Talent has been recognized as one of the biggest challenges faced by the HR professionals especially the HR leaders. While there was a time when mere screening, recruiting and onboarding was considered as sufficient, these days with the workforce especially Millennials have become more demanding.
And with the demands that they make, the HR leaders were compelled to revisit the HR leadership skills and come up with strategies that would not only attract the new talent but would also help in retaining them. Again acquiring new talent was not a challenge; the challenge was to retain them. And this was just one of the challenges, there were other challenges like – how to positively engage employees, how to keep them motivated?
But as HR leaders found out that all these challenges were related to the primary challenge of talent retention. So now the issue was how to retain the talent that has been newly acquired along with the talent that has already been in the organization. The leaders also found that there was a staunch need for leadership development programs at the managerial levels, if they wanted to retain the talent.
With this a need was felt for the both strong leadership development programs along with talent retention strategies that would have helped in ensuring that a talented workforce retained within an organization. So here are three key talent retention strategies that HR leaders should develop in order to retain the talents.
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- Renew your focus on Learning systems and training programs: The workforce today, especially Millennials, are more focused on what they can learn from their managers and organization. They are the workforce who thrive on open door policies, new learning challenges and need constant feedback on their performances. Millennials are not satisfied with just coming to the workplace, do their job and go back home. They need more challenging roles in an organization, they want to learn new technology that would enhance their work skills and also would help the organization in return. So, the HR leaders if you want to retain this workforce you would need to renew your learning systems.
- Employee Well-being: While ‘Employee Wellness’ was the buzzword till last few years, HR leaders found out that Wellness was not covering all that was needed by an employee. And hence the term well-being – a broader yet specific term was introduced. Well-being covered all the aspects of an employee wellness including – all the financial worries that made employee shift his focus from work to the investments. With that taken care of, organizations found that there was a significant surge in the talent retention.
- Being at the helm of digital age: Technology has been advancing and if HR leaders wanted to retain and train the new talent. Then they would have to be at the helm of the digital age. In simple words the HR leaders should be able to interpret the data rather than just provide it to the employees. The entire impact of this on talent retention is that new workforce is technology driven and once managers understand the technology they develop a personalized experience with an employee thus retaining the employee.
