Tapping into Motivators

As revealed in the Jigsaw research, today's Chinese talent pool is driven by some underlying motivators and drivers. For all companies operating in the China market and, in particular, for software outsourcing providers, a key employment and retention strategy may be to tap into these motivators and link compensation and benefits packages to these.

For software companies operating in China and providing outsourcing services to clients overseas, the business model has multiple benefits that can be leveraged significantly to provide powerful attraction and retention incentives.

Take the recognition trait, for example. There is huge kudos in China in working for a well known company. Therefore software outsourcing companies should consider brand building. For example:

• Design and implement a proactive and long term awareness campaign delivering key company messages that focus on leadership, corporate governance, and corporate social responsibility activities.
• Utilize blogs and bbs boards. This is where today's young Chinese express themselves without restraint. Hence it is regarded as the most powerful form of recommendation and word-of-mouth.
• Create a clearly defined brand culture. Ensure that everyone in your company knows what your brand stands for. Look at creating experiences in the workplace with things such as regular drinks, video nights, ping pong or pool matches.
• Sponsor a sports team. The company may be small but if it starts to win ping pong and football matches against the likes of Coca-Cola and IBM, the brand value will shoot up.
• Acknowledge individuals who perform exceptionally well or go over and beyond the call of duty.

Create an empowering environment for today's young Chinese, a group of budding entrepreneurs who like doing things for themselves.

• Build team's and divisions into mini companies.
• Offer the potential for even junior staff and junior management to control and run their own budgets.
• Instill accountability and responsibility into managers for retaining and training staff.

Tap into the restless nature of this generation by creating an environment which continually offers new experiences.

• Move people across teams
• Create and implement highly defined career paths
• Offer overseas work opportunities for varying degrees of time
• Run trainings in different environments and realize overseas training

More than any other nation, this generation in China thrives on knowledge.

• Proactively run in-house training programs. Many companies talk about this and few do it. Facilitate this via the hiring of a training coordinator and create your own in-house faculty.
• Focus on a range of skills training including technical and soft skills.
• Invite high profile, well regarded external trainers on site.
• Seek out world class overseas training courses for key staff.
• Build up a transferable skill set. For instance, English is critical to the success of offshore development centers, the attainment of a high standard of English provides computer engineers and programmers with a life long skill.
• Have a fun money fund so that people can experience new things totally unrelated to their jobs.

In addition to dovetailing compensation and benefits with the labor pool's key motivators, organizations should also look at ways in which they can reduce staff attrition.

Manager's role

Too often the role a manager plays in attrition is underplayed. Managers themselves will often cite external factors such as pay/compensation or the corporate environment.
• Provide your managers with tools to retain top talent and increase the number of times managers 'touch' employees.
• Build talent retention into your manager's personal objectives and performance based bonus.

Organization's role

• Review, and if necessary, revise the existing recruitment systems and policies. Research shows that these can significantly impact retention ratios.
• Ensure retention is an on-going priority. Track and measure attrition and attrition risks. In this way it is possible to see potential causes and evolving patterns.