. (Image credit: via @daylife)
Of all challenges facing today’s employers, one stands out: Find and acquire talent. And for a good reason: talented employees are in limited supply, and very much in demand.
That’s why recruiting these employees can be quite costly, especially for smaller employers who lack the resources of larger employers.
If talent is hard to find, shouldn’t employers do everything they can to retain it and provide the right conditions for career development?
In theory the answer is yes.
In practice, things may turn out otherwise. Employers are anxious to hire talented employees, but sometimes reluctant to commit sufficient resources to retain them.
That’s where the paradox is.
Take the accounting and finance industry, for instance, where employee turnover is high, according to a recent industry survey. The primary reason? Lack of career development programs. Sometimes, the problem isn’t lack of career development programs per se, but the gap between expectations (promises) and reality (actual support).
According to a Harvard Business Review study, on a scale of 1-5 (5 being the most important) young managers assigned a value of 4 to mentoring and coaching. But they valued the service they received from their employers slightly below 3.
The expectation gap was even greater in training, where the assigned value was close to 4.5, while the actual value was slightly above 3.
That could certainly explain why these young managers were looking for jobs elsewhere. Seventy-five percent sent out resumes or contacted recruiters to move to other companies. Ninety five percent engaged in networking activities, and eventually left their companies 28 months after they were hired.
So why do companies fail to accommodate the expectations of their talented employees? Because they are reluctant to spend time and money that may end up subsidizing their own competition.
Mentoring and coaching require a great deal of time, for both the mentor and the apprentice. Formal training is costly and requires paid time off work for the employees involved.
Then too, there’s doubt about its effectiveness. “Employers are understandably reluctant to make big investments in workers who might not stay long,” according to the same report. “But this creates a vicious circle: Companies won’t train workers because they might leave, and worker leave because they don’t get training.”
That’s the heart of the dilemma.
Obviously, the problem is lack of trust between the two sides. As a reader put it in a previous piece: “If the company does not trust its employee (and the employees see and can feel that) and would not bet on him, why should the employee do otherwise? I think this is where the core of the problem is.”
The solution?
Employers should focus more on recruitment practices to make sure that they hire employees committed to the causes of the organization. As another reader put it, “a good way to start solving this dilemma is for companies to focus more on their hiring practices in order to attract candidates who will stick around.”
Most notably, employers should create a workplace where trust is fostered rather than suppressed, as argued by Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones in the May 2003 Harvard Business Review. “In a nutshell, it’s a company where individual differences are nurtured; information is not suppressed or spun; the company adds value to employees, rather than merely extracting it from them; the organization stands for something meaningful; the work itself is intrinsically rewarding; and there are no stupid rules.”
The bottom line:Talented employees do not usually search for an employer who pay a fat check. Rather, they look for an employer who will provide a meaningful job and a platform for career development. Companies must either provide such a workplace environment to meet employee expectations or appeal constantly to the market to replenish them.
