Dalip Raheja of The Mpower Group recently ran a piece here on Sourcing Innovation on how Old MacDonald Was Right — It Is About E-I-E-I-O when it comes to successful supply chains. And when it comes to performance, he’s right — it’s all about Adoption, Execution, Implementation, Optimization, and Utilization.
But when it comes to attracting, retaining, and growing talent, you have to really focus on creating the optimal work environment. According to a recent piece in Industry week, when hiring and retaining talent, it’s all about the three E’s: Experience, Exposure, and Education because employees need
- challenging assignments that allow them to develop new skills,
- opportunities to expand their network inside and outside of the organization to continue learning, and
- classes and mentoring to improve and gain new skills.
And the author is right. If your employees aren’t engaged, exposed, and enlightened, they won’t be energized by your organization. That means your stars will leave, and once high performers see their peers leaving, they won’t be very interested in joining.
However, it’s not the perfect recipe for an attractive environment as it misses two other key features of attractive work environments: Innovation and Inovlvement. Superstars want to innovate and build new products and solutions that make your customers’ lives better and they want to be involved in all aspects of the process from contemplation through design, development, and delivery. And they want to be informed when something happens good or bad (and asked for feedback). The don’t like a closed-door need-to-know environment and won’t stand for it. The want their E – I – E – I – E.