There are two valid points of view on the issue of talent retention, the company’s point of view and the point of view of the talent itself, but even so, both converge on one conclusion: retaining talent costs less than hiring new staff!
Have you ever stopped to think about the cost for a company when it comes to retaining its best employees? It is quite high! When a company decides to hire someone, it needs to think well about the profile it is looking for, think about how it is going to find this profile, put someone or an external company in search of this person, make a careful selection on the various candidates, interview those who seem to best fit the defined specifications, make a proposal to the chosen candidate after the interview and selection rounds, put someone or an external company in charge of drawing up that employee’s contract and all this and the employee hasn’t even joined the company yet. But we’re not done here yet, as there is still the cost of training and integration.
But now the best phase begins. The phase in which that employee can already add value to the company, not only the return on the financial value of the projects where he will be integrated, but also the knowledge that he will be able to bring to the company and help it expand. And finally, we cannot forget that all new projects, products and integration of new employees have a break-even point. For those who are not familiar with this term, I will give a brief explanation, the break-even point is the turning point in which the revenues have fully covered the investment costs, the point in which a project, product or even the employee will start to bring profit. Think this is just the company’s point of view? Make no mistake. Of course, there will be those people who simply seek the adrenaline rush of constantly changing challenges. But I believe that this will not be the majority and that although there are those who like to change challenges if they feel they can do so within the same company, if this company knows how to maintain the motivation level of this worker, he will realize the advantage of staying in the same company for a long period and will bring immense stability to both parties. When I talk about maintaining motivation, I am not only talking in financial terms. Certainly, this will be a slice of the decision that will have a lot of weight, but to keep an employee motivated it will be necessary to meet his expectations. These can obviously be financial expectations, not only in terms of salary, but also incentives for achievable goals. Besides these expectations, which are common to most, there are also expectations of recognition, both internal and external, professional growth, professional training in areas of interest to the employee, a good professional environment, managers who understand the importance of balancing the professional and personal life of the employee, activities to generate links between different employees and company management.
When companies realise that providing some (or even all) of these “perks” to their employees is an investment that prevents other types of high costs such as hiring new staff, we will have a healthy balance between people and companies. We will have satisfied collaborators that will put the hat on and will want to help the company to evolve, we will have more stable companies and people.
At Nowday, we can rejoice that we have many of these retention systems in place and we can guarantee that we have satisfied employees who want to continue helping the company grow!
