Employee retention is one of the main challenges for any organization; you may call it employee turnover, you may call it attrition, or churn, it is a big challenge for organization to retain talent. When talented and experienced people quit organizations, it puts a big strain on the productivity by affecting organization’s bottom line. To solve the employee retention problem, you must first understand the challenges involved.

With young professionals getting increasingly restless the challenge is not only to retain them but also to identify the future leaders among this talent pool. For example,  L&T is facing the crisis of identifying  the next line of leaders. Recently, the company increased the retirement age for CMD from 65 years to 70 years and 62 to 67 years for the other directors. According to a former employee, earlier a person would reach the level of DGM and at the most AGM level at the time of retirement.

Recruitment is a business function that requires business objectives, perspective, expertise, and the ability to find the right match that fits the running position. The hiring manager makes the final decision on who gets hired, while the recruiter manages the process, laying the foundation for hiring the right people. Any organization’s HR role is to convince the prospect with diplomacy and marketing skills and align the recruitment procedure to benefit the organization for a longer period. During the recruitment process, it is hard to grab the ideal candidate’s attention because the good ones are getting multiple offers simultaneously, there is a shortage of wholly qualified candidates the ones who are ready to take on the job.

With social media doing the searching of candidates which is shared by many other organizations tracking the success rate of recruitment has become very difficult.  Organizations take time making a candidate go through multiple stages. Multiple stages of screening make it difficult for employers to close the position. Developing a data-driven mindset for hiring for various positions is a major challenge faced in talent acquisition.

Why 80,000 employees leave Infosys between January and March 2022? Top reason is salary. Infosys didn’t bother to provide enough salary hikes to its employees who started looking for opportunities elsewhere.  It led to the ‘Big Quit.’ The world today is experiencing the era of the ‘Big Quit’ or the ‘Great Resignation’. There are  organizations paying better salaries but are experiencing Big Quit.

Companies often struggle to retain talent due to various reasons. Common pitfalls include inadequate career development, lack of recognition, and not addressing work-life balance. Understanding and tackling these issues can help businesses keep their valuable employees.

Anand Mahindra advocated for liberal arts, stressed work quality over hours, by cheekily countering L&T chief’s 90-hour work week remark. Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra has once again captured attention with his thoughts on liberal arts education and work-life balance. Mahindra gives importance to a person’s work-life balance. Work-life balance is a key part of a healthy and productive work environment. An individual who achieves this balance successfully is ready to dedicate an equal amount of time to work-related tasks and personal matters without experiencing stress.

Speaking at an event, Mahindra passionately advocated for the importance of arts and culture in professional decision-making.  “Even if you’re an engineer or an MBA, you must study arts and culture,” he said, highlighting the role of a well-rounded education. “We support art and culture because I believe it helps make better decisions by engaging the whole brain.” Mahindra stressed that understanding arts and culture enhances decision-making. “If you’re not spending time at home, with friends, or reading, how will you bring the right inputs to your decisions?” he questioned.

Talent retention is the process of keeping your best employees from leaving. Companies need to have a strategy to retain their top talent, as losing talented employees can be costly and disruptive. One study identifies that career growth, workplace well-being, competition within the industry, globalisation and the new employment landscape are the challenges of talent retention. Employees often cite a lack of career growth opportunities as one of the main reasons for leaving their jobs. Besides, lack of work-life balance, feeling unappreciated, low pay, and lack of work culture fit are other reasons that contribute to attrition. The attrition rate is increasing even more due to unknown reasons in a post-pandemic world. 

The pandemic has made almost everyone travel back to their home / native places. And this has made the employees preferring the hybrid work culture. People like to stay home and work for a few hours. This helps them to balance their work-life time. Moreover, the hectic daily commute is saved on a large scale. So, the productivity level is retained, and many resources are saved. That’s why many employees are preferring the hybrid or remote work module, these days. 

Many people have found that flexible working hours are vital for ensuring work-life balance. Hence, instead of a fixed time, employees prefer to switch to flexible working hours. If the company is not allowing flexible hours, employees are preferring to switch the company rather. Another fact is, during the lockdown, many people found an alternative way to earn through their hobbies or skills. Social media platforms and online opportunities opened many doors of revenue for people around the world. And people are exploring many new entrepreneurship opportunities.

The COVID-19 pandemic brought on high levels of upheaval and introspection, causing people to re-examine their priorities. In a new Indeed survey of 1,005 people who voluntarily resigned from at least two jobs since March 2020, 92% said the pandemic made them feel life is too short to stay in a job they weren’t passionate about. 

People have become more aware of the social impacts and thus started working on social causes. Having migrated to their hometown, many people have found a way to earn through agriculture and have shifted their focus to agriculture. Hence, such people also prefer the work from the home module. 

Despite its financial success, Reliance Industries faces a persistent issue: high employee turnover. The biggest shortcoming employees face in Reliance is in areas such as work-life balance, career development, and work environment. While competitive salaries fail to retain talent, solutions lie in increasing employee engagement, empowering employees, and cultivating a positive culture. Reliance needs to address employee retention issues and secure a more loyal workforce. By focusing on employee well-being and career development, Reliance can maintain its position as a top employer while reaping the benefits of a stable and dedicated workforce.

Hindustan Unilever Ltd. (HUL) faced challenges in meeting changing employee expectations. As competition and demands increased, HUL fell from being the top dream employer. Younger employees expected quicker career growth and more flexible work arrangements than HUL’s traditional model provided. Another big reason for quitting multiple jobs among the younger generations is they want instant gratification, they expect a pat on back plus rise in salary, plus promotion all of this instantly.

Conclusion

Employers should ensure a happy work environment if they want to retain their employees.  This will help in creating client delight, sustaining the current projects, acquiring new clients, business growth and business expansion. Accept new norms, flexibility for all the employees, build a vision for all employees – visualise the growth path in the company, motivate employees to do better. Certainly, monetary benefits play a major role in retaining employees. But organisations surely can bring new cultures and vibrancy to the work environment to retain employees. 

 Our mind is always fed with thoughts. Thoughts are excitement, worries, unpleasantness, love, compassion, passion, fear, tension so on… in short, our mind is always cluttered. Mental clutter is something we all work on in our entire life. We constantly have some sort of mental clutter, something is always going on in our mind. Our mind does not something new to occupy it, our past or our future also keeps us busy. Some days are cool, better while some are worst. The natural tendency of the mind is to be restless and constantly think. The restless mind jumps from one thought to another, allowing thoughts to come and go relentlessly, from morning till night, giving us no rest for a moment. Do we invite thoughts? Not exactly, they just come, occupy our attention for a while, and then disappear, making place for others.

Thoughts are the like clouds. They wander through the sky. Like the clouds, they are not permanent. Due to their recurrent movement, they distract or attention and disturb our focus. Our thoughts also resemble the waves of the sea, which grow bigger during high tide and smaller during low tide. They are always in a state of motion, never standing still. Our mind is always thinking, analyzing, reviewing and strategizing whatever it contacts. It keeps analyzing and comparing present to past, keeps questioning, tries reasoning in short, our mind indulges in this nonstop activity. A positive mind gives strength to the body to perform positively and negative mind saturates our energies.

Meditation is a technique for resting the mind. While meditating, the mind is clear, relaxed, and inwardly focused. While you meditate, you are fully awake and alert, but your mind is not focused on what goes on around you, or on the external factors. While mediating your inner state is still and concentrates on one point, your mind is silent. And, when mind is silent it no longer distracts you, at this point meditation deepens.

Think about this. Everything we achieve in life is the result of our actions. Actions chosen by us are the result of our decisions. Our decisions come out of our thinking process and finally our thinking process entirely depends on quality of our mind. A peaceful, serene mind helps us take good decision and in a disturbed state of mind we tend to take wrong decisions.

From childhood, we are educated to observe and validate things in our external world. We are never thought to study things what goes on within us. We therefore ignore what goes on within us; we forget to verify within, look within, discover within. Therefore, while we get a feeling we have learnt everything, or that we are smart we remain strangers to ourselves, while trying to get to know others. This lack of self-understanding is one of the main reasons our relationships don’t work with others. We blame for anything and everything others. We don’t realize that the fault is within and it can be cured. Because we don’t look within we are confused and disappointed always in our life.

Do you know that with all our formal education very little of the mind is cultivated; the part of the mind that dreams and sleeps which is the vast territory of the unconscious which is the reservoir of all our experiences remains unknown and is undisciplined all our life because we are not aware of it? This vast reservoir is wasted by most of us and it is not controlled by us. When we start practicing meditation, we start developing and using the rest of our mind. We gain control over the totality of the mind.

Meditation is simple process: The process of mediation is very simple. I don’t know why the world fusses so much over it. To begin with, commit few minutes of yours – may be five minutes a day. Try to fix a time simply if you want the habit to stick. You can do it for ten minutes if you feel good about it, but all you are committing to is five minutes each day. With little bit of practice of few days it will create a trigger in you.

Find a quiet spot where you can sit just by yourself. The spot could be a corner in your home, your kitchen or your work station in your office. You don’t need to go out in search of it. It need not be a park or a beach or a place of worship to meditate. Don’t look for a soothing surrounding. The place really doesn’t matter, what matters is as long as you can sit without being bothered for a few minutes.

Sit comfortably. Do not fuss too much about how you sit or what you wear. Don’t waste your energies on deciding what you sit on. If you want to lean against the wall or need a pillow to relax your back – take it. You may sit on sofa or a chair.

Focus on your breath, observe it. See how you breathe in and breathe out. Feel the breath on your upper lip; check the rhythm, check the speed. As you breathe in, follow your breath in through your nostrils, then into your throat, then into your lungs and belly. Sit straight; keep your eyes open but focus on one point. If you would like to close your eyes, that’s fine. As you breathe out, follow your breath out back into the world. If you feel like, count your breaths: one – breathe in, two – breathe out, three – breathe in, and four- breathe out. When you get to 10, start over again. If you find your mind wandering and initially it will, just pay attention to your wandering mind.  Concentrate and bring it gently back to your breath. Repeat this process for the few minutes you meditate. It will become a regular habit in a matter of days. It’s that simple, repeat this process daily and I am sure, you will able to meditate easily. After few days you will be able to blank your mind easily and then look inwardly.

Don’t fight with your mind; let thoughts come and go. Don’t try to control it, just witness that the thoughts are coming and going. Whatsoever passes you simply take note of it without prejudice for or against. Don’t call it names; don’t feel guilty about not being able to control the process. Don’t think this is an ugly thought or this is a good thought. You should remain non-judgmental because the moment you judge, you lose meditation.

The goal of meditation is to go beyond the mind and experience our essential nature which is described as peace, happiness, and bliss. Anyone who has tried to meditate knows, the mind itself is the biggest obstacle standing between the self and this awareness. The mind is by nature unruly and unmanageable. And, it resists any attempts to discipline it or to guide it on a particular path. The mind has a mind of its own. That is why many people sit for meditation and experience only fantasies and illusions.

Try meditating daily at the same time and you will soon see that meditation becomes an inner hunger.