Running head: KEY FACTORS TO RETAIN TALENTS IN A COMPANY 1

Key Factors to Retain Talents in A Company

NGUYEN Thi Ha Anh

PHAN Chieu Dat

HO Hoang Viet Linh

VU Tuyet Ngan

NGUYEN Thi Phuong Thao

TRAN Quoc Tien

ISB.MBA9 GROUP B

October 7, 2018

Douglas M. Foster

Dr. Samantha Engel

KEY FACTORS TO RETAIN TALENTS IN A COMPANY 2

Key Factors to Retain Talents in A Company

“Employee turnover is one of the largest though widely unknown costs an organization

faces. Companies keep track of various costs such as supplies and payroll, few take into

consideration how much employee turnover will cost them”. (Laddha, Singh, Gabbad &

Gidwani, 2012, p.453). Retention is the ability that company could make their employee engages

with the organization more than competitors. Success in retaining talented employees,

organizations not only win financial aspect but also reduce the risk of losing business

knowledge. Vietnam is a developing country with many vacancies and chances on job market so

retaining employee is never easy with any organization. This essay will discuss three major

factors that a company should consider in terms of retaining talents, which are: stress, working

environment and leader.

The Importance of Employee Retention

According to the Pareto Principle, better known as the 80/20 Rule, in organization a

standard rule is that 80% of any result is directly linked to 20% of what causes the program (Reh,

2005). This concept has been developed and applied to dramatically grow business. For

instance, if one can find out which top 20% of customers represents 80% of profit, corporate can

seek more potential like them and increase your sales (Reh, 2005). Likewise, in human

resources, by identifying and retaining top 20% of employees, your organization can be

improved about 80% of business growth (Reh, 2005). Asking any business owner what makes a

company’s success, most of them also state about importance of talent factor. According to Anne

Mulcahy (Praveen, 2014), staffs are asset as well as advantage; moreover, they are most

competitive and greatest (Praveen, 2014). In addition, as all you know, Steve Job, co-founder

Apple Inc was the person who made company become top 10 largest ones in the world in 2017
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(Stoller, 2017). Steve Job also confirmed that there were two essential factors to build company

successfully. One is passion, the other is exactly people (Stoller, 2017). The authors cannot deny

the fact that retaining talents is a substantial challenge for organizations nowadays.

Stress

According to Prabhu and Patil (as cited in Bihani & Dalal, 2014), one of the most

important factors that impact to employee retention is stressful work. In this paper, the authors

want to mention about some main reasons that lead people to become stress and decide to leave

company.

Overload work. Nowadays, in the economic industry, most companies are evaluating the

effective work of each employee based on their KPI (Key Performance Indicator), no matter

which title of what job. The KPIs can be set by monthly, bi-monthly, haft-year, etc. with a lot of

scenarios. Therefore, employees not only do their daily tasks but also have to brand-storm to find

many ways to have a good result in final appraisal. Sometimes, they are overload with their

works and under high pressure themselves because of bad KPIs. If this case happens for a long

time, they will attempt to leave their company to release stress soon, which was supported by

Evans (as cited in Kamal & Lukman, 2017).

Job satisfaction. One of the reasons has the relationship with stressful work is job

satisfaction. When employees are happy with the job, they put a lot of efforts and always get the

good performance. Nevertheless, working with much dissatisfaction has no way to provide better

results. To prove this, Vandana (2017) found that whether employees thought toward their job

depends on how much they satisfied with it. Thus, at the same time, even if the satisfaction is

low, the higher stress will happen (Bihani & Dalal., 2014). This will increase the intention to

leave company.
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Working environment

According to Tlaiss and Lavanya (2011) employee retention includes four major things,

of which working environment is one key factor to maintain the potential employees.

Nowadays, most big companies want to keep the employee because of their contribution as well

as the organizational development. Therefore, the company use many ways to appealing

employees with other companies. To do that, organizations need to know clearly the employee

retention, because the ability to keep into those ones want, for longer than their competitors.

Before starting a new job, employees are always curious about the future company’s

culture and workplace. “Seven participants used words such as ‘dynamic’, ‘fun’ and ‘energetic’

when describing the company’s environment”. (as cited in Letchmiah & Thomas, 2017, p.5). The

organization and company culture as a system of shared values and norms in the company. The

working environment looks like the second house of employee, so those employees will do best

to keep the house is clearly and warmly. Kinicki and Fugate (2012) claimed that the more

frequent employees mingle in a corporate culture, the more engagement they will have in a

company (as cited in Letchmiah & Thomas., 2017).

An employee goes to work not only to work but also to be share feeling and to look for

more connection at a so-call second home. Pyszka and Pilat stated that employees intend to stay

longer in an open and honest working environment, which allows them to expose their ability

and knowledge. (as cited in Letchmiah & Thomas,2017).

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Leader

It is to say that in many cases, employees join companies but leave managers. Therefore,

the next key factor to retain talents mentioned in this essay is leader.

There exist many negative managers who seldom listen to their employees’ point of view and

opinion, which makes the employees have an intend to give up. The supervisor who is a good

listener can make employees’ well-being increased and can be the reason make them choose to

stay (Lloyd, Boer & Voelpel, 2015).

When the leader knows the way to encourage and recognize their employees, they will retain

talents. The role of any leader within a corporate framework is to build up the team and to

encourage growth. If they want employees to give commitment to the organization, they need to

show that they respect their staff as appreciation is a fundamental human need. When employees

and their work are valued, their satisfaction rises, and they are motivated to maintain or improve

their good work and want to stay with their company. According to Bihani & Dalal (2014),

encouragement and recognition is one of retention strategies.

Moreover, smart leaders should keep relationship with their team, give career

advancement opportunities to them, in order for employees to have motivation in work and stay

with company longer. When amount of people who quit job increase in a company, it is essential

to review leader team and change their management way.

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Conclusion

“There is increasing focus on retaining high-potential employee because of the

organizational costs associated with losing such employee” (Letchmiah & Thomas,2017, p.7).

Organization also care about time to train a new comer to become talented employee. To save

cost for a company and to pursue organizational development, ones should find effective way to

maintain talented employee (Ortlieb & Sieben, 2012). Accordingly, factors such as stress,

working environment and leader, company should be established the core value of itself to attract

good candidate and retain talented employees.

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Clifford,C. (2017). “Steve Jobs: These are 2 essential ingredients for success. CNBC.

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satisfaction in selected public higher learning institutions. International Journal of

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