How to Retain Employees in your Company

A Nigerian entrepreneur shares three ways for companies to retain employees. Mitchell Elegbe is the founder and group managing director of Interswitch Limited, an integrated payment and transaction processing company.

Mitchell Elegbe, founder and group managing director of Interswitch Limited

According to Elegbe, the best strategy to retain employees is to “create an environment for staff that gives them confidence in themselves to excel”.

Here are three ways Elegbe suggests companies and managers can create an incentive-based environment to retain employees.

1. Invest in their career

“At Interswitch we see investment in human resources as something we take very seriously. We believe that investment in people is a good strategy… Training is a continuous process and you have to have a sustainable model for training,” emphasised Elegbe.

Interswitch has a division dedicated to training their staff, as well as third party individuals in their business operations.

Elegbe added that by investing in an employee’s professional development, you are showing them that they can build a future in the company.

“I can see, across Africa, that there are very intelligent people and you just need to create the kind of work environment that will give them the type of skills that they can have to excel.”

2. Motivation through purpose

“I know that people say the generation of this day is all about the money, but that is not the experience we have had at Interswitch,” said Elegbe. “What we are seeing is a group of young people who want to make a difference and they are looking for an environment where they can make that difference and improve their society.”

He explained that for many people, an important incentive for work is the sense that they belong to an environment in which they can have a positive effect on society. By showing employees that they can contribute to the development of society, they will feel like their work is more than just a nine-to-five job.

3. Allow them to share in the company’s success

“The first thing that we do is to create an incentive structure that is based on performance,” continued Elegbe.

He explained that Interswitch has profit sharing policies that are tied to performance that reward hardworking employees, and allow them to achieve additional earnings if given targets are met.

“So those three areas are the things that we have done to retain talent in Africa,” said Elegbe, adding that he first started the company with nine staff members and, after 10 years, he felt gratified by the fact that they were all still working at Interswitch.

“And they are all in leadership positions. What that basically means is that there was something we did very well that would make people stay with a company for 10 years. Most of them were fresh from school. They have never worked anywhere else in their lives and were able to stay with us for 10 years and they have all risen to be in leadership positions. So investing in people and allowing people to achieve their dreams and aspirations in their positions, to me, is one way that I describe success,” concluded Elegbe.