A recent survey carried out by the Chartered Management
Institute (CMI) and Xpert HR reveals that between September 2010 and September
2011 the number of managers resigning from their job has more than doubled, passing
from 3.9% to 9.4%.
Despite the labour market is not really at its best, employers
are currently experiencing serious difficulties both in attracting and
retaining quality staff. More in particular, from the recruitment point of
view, employers are finding it difficult to recruit individuals with the desired
skills and capabilities. This result is actually made even harder to achieve
because of their inability to offer individuals attractive salary packages.
Things are not going any better from the retention point of
view. The rate of employers reporting talent retention difficulties has, in
fact, increased from 31.7% to 55%, despite managers have received an average 3.1%
salary increase, i.e. a 13% growth vis-à-vis the previous year.
The CMI said that 1 in 10 managers have possibly resigned
just because they have received better offers (which, considering the relevance
of the phenomenon, should slightly be in contrast with the current employers inability
to offer better reward packages, unless a real war for talent is underway), but
it is also very likely that many of them have just simply left the profession.
Nonetheless, this trend is rather worrying considering that the UK Government
is estimating a need for 544,000 additional managers by 2020.
Once again, the best solution could be represented by
affective and well designed total reward packages. Though understanding employers’
difficulties to offer individuals better reward packages, in fact, the CMI urge
employers having recourse to non-financial reward approaches in order to retain
quality staff. As suggested by Kristopher Kinsella, acting Chief Executive of CMI,
in fact: “A company that does not work hard to retain its employees and invest
in its people will find itself in a difficult situation given we already have a
shortage of high quality managers. Strong managers are the lifeblood of
effective organisations and too many employers are realising this too late.”
