Employee Retention - Invest, Reward, Respect

The success of any budding or existing SME lies in its team of dedicated and productive employees working with it. As a management initiative, it is necessary to retain potential employees and reward them from time-to-time. A study has established that 62 per cent of SMEs face hurdles in recruiting and retaining staff over a period of time.

Invest in your employees
Often, companies invest in a wide amount of infrastructure to train their employees for better production and losing them because of a lack in retention skills can prove to be a big loss. SMEs especially need to prepare their HR processes to save themselves from losing valuable employees. Also, competitors do not hesitate in poaching potential workforce from other companies and may cause damage to the companies by offering their employees better incentives. 

Retain your employees with competitive wages

Competitive Wages
There are a number of ways in which an organization can retain their trusted employees. Paying competitive wages is one of the most important methods to hold existing employees. Also, providing your employees a reasonable amount of flexibility in their jobs can prove to be beneficial. A variety of benefits such as changes in schedule, fixed shifts, leaves for personal matters and family-supporting initiatives can also be crucial. Long-term employees need to be appreciated for their long service. Encouragement to them also proves to be a good example for other employees who realize that the company appreciates their commitments. Simple incentives such as health insurance, benefit packages could support them in making a decision to be with the original employer. It also offers the SMEs an additional advantage over the competition.

Respect your employee
Another key area in employee retention is respecting the employee and offering them space and support. Individualized work desks, promoting healthy relationships, and providing supportive trainings are some of the steps which can be taken by a company. Promoting interpersonal communication is also crucial for supporting existent and new employees. Various communication initiatives such as focus groups, attitude surveys, hotlines, etc. can help them in corresponding about their needs and requirements. A good employer must know what his employee wants. 

Make it transparent with your employee

Retention bonuses are another important step in retaining an employee. SMEs often face a lot of difficult situations such as mergers, acquisitions, financial difficulties, etc. It is vital in those times that companies release retention bonuses to support their employees and retain them. Also, it is better to release the amount over a period of time rather than pay it as a lump sum.

Managing a new hire
In worst cases, one may have to lose out on trusted employees and can benefit from new hires who would be more eager in their performance, would be cheaper to afford and can grow up to be a potential addition to the workforce. The only cons to a new hire would again be the question of reliability and standard requirements for training and nurturing which may take precious time of the employer. 

It is always difficult to find skilled workers and more so, in the times of a tough competitive market and financial meltdown. It always makes sense to retain one’s most effective workers.

How relevant is R&D to SMEs?

The Indian market is developing at an accelerating rate and with rapid globalization, the contribution of technological potential is critical for any firm’s survival or growth. R&D is required to develop distinctive technological competencies and is vital to imbibe external technologies. Relying only on the strategy of reverse engineering and innovative cost-effective processes would simply be insufficient to support under the new technology policy regime.

While initiating an R&D project, Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have to consider thoroughly whether the particular research is necessary for their business and if it would deliver the expected results. They also need to examine what is their exact purpose from the research which can dictate its methodology and also clarify the kind of partners required for the project. 

In SMEs, research helps in a number of ways including bringing innovation to existing products or developing new ones. It helps the company in accessing new customers and entering new export markets besides offering an unparalleled edge over the competition by increment in sales, turnover and growth in business. R & D also facilitates global collaboration leading to an intensification of international contacts between SMEs and other companies involved in the field. 

 Indian manufacturing firms of various sizes (small, medium or large) are often found to have a low incidence of in-house R & D and have very less budget allocation for the same. Some of the industries, such as chemicals & chemical products, electrical & optical equipment, drugs & pharmaceuticals and machinery & equipment control about 80 per cent of the entire SME R & D of the country (as per a research by Jaya Prakash Pradhan, SPIESR). Incidentally, these industries are also in the top four across the various SMEs, in India and worldwide in their share in the R &D sector.

Initiatives such as EU-INCOOP-Inter-institutional Cooperation in EU are gaining prominence by bringing together experts from key areas of computing technology from India and EU. This association is expected to boost the IT industry and benefit SMEs in gaining valuable data for entering new markets and also help in understanding details about market dynamics in a developed economy.

Many countries also offer tax relief to SMEs conducting R & D supporting the fact that creation of innovative, high-value-added products and services boosts profitability and growth of such companies and economy of that nation.

Indian SMEs are supported by schemes such as SIDBI’s Technology Development and Modernization Fund, ISO-9000 Reimbursement Scheme and Credit Linked Capital Subsidy Scheme for Technology Upgradation, among others. The government also supports SMEs through direct incentives for promoting in-house R & D activities. Any industrial unit which has received recognition from the Department of Scientific & Industrial Research (DSIR) is given tax deduction equivalent to the revenue and capital expenditure spent on R & D. 

With a variety of tax initiatives by the government and the global market knocking at our doors, SMEs are safe in opting for a bigger budget allocation for R & D activities which could substantially improve their businesses.

Make Your Meetings More Productive With E.gg Timer

One of the biggest challenges in business today is to make meetings productive, while keeping time. Yes, time is of crucial essence here. Especially in Small and Medium businesses meetings extend with many ideas, many open ends and long term discussions. Everyone pitches in, but not much is achieved, while there is a lot of time which gets wasted. A meeting essentially scheduled for an hour extends and spills over very easily. And many times you don't even keep time as what you are focused more on is to achieve the objective for which the meeting was called for.

Keep your time now
One of the strongest ideas to keep meetings in time, everytime is to keep time. Generally people look at their watches during meetings to ensure everything is on time, but the presence of time is not felt as it is not visible to everyone at the same space and pace.

E.gg Timer is a simple application which has been developed for businesses to keep time strongly during meetings.

All you need to do to ensure everyone in a meeting is strict on time and maintains the time limit, is to start the e.gg timer on a computer system/ display it on a big wall/ space such that time ticking away ensures that no member in the meeting falls to keep time. Simply set the timer to as many minutes as you want and e.gg timer will start the countdown for you.

The screen capture below shows how e.gg timer works and how it displays time. It starts a countdown to the number of minutes you have defined for the meeting and obviously looking at the same, everyone in the meeting room is aware of the time passing by and hence the meeting gets structured in a flow and an objective is achieved within time. If not, you can always ensure that time spillage does not happen and the schedule is always maintained.

Team IndiaMART Knowledge Services is committed to enable SMEs with tools, tips and techniques to help them reach up the value chain and hence achieve the next level of growth. For more information on how you can create new opportunities for your business, drop in a comment to this post and we will get in touch with you!