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Typically, the highest-skilled employees are the ones organisations risk losing, which is why talent retention has never been more critical. Good change management focuses on helping people adopt and cope with change, but what is the change manager's role in helping retain talent?
Here we examine the change management sector's role in securing talent in this context. I am taking the South African case as a starter, and it would be interesting to compare the Namibian experience as there could be differences due to specific elements of the Namibian environment.
So, is this a temporary change to manage, or has the hybrid work environment and gig economy cemented it as an ongoing challenge for organisations? I think it looks different depending on where you look. In Southern Africa, we sometimes have difficulty differentiating voluntary resignations from induced ones. With arguably the highest unemployment rate in the world, the South African economy, and its neighbours struggle to keep organisations afloat. While that is true, we continue to suffer from an ongoing brain drain that is not new to us (it's been going on for decades).
What's changed is that the drain may be harder to measure. I can leave the employment side of the economy and work "overseas" without leaving the country. Some say this is a blessing, but that would only be true for skills we have in oversupply, which excludes the highly qualified and skilled.
One article puts the current gig economy employment size in South Africa at over 3 million. Considering that the total employment in South Africa is around 15 million – that's a significant percentage. The gig economy is likely to continue in the absence of social magnets that attract the skilled (which includes change managers) to work in longer-term employment. The challenge for organisations is to adapt to this new scenario. This circumstance implies more or less changes to operating models.
We know from experience that these tend to be radical changes and therefore require good change management. As Change Management focuses on the people side of change, we can see the relevance here – operating models only deliver results when people in the organisations adopt the model and adjust how they work, how they are rewarded, recognised and how they are compensated – contributing to the retention of productive people.
So, how can we protect our talent capital? Again I am approaching this from a change perspective. There is clear evidence from Prosci's research that building change capability leads to a better ROI on organisational changes. Organisations constantly change as an agile response to the environment. Keeping talent is also about remaining relevant, not only to customers but also to our people. Developing change capability makes us better at changing and remaining relevant to our people. People follow and therefore work for organisations that show leadership, agility, change-readiness, and less stress.
If we develop the processes, systems, and governance to change better, faster, and consistently, our people feel the difference, which could make a difference in retention or re-employment. At and Change, we work with clients from 18 industries, and it's interesting to see how industries that have shed tens if not hundreds of thousands of jobs in the past two years (e.g. financial services) still advertise for highly skilled posts – this shows the duality we live in.
Change Managers have to help organisations transform into this blended workforce reality. During the C-19 pandemic, we focused on helping organisations transform into blended working for existing workers, and now we are called again to help transform into a blended workforce. This change has significant implications for managing other changes, like digitisation.
If the affected people keep changing while we make the change, we will need to adapt our Change Management strategies and plans and include a more robust maintenance consideration for those teams who have already changed. Their structure is in constant flux – it's changing within change! Given this environment, how can we retain talent?
The usual suspects are still there, like providing strong leadership, clarity of purpose, flexible packages, but I think we can adopt new retention approaches with the emerging gig economy. In the Southern African context, connectivity is very tenuous in many localities. There could be opportunities for organisations to facilitate better connectivity and provide that as an advantage of working for them.
If we couple this with another challenge – our education system's ability to prepare young people for the changing world of work, this could be another avenue to differentiate organisations as employers of choice. Change management can do a lot to help retain talent.
*Tom Marsicano is the CEO of ‘and Change’, a change management consulting and training company. He is a Master Certified Prosci® Instructor with an extensive background, especially in financial services and IT systems. His love for research makes him a widely respected facilitator and speaker. Write to him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or learn more at andchange.com.