Challenge n°1 : Anticipate on the brain drain

Brain drain has always been a sensitive subject. Especially when we talk about the most valuable employees in our teams. But before we dig deeper into the subject, we should think about "what is brain drain ?"

Origin and meaning of the term Brain Drain 
Brain Drain is the loss of competences. In the past, this term was mainly used for the migration of highly educated people from third world countries towards countries with higher development standards. The reasons were often higher salaries, better training, ... The result was (and still is) that third world countries loose their best workforce.

Brain drain in our companies
Today our companies are facing big challenges to retain and keep their most valuable employees. The strenghts of organisations are often within the employees. If a high performer leaves the organization, we can consider this as Brain Drain.

Brain drain happens through 2 doors at the same time !
I see 2 important forms of brain drain : on the one hand there are a lot of people who will retire within the next 10 years, on the other hand, we have young employees who more easily than ever switch companies and jobs.

Anticipate on retirement
These people have gathered great experience and know how over the past decades and most of what they know is tacit knowledge. This tacit knowledge is only within the minds of the employees and not written down in manuals, procedures, ...
Many of these "older" employees are often willing to share their expertise, but... you'll have to give them a hand. How ?

• Train them to map their experiences, knowledge, skills : what do they know ? Often when you ask them to do a difficult handling and you ask how they do it, they answer "I don't know, I just do it...". 
• Train them to train others : once you realize what you know, you need to be able to pass on this knowledge. How can share my insights with others ? 
• Give them time to transfert their knowledge and give them the role of mentor / coach. 

An example :

In one of the companies I used to work for they didn't have any jobdescriptions & competence profiles. Too often these documents are developed outside-in and don't work because of this approach. I wanted instruments that truly work because I believe they are a solid base for many other development processen. I asked the person who was best in the job (often a very experienced person) and the person who could explain it most easily to tell me what they were doing and what competences they need to do this job. This was the first step in the mapping of jobdescriptions and competences. 

I also asked per competence who was the best person in the team. 

Afterwards I developed solid introduction and training plans. Every new hires got a buddy coach and thanks to the competence mapping they knew who to talk to when they wanted to develop a certain competence. 

This resulted in a autodidactic group - they started to train each other and took the group to a higher level. 

Retain generation Y

It is not only generation Y, but we should talk about all generations in this chapter. Studies claim that new generations more easily switch jobs and thus leave companies. This is probably true, and it brings the next question to our attention : why should we train all these new youngsters if they leave us within the next 2 or 3 years. 

The answer is clear to me : if you don't train them they will even leave faster. Generation Y (and younger generations) are eager to learn. They want to develop their skills to grow. A company who doesn't support them in their growth is considered to be a bad employer. 

My advise on this topic is to install solid introduction & training plans for your new hires. Follow up on their personal development and the status of their training plans. And I don't mean to follow up via an IT tool ! Keep the communication personal. Last week I was in a company where all HR related topics go via a help desk who is not even part of that company. People really felt NOT being supported by HR... 

A few years ago I was training & recruitment manager in one of the biggest companies in Antwerp. A newspaper contacted us to give us the award of "best business school" for engineers. Some of my colleagues didn't want to be in the newspaper with this award because they were afraid of headhunters chasing our best engineers. I persisted and we got an 8 page article in the newspaper bringing the story of how we invested in the development of our employees and the internal jobopportunities they got every time the wanted to move up. We had a job- & project market for our employees. This was the secret why all our engineers stayed. 

So my advise to you : keep jobs challenging and open the dialogue with your employees. 

You might say "this is not new!". You are right ! Unfortunately many companies do not have an active policy on these topics and due to budget savings they have to stop good initiatives...

Conclusion

To avoid brain drain in your company, make sure you have a good mapping of who is competent at what and invest in the professional development of each and every employee. This is the simple truth about retention of good employees !