Monday, September 10, 2007

ERA conference- Aligning recruitment to retention-the take away

Its a little late in the day to summarise-some of my pals called me up and sought an update, especially since they thought I had harped on the ERA conference for almost a month !!

Let me try and make it short.
1. Attendance of 450+ delegates.
2. A well chiseled out program schedule.
3. Execution of the program, confined to the allotted time. No time overrun.
We had some impressive presentations by the speakers. For those interested , here is the link to the detailed presentations.

As a delegate, some of the take aways, I wish to remember from each of the speakers -are as below:

Mr Moorthy Uppaluri of Microsoft -in his key note address, used the Porter's model to provoke the audience to conciously think of an "Employee Value Proposition" as the career anchor-to address the retention issue. Needless to say-it is a great challenge-considering that different people have different expectations from their career!

Dr Susanta Misra of Motorola then delved into the analytical mode-by getting into the first principles- by brealing down the attrition rates to the age of the employee within an organisation. I would surely recommend that all refer his presentation-as he described differential treatment to be given to 'infant mortality', and 'early exits' than for those in the system for more than 3yrs..where he prescribed job rotation as a prevention mechanism.

We then had a flurry of presentations from Mr Ajit Isaac of Adecco People one, Mr Oussama Mansour evangelising the need for psychometric testing, and a panel discussion -consisting of leaders from 4 different industries - Mr Thyagarajan of Maytas, Mr Venugopal of Reliance Retail, Mr Shravan Kumar from Ocimum Bioscience and Mr Roy Gilbert of Google- all elaborating on the changing needs and demands of the talent pool they individually are responsible for. Mr Muralidharan of TMI -the moderator, had come prepared with 7 different case studies which were to have been analysed by the panel-but for want of time, we had to settle for a steamy interaction -from the two operationally driven sections of the audience!!

Mr Michael Sweeny of UBS had flown in from Hong Kong to make his presentation-and I particulary liked his hypothesis -"emotional drivers such as one's relationship with one's manager and the pride in one's work have four times greater impact on the discretionary work effort than the rational drivers such as pay and benefits have "!!
I guess it all boils down to creating an outstanding ecosystem where great works gets done. That in itself -would be a great magnet to attract the best- and ensure they remain !! As a HR person, we do sure have a long way to ensure the right ambience....

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The number one reason employees will stay or leave their current job is the relationship they have with their direct manager. This is confirmed for all levels of an organization and is without a doubt the number one retention factor to be addressed head on. Employee Engagement starts with enhancing the communication between each level of the organization starting at the C - Level and going on down, level by level resulting in increased employee retention, productivity and job satisfaction for all.