It is stimulating that society fosters demands for people who work well and excel professionally. It’s also good to “change airs” and bring new perspectives on work and life. Having possibilities to choose, frees us from the idea of being a hostage to a company, with no alternatives; the diversity of paths is an opportunity for better personal accomplishment.
Gaining new experiences can often be the cause of the departure of good employees, those almost “indispensable”. Faced with offers from the competition, the company must fine-tune its retention plan, to be more attractive than outside alternatives.
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In most Indian companies, there seems to be clear stinginess to remunerate properly those who are actually worthy and do exceptional work. There is a propensity to act as bureaucrats, “same level, same pay”, without rewarding the exceptions, to give them due value.
When a company offers a high remuneration – as perhaps it wants to create a new department and needs people with experience – trying to match the offer could imply distorting the remuneration policy. It is probably time to start paying a lot better to some key personnel, maybe by other means, as with additional compensation in Company shares.
There seems to be a general attitude in India of exploiting talent rather than valuing and trying to retain it! Once remuneration is taken into consideration, one can ask, what moves talents, the productive people and creativity? Probably they are also moved by the:
1. Meaning of the task performed, for oneself and, above all, for the recipients and the society at large; 2. Content of work, the intrinsic richness of what is done and how much one learns; 3. Teamwork with Challenges to overcome routine, to innovate, and help team-members grow; 4. Autonomy at work, with responsibility and adequate performance measures; 5. Feedback, to let know the results. These aspects should be considered.
In particular, in ‘social companies’, such as the Aravind Eye Care System (Aravind Eye Care System, Case of AESE-Business School, Lisbon, 2004.) or Grameen Bank (The Grameen Bank. Credit as a Human Right’, Case of AESE-Business School, Lisbon. Received the Entrepreneurship Prize, 2010, of the “Case Clearing House”, London), there is a sense of deep solidarity that prevents people, with years of professional practice, leaving the company just for remuneration or the office environment.
At Aravind, only 40% of patients pay their bills; the other 60% do not pay or have huge discounts, as they are very poor. Still, the whole company has benefits, because of high efficiency in the operating processes. At Grameen Bank, the microcredits do not need any guarantee, as used in commercial banks; poor people have no collaterals and their word is what matters!
People are learning from life. Many have felt human suffering pass very close by, with the pandemic.
Values and cohesiveness
The values in organisations are palpable and permeate personal actions. They result from the convictions and practices of the top manager or the founder of the institution, decanted over time. They are part of the intangible heritage, passing to new generations, with a need to remember the essentials of them. Often this is done in the form of anecdotes, narrated again and again, that happened with the founders, conveying the company’s driving ideas (as at Tata Group, at Hewlett-Packard, at Southwest Airlines, at Aravind, etc).
Values strengthen mutual trust, cohesion, and unity of the company. This is the secret of long-lived companies, which overcome crises and show an upward trajectory. Perhaps it is because loyalty in both directions leads to be more creative, with new ideas at service of the organisation.
Everyone in the company must be focused to learn, to suggest, to try new ideas. An experimentation environment is tolerant to mistakes. Of the many new ideas, part will not be viable. In good companies, there is a concern to learn from mistakes, from failed projects too.
Need for feedback
Everyone needs feedback. It gives opportunity to think, adjust and improve. It can also be a stimulus for further training. It should be an indication simple to understand. It is a sign of trust.
At a certain point, it is important to increase productivity, eliminate errors and defects, for reducing costs.
There are institutions putting ‘exclusive’ settings, such as gyms, swimming pools, cafeterias, with the possibility that on weekends can take family members, to give them an image of prestige. This gives a certain pride of belonging. Nevertheless, they do not have a decisive impact as the meaning or purpose of the work.
Clearly, there is concern on talent retention, now that new technologies related to digitalization are widely applicable. May it be in AI-Artificial Intelligence, in ML- Machine learning, in IoT- Internet of things, in Robotics, etc., as it becomes more urgent with several variants of Covid-19 to foster the “work from home”, supported by those technologies.
All big firms and multinationals want to prepare themselves, looking for high-quality specialists, without restrictions on the remuneration side. This has a clear impact on Indian Companies, where many specialists are.
Maybe the best response can be to stress the human side, centring the attention on the person: to his values and the meaning of work for him and for the client; with attention to the need to learn, in order to deliver the best. Of course, his compensation and the ambiance of the workplace matter, too.
(The author is professor at AESE-Business School (Lisbon) and author of
The Rise of India.)
