Management Keeping the Best People in the Job

Management Keeping the best people in the job.

With Ireland being deep in a recession, Banking call centres like MBNA have struggled to adapt adequately to the radically changed economic environment. Banking Call centres such as MBNA despite many advances over the years have adopted the hard taylorist approach to Management strategy with cost cutting and increased focus on targets becoming more and more prevalent to try and survive in the banking industry. (Bain, Watson, Mulvey, Taylor, Gall 2001) As such the focus on employee values especially with talented employees has waned in recent years. Graduate programmes that used to be in place as well as cross training and sideway promotions to other departments have been reduced. This is also identified in the CIPD report which suggests that although Talent management focus is increasing across the employment industry, 18% of organisations have reduced their overall spend as a consequence of the economic downturn(CIPD Resource and Talent Planning 2011 P.5)

With banks across the Irish market gradually downsizing in areas across the business promotions and jobs realignments have become harder and harder to come by, and skilled employees especially IT and Management are leaving to join other competitors, mainly citing lack of opportunities and failure to recognise their work performance as the main factors. As such this has lead to a drain of talent in the organisation that is struggling in an ultra competitive banking area. CIPD have stated this is prevalent across other organisations with 58% of companies experiencing difficulties in retaining staff mainly with manager, specialists and technical employees (CIPD 2011).

With extreme recruitment shortage in specialist areas such IT and management across all sectors of the Irish Labour Market (Irish independent 05/04/2012) it is now more important than ever for businesses to retain their most skilled and talented employees and not allow over focus on cost cutting measure to take away from this. Skilled employees who leave cause a large talent gap in the workplace that can be very difficult to fill especially if there is no predefined succession planning strategy in place.lynn 2010, Lamoureux 2009. According to a YouGov survey consisting of 1600 senior HR professional 49% admitted they do not have an adequate succession plan in place (Brockett 2011)

It is important to develop skill with your existing employee base by getting to know your employee, find out their main strengths and weakness and try to align them in an area of the banking business that they is most suited to and what will be needed in he future (CIPD 2011). This essay will focus on the main challenges facing business in retaining talented employees, and suggest ways to implement job design strategies to move away from the taylorist approach into a working environment that promotes job enrichment, enlargement rotation as well as retaining and even regaining its competitive edge in the banking sector. and in the inevitable case of some skilled employees leaving, having a strategic succession strategy in place so that other talented employees can slip in and fill those gaps.

Talent Management is the systematic attraction, identification, development, engagement, retention and deployment of those individuals who are of particular value to an organisation, either in view of their high potential for the future or because they are filling business/ operation critical roles. (CIPD 2010) In an organisation this is particulary true especially for effective manager professional specialists and technical employees but according to CIPD reports these are the most difficult to retain. (CIPD Resource and Talent Planning 2011, p.6)

Trying to identify talented employees can be a challenge in itself. Due to the high turnover rates in call centres two thirds of call centres in Ireland experiencing an average turnover of 30%, and almost 10% of call centres have a staff turnover rate of 50%, with the highest turnover taking place during the first 6 months of service (Gilson & Khandelwal; Lee; Stockford, 2005; Wieters). , (European Industrial Relations 2000); With turnover so high and coming within such a short period of time, companies such as MBNA find it difficult to identify many talented employees before they leave. . The IRS sector study reveals that the key negative drivers of staff turnover include a lack of career progression and repetitive work, ranked equally important by more than two thirds of respondents. The relatively flat hierarchy operating in many call centres was regarded as the main stumbling block. The main positive factors attracting staff away from their current employer are better pay and benefits available elsewhere in the local employment market. Among this group, many organisations specifically refer to salary competition form other call centre employers (IRS 2002)

With no real prospects of promotion or even job realignment and a high culture of presenteeism many managers feel stressed which inevitably is linked with absence. CIPD report stress as the number one cause of Absence in the workplace and can cause 50% employees to leave the business every year. (CIPD, 2011), (Houston 2004).

Presenteeism is also seen as a major issue especially with middle management and team leaders across the Call Centre industry with employees especially managers being pressurised to stay behind and work extra hours while sick, stressed or have person problems mainly due to the fear of dismissal, missing promotions or increased pressure to complete a task which results in reduced productivity(Prater, Smith 2011) (Murphy, Doherty 2011) (Churchard 2012), (CIPD 2012)According to a you Gov survey 40% of employees in the UK say they often stay in the office longer than necessary (Brockett 2008).

In some instances turnover can be considered a positive for example when a poor performer is replaced by a more productive employee, or when employees retire which allows for the recruitment of fresh talent (CIPD 2012), Pilbeam Corbridge (2011)in a lot of instances talented employees can fall through the cracks. Wieters claimed that attrition can be considered as the "epidemic that will eventually drain the cost effectiveness of call centers throughout the world, thereby hemorrhaging the profitability of the organization" (p. 2). A cipd report in 2000 unveiled that cost of labour turnover is £3456 per employee. A more recent report in 2007 states that the cost of labour turnover is £8200 per employee (IRS 2007) This is a rise of £4744 in 5 years, no recent datas could be found . As cited by Taylor 2003 J Douglas Phillips (1990) goes further suggesting that the total figure averages 1.5 times the annual starting salary. .

Due to these high costs Companies are