The Need to Retain Talented Employees Increases Every Day

In a workplace where the war for talent is making it tough to find good workers and where key skills getting more scarce, the need to retain your most talented individuals by treating people well, increases every day.

It is far shrewder and more economical to work at keeping your top employees than to let them go and spend money on recruiting and training new people who are going to take a while to get up to speed. Losing esteemed colleagues can also have an impact on the rest of the team, department and business. Other workers may well feel demoralised if they see the best talent being let go too easily.

Look at the wider, demographic picture and you'll see it presents another reason to hold on to your best. With baby boomers nearing the end of their careers, they're leaving a big skills gap that's hard to fill. Skills such as science, mathematics and engineering are predicted to be particularly sparse in the coming years. If you already have individuals who are in the prime of their working lives and who have these skills covered, do not underestimate how important it is to retain these employees.

Retention of crucial talent is so key to the continued growth and success of your business that it is well worth investing the time and effort into ensuring these individuals are happy to stay put and develop within the company instead of looking elsewhere for professional opportunities. Your best employees enhance the company in several different ways-by ensuring customer satisfaction, maintaining balance and productivity within the workplace, and driving product development and innovation onwards and upwards.

Retaining employees-even ones that seem engaged and dedicated to the organisation--requires a sensible and sensitive approach to the way that people work. Giving colleagues a sense of the direction of travel that they and the team overall are taking, plus consistent and regular communications about what needs doing as well as how they are doing in terms of their feedback are fundamentals to keeping your best and most involved workers. A lack of feedback in particular can lead to an employee feeling lost and directionless. It's vital that workers are given an idea of what they're doing right and wrong, so they can feel in control of their own improvement, development and destiny.

Tune in to every individual on a regular basis. This does not have to be formalised and structured as part of the standard appraisal process. This is much more about day to day management and supervision. People leave supervisors and managers rather than leaving organisations. The management and supervision of your top achievers must be as high quality as the achievers themselves if it is to meet their needs. As a line manager, do not underestimate your role in holding onto your best workers. Employees will stay or go because of you, not in spite of you. Avoid over-measuring --whilst it is important to measure outputs and performance, over-measurement can be a real irritant to high-performing individuals and may reduce their level of desire to keep doing what they do.

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Generations Gaps: A Great Source of Learning

What an opportunity exists if we can understand and innovate around this subject! In the 21^st century, we tend to laud youth; its beauty, its energies, its technical knowhow and how much the young seem to know, relatively, to previous generations at the same age. The way that they have grown up with their technology, and how central it is to their life, whether academic or for fun, is awesome. There are many effects.  Not least is young people’s ability to be so connected and supportive with another.

Within the same society that praises that generation, we must not deny the wisdom of experience. Earlier simple communities and societies show us the importance of wisdom and age to the smooth running of those societal/organisational models. And therein lays the opportunity for us to learn to build across these different generational gaps.

There is one issue that you can predict would come up if you were to ask a young person about what they believe is the most fundamental issue for them in any inter-relationship with another human being regardless of generation. That issue is respect. The implication is that one needs to be listened to and understood and that one’s opinion has equal value; whatever your age. So if you now imagine a pie chart or a cake with equal-sized slices that come from different ages and different generations within a working environment that is rapidly rising to within a 50 year age range from youngest to oldest, you have  to assume that every member believes they have equal value. They do as an individual and as a worker. Of course the value is different for each; as unique as each person is the skills, knowledge and capability that they bring is unique also. Also, each individual is likely to be differently valued in terms of their positional power and the amount that the organisation pays them for their labour. Notwithstanding the realities of the organisation’s and team’s work, the fundamental point of individual value should not be lost in seeking the source of great learning across generations.

Another concept which will damage this endeavour is speed, or pace. Younger people have always been in a tearing hurry but generation Y and younger generations believe even more so it is their right to ‘have it now’ and there is an impatience for waiting for anything. Those of older generations might be considered and have a mindset of ‘we need to take our time’ or ‘I wouldn’t if I were you’. Recognizing the different paces at which people are thinking and doing is important to any aspiration to learn across the generations. We’ve always known that the learning style that suits us is not always that which suits other people. So what works best for me needs to be tempered by ‘but it may not work for you’ and indeed, recognition of the earlier point of listening and understanding that giving people the right space and the right tempo and the right mode of learning are all important to opening up the real opportunities for learning.

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Are We Ready for an Older Workforce?

Up until the middle of the last century, when a worker retired the expectation was that they would not live for long. Sadly, but in a minority of cases, that circumstance is still true. What is much more normal though is that employees will have a longer period of life when they finish work. In 2011, those born in 1946 will be 65 years old. They are the oldest of the cohort called babyboomers and many of them will be retiring. Considering the average UK life expectancy is now is nearly 80 years, we can expect this demographic to be in retirement for around a decade and a half. One of our country’s biggest challenges in society is how to fund pensions, healthcare and social security for an increasing proportion of people over the age of 60 or 65 relative to the people who are working in the population.

One of the Government’s answers to this conundrum has been to phase out the default retirement age (DRA), giving older workers the option of working longer. Organisations will no longer have the right legally to end the employment of their older workers. This relieves some of the pressure on the state and also economically benefits the employee. The individual can retain earning their income and taking benefits from their employer, although these benefits are likely to change over time and there is the opportunity to continue contributing to their pension fund, if they are in one, and benefit from any tax efficient opportunities that may also exist in the future. By not drawing their state pension, these people can take advantage of drawing it later and at an enhanced rate.

If employers are smart about how they use more mature employees and allow these individuals the flexibility they need to carry on working, it will also ease the strain on our medical services. For instance, the smartest organisations will allow their older employees to work from home as well as in their normal office space, thus reducing the amount of commuting, which increasingly takes its toll on both mind and body as we get older. The individual thus expends less energy and is able to stay in work more easily. Being able to continue working in a way that is better aligned to our health, mentally, psychologically and emotionally, should see a reduction in the amount of need by this part of the working population for GPs and subsequent specialist health services.

Another advantage to allowing older workers to work for longer is that public and private organisations alike continue to benefit from these individuals’ skills—skills such as maths and engineering that are worryingly a dying art amongst younger generations. Some well-known international companies have struggled to find graduates in particular disciplines who meet the exacting standards that they require. However, people can’t work forever so what are we going to do about the skill shortages when the babyboomers finally do retire?

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Respecting Your Elders

For the last decade, and following a wakeup call from Mckinsey’s Report, organisations have placed a strong emphasis on the war for talent. There has inevitably been significant attention paid to younger workers, looking at how to hire in the best talent, building training and development opportunities, incentives and how best to mould, shape, develop and hold on to future leaders. Making sure that the talent pool continues to be resourced is a key challenge. However, in focusing on the young, have we been neglecting our older workers? Is the baby-boomer generation being forgotten?

When Position Ignition was first created, we wanted to bring our holistic approach to careers to the market. We had created a far reaching and powerful process for individuals to use at key points of transition in their lives and their careers. We thought hard about which market segment to focus our attention onto first; in which areas could we bring the biggest impact and affect the most value. No-one was really watching those in their late 40s and 50s, even though there is a growing need to harness the experience and wisdom that these individuals have. It is also such a significant stage in our lives with each of us being faced with a range of complex challenges.

The demographic wave that has been talked about for a long time is now upon us. The Baby Boomer generation (born between 1946 and 1964) starts reaching 65 years this year. Increasing numbers of people are “retiring” relative to the working population and more people are living for longer. This is an unsustainable set of issues for a country to manage without changes in public policy.  Last year, the government announced that the default retirement age was being removed. People can now retire whenever they chose. 

We can work for longer, live for longer and look forward to healthier, longer retirements. We can continue to build our pensions, if we choose to, and we have second lives or second careers ahead of us. However, how clear are we about how to do this?

Do people know what they want, when they wish to leave work, what they want to do or even what they can do? From an organisational perspective, do we want to keep all of these people working? Will they continue to be as productive as before? The answers are generally - probably not, which is why we need to think about how to help workers move forwards and also why organisations have decided to work with Position Ignition.  

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The Rising Cost of Senior Workers

Why do senior workers cost more? Why indeed do older workers cost more? We have grown up for generations believing that just by staying still we would receive more money as our employer applied inflation linked amounts or increments to our salary each year. Since performance pay first came into the equation 40 or so years ago, in some environments this has changed the way individuals think about salary and indeed their expectations of it. In other words, you expect to get paid for performance, not purely paid just for turning up.

In a macro sense the business model for organisations continues to drive for greater efficiency and/or profit and levels of service for the same cost. Increasingly a new model for organisations will be to pay for value rather than for service. Why, for example, in a technology or IT environment, would an employer pay an older worker significantly more than a younger worker who can probably do the work more effectively – in terms of their newer skills and adaptability?

This scenario fits well for the futurists, who believe that employees will be switching their jobs more regularly in future. Organisations will require a higher proportion of flexible labour within the business at any time and individuals, therefore, will be on more flexible contracts.

The impact of all of that will be that there will be a market rate that each individual employee will carry at any moment in their career. The way to enhance your value will be partly to be smart with the work you undertake and also with the drive that you have in enhancing your personal growth; by not only working but also by learning. For example, if you’ve been working as a project manager and you are likely to do more project management, undertaking PRINCE2 training to get that qualification enhances your value.

The rising costs of senior workers will increasingly become less of an issue as organisations restructure, as individuals understand the implications of more flexible workers and where the employers increasingly pay for value and not for the years of service that an employee has given them.

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