24 September 2018
The private sector has grown pretty rapidly in all sectors in Nepal over the last several years. Needless to say, this is a welcome sign and an encouraging one.
However, the problem of employee migration has beset the private sector as if an attendant to the growth. There is a mass migration of personnel all around Nepal due to saturation of businesses in the capital city of Kathmandu.
Two kinds of migrations are happening at present.
The first type is the one that is taking place inside the Kathmandu valley. Employees are coming from areas outside Kathmandu and they are hopping from one job to another within Kathmandu for better pay and benefits.
Even the HR Agencies and independent consultants have joined this race so that there is a high ratio of headhunting now to capture competent manpower from a certain organization and bring them to another.
Another kind of migration that is happening relates to people who are now opting to live in better off foreign lands such as the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia. Within Nepal, employees prefer to live in relatively better off cities of the country such as Pokhara, Butwal, Bhairawa, Biratnagar, Nepalgunj, and Dhangadi.
Migration is good for the overall economy as the skill level in all areas across companies becomes similar. It might help jump-start the local economies of cities.
However, there are employers who have cultivated their employees over a long period of time and taught them all the required skills and groomed them for succession. The sudden migration of such personnel is a great loss to such employers both financially as well as strategically. They will now have to spend extra time and money on grooming another person for the same job. It means not only will there be an economic loss for the employer but also opportunity loss due to employee migration.
I also frequently look back at my own migration strategy especially during the initial phase of my career. Based on my personal experience and a close inside observation of the Nepalese corporate sector, I have identified some strategies mentioned below which can help in employee retention and prevention of employee migration. Viewing the problem from opposite angle, lack of below strategies has resulted in the increase in employee migration in Nepal.
1. Finding the Linking people: Generally, we tend to think that we should focus only on the retention of high performers and key staff member in an organization. However, it is possible that there will be people who may be the binding force to keep the company together with skills not normally recognized as mainstream skills, such as social skills or social networking ability and charisma.
Identification and retention of these kinds of people are important. It is crucial to find what kind of links this staff has with other staff and discover why these links are there. Identification of this skill would help in replication of this plan to other people in an organization in order to apply in the skill in other parts of the organization.
I would like to recall an incident which would help explain this point. In my time in an organization, we had some really charismatic managers and colleagues. However, the resignation of one of them prompted our entire team to resign from the work one by one and once again the whole team came together in a different organization. This indicates the power of linking people.
2. Cultural Integration Plan: This is a very important point which is usually ignored in Nepalese organizations. Human resource professionals need to work out on the kind of culture prevailing in an organization and develop a cultural integration plan to ensure that people still want to work with the organization.
In many organizations, the culture is such that there is a certain behavior of resentment towards the CEO or employers regarding their behavior and staff incentives. this resentment ultimately pours over to the employees’ own brains and leads to the creation of a certain sense of negativity towards the entire environment in a short while. The result is fast employee migration from the organization.
3. Benefits: Benefits in Nepalese organizations usually means leaves, provident funds, annual bonuses, an additional month’s (13th month) salary during the festival time, family insurance, and tax breaks for life insured staff.
In the Western countries, organizations have extended the type of benefits given to employees based on their demographics. For example, more experienced employees get great family benefits including leave, maternity leave for male employees, stock option etc. In the case of young employees who would like more flexibility benefits may include gym memberships, subsidized meals, and subsidized transportation.
To my mind, it should be possible for Nepalese organizations to incorporate some Western type of benefits for encouraging employees to be attracted towards their organization and not migrate.
Some of the offshore information technology and software businesses in Nepal are already implementing these strategies for employee retention.
4. Personalization: Generally, personalization for an employee comes down to three areas:
a. Allowing personalization of office space to employees such as houseplants, pictures from home and so on. These soft touches have been shown to improve employee retention and are often a feature of startups rather than experienced organizations.
b. Offering flexible working locations for the employees such as an opportunity for them to work from home.
c. Flexible working hours: Normally tasks allocated to employees in an organization are such that they may require presence in the office itself e.g.: planning, presentations, meetings etc. However. Some other tasks such as reporting may require a private space which could be mean home for the employee. Employees may be given the flexibility to work this way from home and office based on the type of work they are allocated.
While the strategies pointed out above may not be all-powerful in stop employee migration, they may nevertheless be helpful for the HR Department and HR Managers to have a fresh perspective on doing something new to stop the employee migration in an organization in Nepal.
These strategies may be analogized considering that absence of the above strategies in an organization’s HR Strategy can be compared to a curry dish with lots of delicious spices but without much salt. It leaves a bad taste in mouth and you don’t know what you did wrong.
But if the above four strategies were to be implemented, they will together act as a pinch of salt in the curry which brings about great taste. The lesson: small things can have a big impact on the reduction of employee migration.
(Nischaya Subedi is a Consultant Strategic Manager based in Kathmandu.)
