Hold fast to valued workers, bosses told

JOHNNY TAYLOR, former chairman of the Society For Human Resource Management. ((Picture by Sharon Harding.))

Wed, October 03, 2012 - 11:00 AM

Employers are being warned not to let their outstanding employees slip through their fingers and be recruited by other organizations.

This caution has come from Johnny Taylor, former chairman of the Society For Human Resources Management (SHRM) as he delivered the feature address during the Global Export Systems Inc. First Caribbean & Latin American Conference On Talent Management, at The Savannah hotel last Tuesday.

Speaking to a roomful of human resources personnel, Taylor said it was their duty to ensure their organization’s best workers were fully engaged and did not leave.

“Stars always have options,” he said.

“Your stars are going to have options, so you can sit back and say ‘you know what, we will wait for Plan B here’. By the way, if you lose that person, your boss should be upset.

“If you are in HR and let us lose a star because you said ‘we don’t have to do these things to keep these people’, at some point someone else will [take them],” argued Taylor.

He said there was a four-part talent acquisition strategy that people in human resources should follow if they wanted to find and retain the best.

“It includes, one, the recruitment: show that you can recruit the right people.

“Second, it is about rewarding those people. You can’t get people in the door if you can’t award them. If you have a star, pay them and take money off their minds and make them happy to come to work.

“Third, you’ve got to invest . . . . Finally, you’ve got to show your employees a lot of love,” said the business leadership speaker.

He further suggested that in order to keep outstanding employees, employers should consider offering special benefits such as “free lunch”. He also suggested employers revisit some of their rules and get rid of “old” and “stupid” ones.

“I just can’t have you sitting in HR wasting good time on a dumb policy. I can tell you there are a number of policies that I could ask each of you to [consider whether] ‘we should still have these rules because we are making it difficult to attract stars’,” he said.

“You have to treat your stars very, very special. If you let people recruit them, then what do you do? Run [after] people who’ve already checked out?

“By the time someone tells you they got an offer, you think you can get them to stay? Be careful. It is your job to be proactive and make sure that we don’t lose them,” he warned. (MM)