The Importance of Investing in Employee Retention

The importance of investing in employee retention can’t be overstated. 

Building and maintaining world-class talent pipelines isn’t enough to guarantee that the right person for a job will be available when they’re needed. 

So, how can organizations support talent mobility? 

Let’s take a look. 

Picture this: Your team member communicated that they desire to grow their career horizontally instead of vertically. With talent mobility in place, your organization can help that person grow into their new desired role and minimize attrition. Talent mobility’s basic principle is agility; this means examining technologists’ skills, highlighting the organization's needs, and quickly executing responses. Without talent mobility, organizations cannot promptly respond to industry changes and disruptions like the 2020 pandemic. 

So, how can organizations support talent mobility? 

Innovating for the future requires data-driven and people-first decisions to ensure individuals and teams can complete a project or goal. Nurture your internal and external talent pipelines by exploring and examining data and:

• Upskilling opportunities and initiatives

• Technologists career aspirations

• Talent mobility that supports vertical and horizontal growth

• Critical roles where skills gaps present the most significant risk to your organizations

Supporting vertical growth and horizontal growth is one way to support talent mobility. Traditionally, organizations and people focused on the former to measure a successful career. However, vertical growth has limitations; it only allows for career growth within a person’s current role. 

Horizontal growth, on the other hand, prepares employees for creating value. It allows them to seek new ways to contribute to the organization without limitation. It also promotes continuing education, upskilling, coaching/mentoring and, most importantly, prepares employees to pivot to new roles—without skills gaps—that your organization may need in the future.

Not being able to fill roles when needed can handicap an organization. 

Enabling talent mobility cultivates talent pipelines. Current employees are still an organization’s greatest asset, and leveraging their talent helps future-proof roles and organizational outcomes.  

The results of your investments are measurable by your employee retention.

If retention is the culmination of your investments efforts—and, more importantly, indicative of the employee experience at your organization—then the employee experience is just as valuable as the customer experience because the employee experience is the perfect metric for attrition. 

We mean that satisfied employees—employees who feel valued and invested in—are less likely to leave the company in search of greener pastures. Yes, compensation is also a factor, but if an employee feels valued, they are more likely to stay and continue growing vertically and horizontally. 

By examining your employees’ journey from onboarding to retention efforts, you can future-proof your organization with hard data that represents employees’ satisfaction levels and any areas that need additional investments. 

Better compensation is one way to improve retention, but overall, the best investment you can make to improve retention numbers is upskilling opportunities.

Let’s take Deutsche Bank, for example. 

The future of banking is rapidly evolving and moving toward a platform economy driven by data. To keep up with the fast-moving digital age of banking and maintain its leadership in the industry, Deutsche Bank needed to adopt new technology and develop a digitally-expert workforce.

So Deutsche Bank set the following strategic goals for their technologists: 

1. Technical experts exist at all levels, from junior associates to leadership 

2. At least 70% of the staff regularly practice hands-on technical skills

3. In-house technical subject matter experts who stay current with leading technologies 

4. Establish a learning culture to attract, retain and develop world-class engineers

Deutsche Bank’s solution for innovating for the future is through upskilling initiatives. The results are beyond impressive—and even surpassed Deutsche Bank’s expectations. By investing in upskilling initiatives, Deutsche Bank was able to support its retention efforts in the following ways: 

• They enhanced their Global Graduate Training Program, which upskills current and new engineers, developing them into world-class talent for their application and infrastructure teams

• They created a culture that encourages continuous skill development, resulting in diverse teams that can keep up with the evolving digital age

• Tech leaders gained insights into learners and provided an excellent baseline to connect them with learning critical to their role

• And most importantly, they replaced in-person training with custom, virtual learning paths that introduce essential topics and technologies at Deutsche Bank

The overall result is that Deutsche Bank now provides more comprehensive access to training materials on GCP to at least 2,000 people and counting, fostering an inclusive culture that attracts, develops and retains world-class talent.

Investing in upskilling opportunities is one of the best investments organizations can make in retaining top talent. Employees who feel invested in are more likely to stay with your organization.

Find out more (and see the data to back this up) in our new report.