“Sense of worth” before “Sense of growth”

Thinking of retention risks?  Focus on people finding their “sense of worth” before giving them, the  “sense of growth”

Retention is an issue that haunts HR folks much more than any other evil. Reasons are galore. What make people think of moving out?.One is "urge to get out of here" and the other could be "to get in there". Though it is just a trigger.

Someone's loss is someone's gain. The devil emerges, many a times, when a team becomes dysfunctional for any reason, from losing a juicy project to a enter of a dictatorial manager to the poor performance review. Quite often, the reasons for people choosing to move out are sectoral technology change, seasonal recessionary trends, making business sick and people have no clue on when company returns to pink. 
Let others, not just HR folks, do the thinking and build a robust plan to retain the stars (A player) and others, respectfully called B players, as they hold the organization with their consistent performance and lesser threatening demands than the A players.

Retention is a strategic game as it aims at averting the "War for talents" scenario. 
Skill/Capability building takes much longer than buying it. Money makes the move. Fancy and high sounding Titles, ESOPs, On-site 5 star training, Outside India office training/orientation and hefty sign-on bonus play a deal-maker. Here we have the capitalist mind-set, which boasts, 'WHO PAYS WINS' and rest of the lot say, let's re-build our long-term strategic retention rod-map. The war has begun.

Surprisingly, while building war strategy to protect business, we often ignore what we are made of is just not people, who are bought and sold, we have people, who keep searching their 'sense of worth', much more valuable than the "market-rate" and RFP Jewellery!

Let's start talking to people heart-to-heart and you will find them having all the solutions that can make you think beyond the "survival strategy". People are there to grow with a sense of achievement, sense of belongingness.
Share your concerns with them. "When in doubt, disclose" is what NRN says. What does not work is, "when in doubt, cut it out". Solutions are not that close and easy. Cookie-cutter is a good day scenario!

Many a times, we do statistical regression analysis to Fair Issac predictive analysis, of employee exit data in an attempt to figure out what might have gone wrong in managing people. Unassumingly, what we get are so very different reasons that we start doubting the authenticity of exit interview captured data.

Retention actually starts from the date of hiring. We need to be aware of the personal and professional aspirations, ambitions and dream, one joins organization for. That has to be tracked and fulfilled or disillusionment starts building.

Remember, people look for their sense of worth to the organization much before they start thinking of sense of growth. Ensure that a new employee finds her sense of worth very quickly and very well. As said, values are built in initial six months in the organisation. If it does not, it is an attrition or worse than that, we call dis-engaged/disgruntles employee.