Management practices for retaining highly talented employees in a large South African organisation

Abstract

The management practices used by predominantly large organisations for the purpose of retaining talented people is key to the greater success and longer term sustainability of the business. However, these organisations continue to wrestle with appropriate management practices to retain their talented people. It is therefore of critical importance that organisations are aware of the retention practices that work, and those that don’t, in the global war for retaining talent. A non-probability sampling method was used to select a sample of high potential or talented employees that either are, or have been participants of the Leadership Academy at a large South African organisation, to participate in a series of focus groups utilising the nominal group technique which enabled the quantification of qualitative data. A total of 36 highly talented employees participated in the focus groups which were split in terms of age in order to establish if different age groups had different views. The findings of the research enabled the development of a structured argument in terms of what organisations need to start doing, stop doing and continue doing with respect to the management practices employed for the retention of highly talented people. The research further enabled the identification of a number of components to an employee value proposition (EVP) geared specifically at the retention of highly talented people in a large organisation.