Deals under fire
Posted By
Ksenia Zheltoukhova
05 April 2011
Employers would be wrong to assume that once they have found and recruited talented workers, the deal is sealed and set in stone. Soon after the contract is signed, employees will test the promises made to attract them to the job. To engage and retain highly skilled individuals, organisations need to understand what would keep the deal going if some of their expectations are not met.
Over the past two years, the Future of HR programme at The Work Foundation has explored how individuals achieve, sustain and negotiate the balance of their psychological contracts. This morning’s ( 5 April 2011) partner event ‘Re-balancing the deal: Engaging and retaining employees’ focused on the last stage of that process, emphasising that employers have to act early to avoid or repair broken deals.
Jane Sullivan and Wilson Wong at The Work Foundation highlighted the fragility of employment deals in turbulent times of change. Presented with multiple internal and external opportunities, employees are challenging their current deals by asking ‘what is in it for me?’. Employers may find it difficult to maintain engagement levels while unstable organisational contexts put employees’ deals in flux.
Recognising how individuals make sense of their place within the organisation will provide solutions for managing employees’ intentions to quit. To sustain changing deals employers have to see the employment relationship from an individual perspective. For a particular employee the deal could rely on personal meaning found in the job, team identity, trust in the line manager or be a more transactional relationship.
David Blackburn’s work on increasing employee engagement at Shepherd’s Bush Housing Association illustrates the importance of focusing on the individual in the employment relationship. David asked employees what would make the organisation ‘the best place to work’ for them to implement their values into a successful retention strategy. One example of his approach to engagement is strengthening employee affiliation with the brand.
Taking into account individual perspectives means that although people will dislike changes in their deal, they will be more able to understand why it is happening and stay loyal to their employer. Line managers are key actors in identifying employees’ needs and meeting their expectations; it is therefore essential to equip managers with tools (such as the deal framework) to address individual deals and form honest, trusting relationships.
Finally, Steven Bevan shared insight on the individual and organisational factors that contribute to employee turnover. Highly skilled workers are a visible asset and may be attracted to better opportunities elsewhere. Pay and benefits often become the tactical currency of retaining such employees in the short run; however, a strategic approach is needed to respond to the risk of losing talented employees.
When dealing with individuals with high bargaining power, the challenge for employers is not only to attract talent, but also to keep employees motivated and forebearing. Such strategies should build on appropriate training, job design and career opportunities.
To retain talented employees, organisations will have to recognise and meet their expectations from the very start of the employment relationship, before they strike a better deal with someone else. Individual perspective and values may depend, for example, on employees’ age, career or life stage. The next research programme from the Future of HR will aim to add a generational dimension to the deal framework.
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