Employee loyalty crisis

Recently, an advertising company that has begun to take shape has lost a large number of creative designers. At present, a big order needs to be supplemented by senior designers urgently. The boss got angry and ordered the personnel director to recruit people as soon as possible. A week later, the personnel director was very happy and found a headhunting relationship. Finally, he found a well-paid person. But when the boss came to see her, he told her a short story: the labor agreement had just been drawn up, and the newcomer called and said that he could not resign, because the original company wanted to give him a 50% salary increase, because the original company was desperate, and he was one of the last outstanding designers who jumped ship.

Similar stories are not uncommon, especially in big cities such as Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai. From the perspective of enterprises, the regularity and continuity of job fairs are obvious. Among the many assessment indicators of human resources department, such as the increase in turnover rate of employees in key positions and the decrease in employment rate; From the perspective of employees, "knowledge vagrants" are everywhere. A financial expert, after getting an MBA, worked in five companies in three years. The public relations manager of a successful portal company is a woman under 30 years old. She has worked in nine companies before, including large companies and small startups. There are also many incidents of collective job-hopping and collective resignation. Everything shows that the crisis of employees' loyalty to the enterprise is more prominent.

So how to understand the problem of high-speed employee turnover and loyalty crisis?

First of all, China's talent market has entered the stage of high-speed flow, and it is multi-directional cross-flow. Originally, the flow of talents was one-way, only "going up the mountain" (from small cities to big cities for employment) and not "going to the countryside" (from small cities to big cities for employment). Now regional mobility has obviously accelerated, both "going up the mountain" and "going to the countryside"; In the past, more people went abroad, and fewer people returned to China as "turtles". Now it also shows the characteristics of "two-way convection"; In the past, the range of career choices was small, but now it is more and more extensive; In the past, I served a unit for a long time, but now the average service time of each enterprise employee is obviously shortened; In the past, the job nature of the post was relatively stable, but now the job nature and job content are beginning to change, and new job demands are constantly emerging, which inevitably requires employees to learn new knowledge and skills, and the job content will become more abundant. Without these changes, it may be difficult to understand the phenomenon of frequent job-hopping and loyalty crisis.

Secondly, the era of talent sovereignty, winner takes all, and human capital taking precedence over financial capital advocated by theoretical circles is far from coming, or it is far from reality. At present, China's employment market is basically in the era of "capital monopoly", and many enterprises are still in the primitive accumulation of capital stage. In essence, the importance of talents mostly stays in words. The general labor force can only be completely obedient in the communication with enterprises, and human resources are still in a weak position in the "negotiation" between employers and employees. As the backbone managers, a small number of human capital have little chance to gain advantages or even equality in the "dialogue" with capital, so they can only vote with their feet and resign.

Third, professional loyalty replaces corporate loyalty. How to understand employee loyalty? In my opinion, the most effective symbol is contribution, investment, value creation and its effectiveness, not the length of service. The loyalty of employees with short working hours but great value contribution is much higher than that of veterans with long service hours but mediocre performance. For enterprises, it is necessary for employees to flow reasonably, but excessive flow is a manifestation of low loyalty and reflects some problems in company management. From the perspective of internal fairness, people who create more value and distribute less value have higher loyalty at the same time. On the contrary, people who create less value and distribute more value are loyal on the surface and serve for a long time, but in fact their loyalty is very low. They are exploiting the wealth created by others for the enterprise.

Working in a powerful company all the year round is no longer a sign of success in life. People need economic security more than job security. Now people can have more ways to obtain economic security, especially employees in the high-tech and knowledge-based service working environment. They are loyal to an industry, a professional technology, or a job function, not a specific enterprise.

In other words, professional loyalty replaces corporate loyalty, and in the long run, they are more inclined to pursue the maximization of personal professional value.

Of course, loyalty to the profession does not mean giving up loyalty to the enterprise completely. As far as talents are concerned, we should fully understand our own value and the needs of enterprises, and realize the transformation from blind flow based on short-term interests to reasonable flow based on long-term development. It should be noted that frequent job-hopping and exorbitant prices are all manifestations of talents' lack of rational understanding of their own values and high expectations. It not only increases the risk of the enterprise, but also makes the talents themselves bear huge risks. In the flow, individuals also have to pay huge direct costs and opportunity costs, including organizational capital and environmental capital. It is impossible to adapt to the work and organizational environment and accumulate experience overnight, and too frequent mobility is not conducive to the long-term development of individuals. For talents, job-hopping is only a means to raise prices, and it is fundamental to cultivate core expertise and ability at work, create value for enterprises and increase their own value.

At the same time, we should see that in metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai, frequent employees are mostly immigrants from other places, and the quality of work and life needs to be improved, especially the sense of belonging and job stability is seriously lacking. Frequent job-hopping is indeed a helpless move. Many enterprises are too lacking in humanization, and a loyalty crisis is inevitable. Originally, all these factors were beneficial to enterprises. As long as it is done a little better, it is easy for employees to extend their service hours, including salary, welfare or corporate culture construction, which is also the driving force for employee loyalty.

From the micro level, there are still many problems and deficiencies in the internal management of many enterprises, or there is a lot of room for improvement, some of which are caused by the objective environment:

1. Most small and medium-sized enterprises in China are in the primary development stage, and many industries have obvious market turbulence, great uncertainty, unstable market business and high brain drain rate. Therefore, the law of talent demand is difficult to predict or control, the management of unstable human demand is more difficult, and human resource planning is of little value. On the one hand, when important people are needed, there is no project/business, rigid labor costs increase, and enterprises are in a dilemma.

2. The recruitment channel is single and the recruitment effect is poor. There are few recruitment methods that enterprises can adopt, the cost of newspaper advertising and on-site recruitment is high, the online advertising is convenient but ineffective, the intermediary is false, and the information is asymmetric, which leads to the ineffective docking between job seekers and employers. Invalid recruitment and frequent recruitment have brought too high direct and indirect costs to both supply and demand sides. For example, the recent phenomenon of "labor shortage" in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong and other places is not only the lack of competitiveness in wages and salaries, but also the underdeveloped recruitment channels in the talent market, insufficient network coverage, and immature business operation mode of industrial value chain resources.

3. Staff training and development management issues are outstanding. Many companies are short of basic training, and human resource planning is seriously inadequate, let alone career planning and implementation. But the author believes that at this point, enterprises should not be demanding. Most enterprises in China are still in the chaotic stage of basic management and human resources system planning.