Care is a Verb, Show it! Date:   Monday , December 31, 2007 In a hot job market situation, employee churn is inevitable. The new generation of employees is ambitious and is in a hurry. Ambition, as noticed today, may be defined as moving to a place where you don’t want to stay. Opportunities for better salary, more glamorous designations, choice of locations, and handsome sign-on bonuses have only fuelled the churn and mobility. Welcome to the world of corporate reality! Here are both the good and the bad news. In Strong Winds, even Turkeys will Fly During good times with soaring demand for talent, a couple of proverbs come to mind. Firstly, rising tides lift all boats; and secondly, in strong winds, even Turkeys will fly! Simply translated, when opportunities outstrip availability, even those that are considered marginal performers find ready takers with a decent hike in salary. A friend of mine summed up the trend in somewhat humorous terms, “If you are a good performer, you get a 20 percent hike in your company and you stay put. If you are an average performer, you will likely get a 10 percent and so will jump for another job with a 30 percent raise; and if you are a poor performer with no raise (and indications are that you should look out), you probably will end up with a job overseas with double or treble your current salary!” Exaggerated as it may sound, the reality is not far from it. Irrational Market Exuberance & Frenzied Hiring Well, the message is not how we interpret this irrational exuberance in the market place and the even more frenzied hiring by organizations. Market forces will correct over time. There is, of course, an urgency to protect and preserve the employees who are key to an organization’s success. Ideal situation is where you have a 10 percent or so churn every year, and this 10 percent is not from your prized top talent of 20 percent. If we are clear about this end result, we must do a few things which are clear common sense. As everyone knows, common sense is not always put into practice! Let us look at what I may call as the common minimum program: As managers we must deliver so that the intended result may be achieved. Common Minimum Program This program will cover the following actions: * Identifying who is your top talented employees are. They are usually no more than 20 or 25 percent of your total team strength. * Letting them to know that they are recognized as the top talents. * Ensuring that their career aspirations are understood and acknowledged. * Giving them a differentiated pay increase and explaining the same to them. * Crafting an Individual Development Plan (IDP) for them and fulfilling the commitments made. * Letting them go over to other teams when career opportunities present themselves there. * Ensuring that they have mentors and helping them identify the right mentors Care is a Verb, Show it So, it is back to basics in grammar. Love and Care are as much verbs as they are nouns. If you really care and love your top talent, please show it! We seem to do a much better job of showing our love and care to pets we have at home. When it comes to showing care and love to people we value a lot at work, we seem to fall short of remembering the basics. There is simply no other way to retaining our top talent, except by showing them that we care and showering them with recognition and rewards they deserve. Great managers are known to play favorites and they do not feel shy about it. Only that they play favorites with those that are star performers and contribute the maximum to the company. It is a fairly settled fact that despite attractive offers elsewhere, employees often are smart enough not to trade off their manager’s quality for anything else. And by the same token, employees are not averse to settling for less money or similar designations when they do not enjoy working with their managers. After all, the human longing to be ‘stroked’ for good work lingers in every heart. And the star performers need even more stroking and adoration. The oft-repeated reason why managers do not adulate the star performers is that doing so openly will demotivate the rest of the team. It is fairly simple to deal with this dilemma. If you take care of the star performers, some of your average performers will leave. However, if you don’t take care of the stars, you will find your stars leaving. The choice is entirely yours, as managers. So, take care to show care! The Author is Senior VP and Chief People officer with Symphony Services Corporations. He can be reached atmahalingam.c@symphonysv.com