Employee retention strategy in the technology segment

TP Sharafudheen

The increasing failure in employee retention has caused much worry to many technology companies in the region as the impact of turnover of employees remains a chronic problem for managers and HR leaders.

The cost to replace an employee ranges from 50 percent to 150 percent of that person’s annual salary. Just with higher compensation or typical employee engagement, companies cannot retain their employees after they have spent huge investments in hiring and training processes.

It emerges that even during the pandemic or in the post-pandemic period, the majority of the employees haven’t thought of long-lasting, sustainable employment in their given roles or companies. The high employment available regions like Dubai market are an example to understand this scenario. According to recruitment and HR industry executives, a large number of employees in the country will switch jobs in 2022. It seems that few companies can fulfill the employment dream of a person. A huge 56 percent of professionals have stated that they intend to change their jobs in the next 12 months even during the crisis time.

For companies it is better to find out a system-driven solution to address the situation. Ideally, it is better to have only 50 percent dependency on employees’ presence inside the companies, and the other 50 percent dependency can be on the system. Average employee turnover should be kept up to 20 percentage.

However, while high staff turnover is not necessarily a bad thing the low turnover is not necessarily a good thing. It helps the organisation in many ways to improve the talent asset, broaden the organisation’s competency perspectives, prevent workplace politics and complacency, and to maintain healthy manpower costs and incentive allocations.

There are three generations in the present workplaces. According to the studies, the people born between 1964 and 1985 are called Generation X. They are more risk-takers. They can afford any serious changes in the workplace even if they are any abrupt changes. You can see these people with 15-plus years of experience.

The critical category is Generation Y. They believe in the so-called professionalism. According to various surveys, they will be 75 percent in the workplaces by 2025. They will be the largest chunk of categories in any organisation. They have faced two critical problems during their career time. The first nightmare for them is the memories of the recession in the first decade of the new millennium and now the pandemic. In a way, they are a badly affected generation. Due to this they have become almost skeptical.

No employment engagement policies can make them confident and it is hard to retain them in an organisation.

The third generation is called Z, who is born after 1995. They are rational in their thought process. They keep low-level emotional drive in the planning and acceptance. But they are truthful and do stand for strong causes. They have already entered the workplaces.

It is better to deploy process automation and customer relationship data-driven managing systems to compensate employee risks to overcome the challenges of attrition and employee turnover.

The nature of most technology companies in the Middle East is sales-oriented rather than design, develop and processing. They don’t have options other than depending on process automation and CRM systems to avoid the prevailing issues of high attrition.

Employee engagement programmes, training, motivation, incentive and bonus as a standard compensation tool towards the employee compensation may not help as a remarkable strategy for retention.

The Middle East-based technology brands, distribution companies, system integrators, resellers and the other stakeholders in the value chins should ponder on ways to avoid the disappointment of higher employee turnover.

Hence, make a proactive plan for your HR policy to ensure the attrition level is 20 percent to attract fresh thoughts in your organisation, reduce workplace politics, and control employee costs.

Give more focus on learnability, adaptability and combination of emotion-professionalism- rationality during hiring. Segregate the right people and best people separately and engage them according to your HR strategies and dream. The right team will take ownership of their role much better than the best people. But you cannot manage the organisation without the best-talented people in good proportion.