the key concerns in many organizations. Performance Reviews and Appraisals are seen as one of the annual (or bi-annual) exercise and not as an opportunity to figure out performance concerns, benchmark best performances and associated competencies, and list out ways to improvise the performances through coaching or mentoring.

10. Competent and Knowledgeable Reporting Manager – This may be one of the concerns in small or mid-size or family organizations where key positions are given to those who are either family members of the management or has close relations with the management rather than skills and competencies. In large organizations, one can move up only if they have required amount of experience, expertise and competencies. However, it is a common observation that many Team Managers or Department Heads lack the People Management and Leadership Skills and need to be trained and coached for the same.

In addition to the points discussed above, companies are expected to extend more comfort, give more freedom and provide highly challenging roles to their Senior Level Key Employees to ensure their retention. As mentioned in one of my previous discussions (Ref.: http://www.sanjeevhimachali.com/?tag=managing-senior-employees), your senior and experienced employees are not looking for more industry experiences or technical expertise; they have already gained that. They are also not looking for very huge salary hikes but something to match with their experience and expertise. At the stage where these senior people are, they look for challenges that can test their knowledge, experience and expertise. Challenges that are associated with:

1. Mergers, amalgamations, acquisitions, take-over’s, increase in market-share, increase in revenue, venturing into new market, introducing new product line and consolidating the market position excites them

2. Creating something new (new company, new market, new product or service line) or initiating /executing changes are few other things that excites them.

They like to get involved in strategic decision making process and power, along with accountability and responsibility, to manage day-to-day functionality and operations of their department or SBU or profit/cost center is other factor that these senior managers look for. They do not want to be spoon-fed and certainly don’t like to be micro-managed. Developing the Performance Culture You may not only be interested in retaining your talent pool but also like to promote the culture of performance and improvise the productivity and in turn the brand value of the organization. Here are a few suggestions to accelerate that culture.

1) Get rid of those Sycophants – Human nature is such that we always like to be wooed away and flattered. We like to listen to good things about us. We feel nice when someone appreciates our belongings or things that we do. If you like this then it’s a common-sense that your bosses and reporting managers also like this, particularly new boss and new managers. There is nothing wrong in this attitude but that is not what you must be doing at workplace and that is certainly not what you are paid for. Get rid of those sycophants. They are using sycophancy as a tool to cover-up their incompetence and non-performance. Your new tie is good and your new laptop is excellent and very advanced and also your son is looking so cute in that picture but we are not here for that. I didn’t wake-up this morning at 5 AM to flatter you in the office.

2) Uniform execution of policies, rules and procedures – I am a big advocate of uniform execution of policies across the company. In my experience, I have noticed that, in general, employees don’t hate policies or discipline in the organization; they hate it when those policies, rules and procedures are not uniformly executed. You use one scale for A and another for B. For the same offence you punish one person differently from another person. Exemption to the rule or procedure must be on the basis of performance and achievement rather than your proximity, comfort-level and emotional closeness to certain set of people. Another thing is that you make policies and then you make exemptions, you don’t make your exemptions as policies.

3) Chase-away those bullies - The main and the foremost purpose of bullying are to hide inadequacy, incompetence and inefficiency. Bullying has nothing to do with managing etc; good managers manage and bad managers’ bully. Management is managing; bullying is not managing. Therefore, anyone who chooses to bully is admitting their inadequacy and incompetency, and the extent to which a person bullies is a measure of their inadequacy. Chase-away those bullies or they will chase-away your talented, dedicated and intellectual high-performers.

Conclusion

Points that we have covered and discussed here are very crucial and helpful in retaining your talent-pool. We have not discussed about salaries and compensations because we have noticed that not many people leave the organization for higher packages (we assume that you won’t be paying peanuts to your employees but rather a competitive set of compensation and benefits). Cost of losing one employee is much more than the total amount of salary paid to him and if you happen to lose your key employees to your competitor then you cannot even imagine the actual lose caused to you. We welcome your comments and feedback because that’s been very crucial for us. Feel free to contact us for any clarification or professional assistance. Have a great day and take good care of yourself.

Composed by: Sanjeev Himachali
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjeevhimachali
Emails: sanjeev.himachali@gmail.com; ss_himachali@yahoo.com
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