Talent Management of Knowledge Workers by Vlad Vaiman

Author:Vlad Vaiman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2009-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

6

The Customer–Employee Relationship Revisited: A New Perspective for Human Capital Management?

Regina- Viola Frey

Introduction

Retaining qualified and productive employees is an important goal for companies, since high turnover is costly (Rust et al., 1996) and diminishes organizational performance (Meifert, 2005). Thus, high churn rates also negatively affect a firm’s financial bottom line and its accumulated social capital (Griffeth et al., 2000; Koys, 2001). This problem is exacerbated by the demographical change in Europe, with its ageing societies and sinking birth rates ( Horx- Strathern and Horx, 2001). Hence, a ‘war for talent’ arises due to there being a smaller qualified workforce available and a higher demand for ‘knowledge workers’, especially in the professional services sector ( Horx- Strathern and Horx, 2001; Scholz and Stein, 2002; Terjesen and Frey, 2008). Professional services employees are especially difficult to retain, which is shown by the high turnover rates of professional service firms. This retention problem is caused by professional services employees’ loose contact with their employers. Many professional services employees work very closely together with their clients, and often remote from their employers. This situation makes many professional services employees, such as management consultants and planning engineers, more similar to contingent employees than ‘usual’ white- collar workers such as administrative staff (Lee and Mitchell, 1994; Lee and Maurer, 1997; Scott, 1998; Donnelly and Quirin, 2005). Because of these framing conditions, and the resulting influence of clients on professional services employees’ work environment, motivation, and satisfaction, we suggest considering clients for employee retention management.

The extant literature on employee retention focuses on ‘usual’ white- collar workers such as the administrative staff outlined. Interestingly, the main recommendation is retention tools, which are under the company’s direct control. Typical and common retention tools under the company’s direct control include career opportunities, remuneration, and training. However, for professional services employees, clients can even be seen as colleagues in a broader sense, since they work together intensely on a project basis (Schneider et al., 1980; Gertz, 2004; Ibarra, 2000; Bendapudi and Leone, 2002). Because of these special conditions, we suggest researching into the client–employee relationship, because this might yield promising insights for improving the retention of professional services employees.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.