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.

4 Hiring Mistakes Most Entrepreneurs Make

By:  Ross Kimbarovsk, co-founded crowdSPRING, a Chicago-based online marketplace for custom logo design, web design, company naming and other design and writing services. 



Business owners are justifiably terrified about hiring the wrong person. Bad hires undermine team morale, are expensive and can kill your company.

I'm very proud of the team we've built at crowdSPRING, but we made some bad hires along the way. 

The really bad hires are easy and obvious. One of our first engineers was late by an average of four hours in his first three days. We fixed our mistake by terminating him.

Most bad hires are not so obvious, but they are incredibly costly. There's an opportunity cost when you continue to employ someone who isn't working well with the team. At a startup, the opportunity cost is often the difference between success and failure. 
 
How can you manage your fears so that you don't end up with mediocre employees? Here are the key insights I learned over the past 18 years:

1. Rushing the hiring process just to put a body in a chair.
When possible, do the job yourself before hiring someone, to help you understand the skills necessary. 

When we were a young startup, we typically looked at the pool of respondents and hired the best person. After a few years, I realized we were compromising. After making a few hiring mistakes, we now hire only when a candidate is the right fit for us. We've had hiring cycles where after reviewing hundreds of applicants for a position, we elected not to hire anyone. 

We've also hired multiple people when looking for only a single hire. Once you fully understand the job requirements, hire the right person, not the best person from among those who responded.

To hire the best person from among many, you need to read tons of resumes, do many phone interviews, and conduct at least five to 10 in-person interviews. 

If you create standards that clearly define the right person for the job, you'll know when you meet them, even if you've only interviewed one or two people. Our most recent hire in customer service impressed us with his creativity by writing and performing an original song as his cover letter and his references were glowing. We'd only interviewed two people for the job and he was the second one.

2. Hiring the best candidate.
It's become a cliché to say you should hire people smarter than you. Most successful business owners strive to do so. But the smartest, most skillful people are not always the right people for the job. 

One of our biggest hiring mistakes as a young company was not paying attention to cultural fit. You can teach skills, but you cannot teach passion, a good work ethic and respect for the collaborative process. When you add a lone ranger to an efficient and collaborative group, you can undermine the entire team and the evolution of your company.

When interviewing, ask about the candidate's most and least favorite projects. Compare the passion with which they describe each, the effort they brought to each project and the results they achieved. Highly effective employees will, naturally, be more passionate about projects they loved, but they'll demonstrate a good deal of self-discipline talking about projects they did not like and what they did to achieve great results despite a lack of strong interest.

3. Committing to an employee before trying them out.
A number of years ago, after making a really bad hire and quickly fixing our mistake, we decided we would not hire for any full-time position without a short trial period first. Today we hire people on an initial 30-day contract. We pay them the equivalent of the full-time salaries they would receive, but make it clear this is a test period for us to see how they work with our team and for them to decide if they like working with us. You can identify problems during those 30 days that you never could have identified during a series of short interviews and reference calls. If the problems are significant, you can choose not to extend a full-time contract to that person. On the other hand, if a candidate is an exceptional fit, you can extend a full-time contract well before the 30-day trial period ends.

4. Not fixing your mistakes quickly.
Most business owners are uncomfortable when they must fire an employee. But you do yourself and your team a disservice if you don't act quickly when you realize you've made a mistake.

When I look back on some of our costliest early hiring mistakes, our unwillingness to quickly terminate a poorly performing employee is at the top of the list. A mediocre employee will not only cost you a lot of money, but can damage the rest of your team.

The most compassionate act you can take when you realize you made a mistake is to be transparent and fix your mistake quickly.

Why Everyone Will Have to Become an Entrepreneur

It used to be that entrepreneurs were the renegade cowboys out in Silicon Valley. Nowadays, you have to be an entrepreneur just to get and hold a job.

Consultants and freelancers are cheaper than full-time staffers with benefits, software developers overseas cost a fraction of what they cost in the U.S. and, by 2030, robots will be able to perform most manual labor, according to an infographic (below) from San Francisco-based startup organization Funders and Founders. Even employees who are employed in large corporations are encouraged to be “intrapreneurs,” meaning that they are in many cases given company time to come up with disruptive ways of thinking about corporate organization and practices.

No matter what your office looks like, you are going to have to become an entrepreneur. 

Take a look at the infographic to understand why.

 

 

 

Source: Entrepreneur

3 Key Principles Top Employers live by

 

Research and experience is showing that employers of choice manage to attract and retain top talent by sticking to a few simple principles and embedding them throughout the company. It’s in their DNA.

Samantha Crous – the regional director for Africa and Benelux for the CRF Institute, a global organisation that measures, audits and certifies top employers – believes that becoming a sought-after employer “boils down to the implementation of a few simple principles”. These include embracing change, respecting social and environmental principles, and investing in people.

The CRF Institute compiles an annual list of top employers in over 45 countries around the world.

“In a world where top talent is in short supply, there is intense competition amongst businesses to attract and retain the best people,” says Crous. “But it is more than just about employee benefits.”

The key lies in creating a winning corporate culture that adheres to the basic principles of success and that people want to be part of, she adds.

1. Embracing change: adapt or die
The first of these principles is to embrace change and capitalise on challenges. “Many of the apparent hurdles in an industry can unlock great business innovations,” explains Crous, citing communication technology as an example.

“The rise of social media can seem threatening as marketing managers effectively lose their grip over what is said about their brand, but top employers are embracing new communication technologies. Many top employers now use social media to their advantage.”

Entrepreneur Mike Stopforth puts it as follows: “When technology leaps forward, find a way to harness and leverage it; don’t avoid the trend – you will regret it later.”

Crous agrees. “An example of a company that has embraced change is technology company Avanade, which launched its own internal social media platform to advance communication within the company. They use Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to promote the company, providing rewards for those who attract the most followers or have the most popular or insightful posts.”

In fact, embracing this kind of technological leap can do a company enormous good, believes communication specialist Amanda Laird. “Internally, technology-driven communication has far more benefits than risks,” she writes. “You make your employees feel heard, you can promote new products and services, reach staff faster, build relationships, increase internal brand awareness and advance your organisation’s thought leadership.”

“It can bring an unprecedented level of interactivity that can increase employees’ pleasure and pride in their work, as well as improving communications,” says Crous.

2. Invest in your people: they will thank you for it
The second area in which top employers excel is to boost staff morale through investing in people, says Crous. “This may be as simple as skills development, which in South Africa can step into the gap left by sub-standard tertiary education.”

Companies such as Vodacom, DiData, Accenture and others are providing scholarships, learnerships and incubation programmes, as well as continued development opportunities at all levels of the company, she relates.

“People determine success,” she says. “Invest in people, and you invest in your success.”

3. Respect society and the environment: be part of a new wave of business for better
The third area in which top employers outperform others is looking outward – and responding to the social and environmental concerns in their context. “For example, a large percentage of top employers are investing in environmentally-conscious practices that not only protect the planet, but also embody a more sensitive, respectful approach that is likely to resonate more with employees than a profit-grabbing corporate machine,” says Crous.

Companies such as Nestlé and Group Five have explicit policies, for example, to limit travel-related carbon emissions by holding meetings electronically and they are also investing in state-of-the-art green buildings designed to use less power and create less waste.
This may particularly resonate with South Africans, Crous believes. South Africa is 14th on the list of countries with the highest carbon emissions; a few paces behind Japan, the UK and South Korea.

“This is probably a talking point for some employees,” says Crous. “No doubt many of them will feel some pride as ambassadors for ‘green’ companies that are making a difference. They may even Tweet about it.”

“The bottom line is that it will rub off on the image of the company and staff happiness. That is what makes a great employer: the kind that people really want to work for. These three DNA markers make all the difference.”

Source: How We Made It in Africa