Key highlights:
- Nairametrics interviewed Mr Michael Ogu, a HR expert, who shed light on some employee retention strategies companies are beginning to adopt.
- These strategies are a result of the mass resignation being faced in Nigeria and globally, mainly by tech talent.
- He recommends strategies like the co-creation of reward and recognition schemes, giving employees a voice, hybrid work, incentives, Internal Talent Transition programs (ITTP), and others.
HR professionals in recent times, have tried to identify the best employee retention strategy. This is because of the mass resignation witnessed globally, or the ‘Japa’ syndrome, notably in Nigeria, which has led to a high staff attrition rate, especially among tech talent to overseas locations.
As a result, HR leaders have been inundated with constant hiring, re-hiring and identifying best practices to retain talent to avoid operational gaps and achieve the bottom line.
In this interview with Nairametrics, we spoke with Mr Michael Ogu, an experienced HR Practitioner and Thought Leader. He is currently the Head of People & Organisational Practice of the Talent Optimization Company.
He discusses how HR leaders can adapt to the current realities in the labour force, which is the mass resignation of talent. He also shares insights and perspectives on the strategies that leading HR departments have begun to adopt, or should adopt to retain top talent in the face of these challenges.
Nairametrics: How have HR practitioners tried to rethink the HR value proposition? Is what they have strong enough to keep talents?
Mr Michael Ogu: The ‘Japa’ syndrome affects HR leaders, tech leaders, the health space, retail space and many other sectors. They are all feeling the effect of it.
Some of the strategies HR leaders have begun to do is to conduct stay interviews. Here they find out what will keep people in the organisation. Any talent who indicates they wish to migrate obviously cannot be stopped, so you need to know what will make them stay.
Another is to co-create a reward and recognition scheme. This is a strategy to retain talent so that they can rethink the terms.
A location flexibility clause has also been added to the employment contracts of employees. This means that if an employee wants to leave the country, they can remain an employee of the company when they settle in their new location.
Another is giving employees a voice. Every employee wants to feel important and be heard. We create a culture of psychological culture and safety for the employees.
Nairametrics: In terms of giving employees a voice. Can you unpack that?
Mr Michael Ogu: Giving employees a voice is rooted at the core of human-centred leadership. At the core of human-centred leadership are mutual trust, mutual respect, and creating a culture of wellness.
If organisations adopt a human-centric approach to managing talents, that is a retention strategy because human-centred leaders put their people first and ensure they create an enabling culture for people to thrive.
People want to believe that what they are doing connects to a greater good and greater cause, so they want to believe their employers have prioritised their welfare, well-being and everything that concerns them.
That is the core of human-centred leadership. And if the employees know that you have placed them at the core, what better retention strategy can there be than that to achieve organisational goals and objectives?
Nairametrics: How are HR leaders managing the gap created by tech talents when they leave an organization?
Mr Michael Ogu: One of the things organisations in the tech space have begun to do is to reclassify and redefine their talent pool.
In the last year, I’ve had multiple engagements as a consultant with some organisations, such as payment aggregators, tech application companies, and the like.
What I noticed that most CEOs are doing to deal with the mass exodus of tech talent is that they have started to redefine and redistribute their workload.
The second thing they do is bring non-tech employees into the talent stream by training and retaining them.
A lot of them have created what is called Internal Talent Transition programs (ITTP) where the tech knowledge is thrown open to people so that the organisation can train those who are willing to gain tech knowledge.
One of my clients had an all-female tech program which brought in a lot of women to the tech space. Today some of them are Product managers, UI/ UX designers, Android developers, front-end and backend developers, etc.
Another is job shadowing, but it has to be managed well due to the demands that come with it.
The fourth is to promote hybrid work because tech talent takes that quite seriously. After all, they need quiet places to code.
An organisation I consulted for, employed a special tech incentive so that for every project that is completed, the company pays 1% of the value of the project. It’s called a tech project completion allowance. This spurs a culture of high performance.
Employees who completed their projects received their tech project completion allowance. So these are some strategies that some corporations have deployed in the last few months to cope with the mass exodus of tech talents.
Nairametrics: In summary, what is the key thing that CEOs and business leaders must embrace
Mr Michael Ogu: CEOs need to embrace the fact that the world of work is changing. One of these is remote or hybrid work because the concept of the office has changed. Therefore, CEOs, HR leaders, and business leaders need to understand this.
Also, is a need to use a design thinking approach in the execution of any people-centred project. That means that the end user of the outcome of a project must make an input in the design of that project. What you don’t reward, you cannot sustain, so if we see our people coming up with exemplary behaviours, they need to be rewarded because when they are rewarded, they can be sustained.
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