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. 

The business world needs to cope with the rapidly changing sustainability landscape while balancing their financial performance and growing costs of energy and raw materials. The sustainability performance question spans diversely with academic disciplines such as human resource management, marketing, economics, accounting, tourism, operations, law, governance, supply chain and many more. Although handling a fusion of these diverse disciplines is a tough job, yet, being realistic is most important for survival of the planet.

For many of us, the meaning of sustainability remains elusive. Some equate it to environmental wellbeing while others think of sustainability as equivalent to corporate social responsibility. Let us understand this: business sustainability refers to the ability of firms to respond to their short term as well as long term performance needs without compromising on their future growth that requires the natural and human resources available in the external environment. One more fact is that the balancing of economic, social, and ecology is fragile in nature. Therefore, sustainability encompasses voluntary corporate strategies geared towards an integration of environmental, social, and economic objectives into the fabric of the organisational life (Quinn & Dalton, 2009). Let’s look at some brilliant examples of how companies are innovating.

The world’s largest shipping companies such as DHL, UPS & FedEx need to bear tons of maintenance fees for the maintenance of their vehicles, as well as the costs of oil and gasoline to keep them running. As an alternative to that, and also to cut through busy and crowded streets, each of the companies has been innovated various new delivery methods. DHL has set up couriers on bicycles in nine European countries so far, including its most recent entry in a few German cities. The company replaced 33 trucks with 33 cargo bikes in the Netherlands, which DHL estimates saves them $575,000 annually and reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 152 metric tons per year. The company knew customers were asking for a “cleaner transport alternative” to the gas-guzzling trucks, and the bikes as part of clean environment solution. The efforts of DHL are highly appreciable for it aims to utilize bicycle couriers in the next few years anywhere in the world to improve their customer service and effectiveness.

Cargo bikes are also taking various forms for FedEx and UPS — each of course with the company’s standard logos and colour schemes. FedEx began piloting electric tricycles in Paris as early as 2010, and UPS expanded its use of electric Cargo Cruisers since 2012 in several European cities. Other businesses like Whole Foods and Ikea are also experimenting with delivery through bicycles.

LanzaTech is a clean-tech company that’s revolutionizing the way the world thinks about carbon waste. The company uses a bacterium for its fermentation, Clostridium autoethanogenum, which eats carbon monoxide and emits ethanol without using water or land resources. The company treats carbon as an opportunity instead of a liability. LanzaTech’s proprietary microbes capture and recycle waste gases before they are emitted as greenhouse gases, reducing harmful nitrous and sulphur oxides by over 85%. Essentially, they’re turning air into something of value. The company estimates it can apply its process to 65% of the world’s steel mills, with the potential to make 30 billion gallons of ethanol, or 19% of today’s current jet fuel demand. Kudos to this company!!!

Google’s Nest: uses a system that turns food waste into compost or that a shipping company is doing what it can to cut down on emissions, there are also companies providing you with direct ways to impact the environment yourself. One of those is Nest, the smart thermostat system that was acquired by Google in 2014. According to Nest, half of your energy bill is affected by your thermostat alone. The company estimates that by using a programmable thermostat that automatically adjusts for sleeping, when you’re awake, and other learned routines, the system can decrease by about 20%.

In India, Jain Irrigation Systems Ltd is a diversified entity with turnover in excess of one billion dollars. The company has a global presence with 30 manufacturing bases spread over four continents. Through its 6700 dealers and distributors worldwide, the company has reached over 4.5 million farmers. This is world’s second largest Micro-Irrigation company. Its Micro-Irrigation Division manufactures a full range of precision-irrigation products. Jain irrigation provides services from soil survey, engineering design to agronomic support. It nurtures a sprawling 2000 acre Hi-Tech Agri Institute including a Farm Resource R&D, Demo, and Training & Extension Centre. It also undertakes turnkey projects for agricultural and irrigation development with holistic & integrated approach. Over 1500 agri and irrigation scientists, engineers and technicians are engaged in offering services for complete or partial project planning and implementation e.g Watershed Development through Wasteland Transformation, including crop agronomy, protected cultivation etc.

Their Tissue Culture Division can produce 80 million plantlets of banana at full capacity and has established matching primary and secondary hardening facilities as well as independent R&D and virology labs. Similarly, a modern Bio- tech lab equipped with all modern and state–of–the–art facilities meet the needs of continuous genetic improvement and validation program in cultivators of onion, banana, mango, pomegranate etc. They process tropical fruits like mango, banana, and pomegranates into purees, concentrates, juices and IQF products. The Dehydration Facility dehydrates onions & vegetables. The Spray Drying Unit processes gooseberry and other fruit purees into powders. The best part is that agricultural and fruit processing waste is converted into biogas to generate power of 1.6 MW capacities along with waste heat for refrigeration and soil conditioner.

Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan: Unilever in 2010 launched its blueprint for sustainable business, named the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan. Sustainable living brands, including Dove, Lifebuoy, Ben & Jerry’s and Comfort are integrated into the contribution they make to the world and into their products’ ingredients and lifecycle. The consumer goods giant says about 50 percent of its growth in 2014 came from sustainable living brands, which also grew at twice the rate of the rest of the business. Not only are Unilever’s sustainable living products more profitable than standard products by 2 gross margin points, these products also drive other top-line benefits, Unilever says. This purposefulness and sustainable living plan attracts and retains young talent. No wonder, Unilever is among top 3 most sought-after employers globally. About 50 percent of graduates cite Unilever sustainability credentials as the main reason for wishing to join the company.

GE Ecomagination: GE’s Ecoimagination line of products and services has generated more than $200 billion in revenues since GE started the program 10 years ago. Revenue from Ecomagination products totalled $34 billion in 2014, representing about 30 percent of total GE sales. A key success factor for Ecomagination is to reduce energy and water waste in manufacturing, Intel Corp works with GE to develop advanced manufacturing and digital optimization techniques to increase resource productivity in manufacturing.

Ikea Sustainable Home Products: This Company contributes to a more sustainable life at home for consumers. Its entire lighting range is now LED. It plans to become resource and energy independent which means helping to replace the industry with key raw materials like cotton and wood, investing in renewable energy and becoming more efficient in operations and supply chain. Ikea wants to make every product more sustainable while keeping the quality, function, form and affordability for their customers.

Conclusion: The environmental aspect of sustainability considers the impact of organisational activities on natural resource depletion, pollution and emission management, waste management, and energy and resource use among others. The social aspect of sustainability reflects on the social obligation of the organisation to the communities by managing issues such as poverty, income inequality, disease, access to health care, clean water, sanitation, education and broader societal problems that organisations are increasingly called upon to solve. Finally, the economic aspect of sustainability concerns the viability of the organisation to financially thrive in a competitive marketplace by balancing both environment and society.