Powered By Talent Lite: Talent Retention

Powered By Talent is Northern Ireland’s only conference series dedicated to a business’s most important asset, its people. In advance of the main conference on May 22^nd, 2019, the Abacus Talent Group are proud to present three supporting seminars on ‘Talent Attraction’, ‘Talent Retention’ and ‘Talent Development’.

The second of our three half-day seminars ‘Retention’ took place at Ten Square Hotel in Belfast City Centre on Thursday 14^th February. Attended by 62 delegates from more than 28 organisations, the feedback from the seminar has been overwhelmingly positive, reaffirming the organiser’s belief that talent is top of the discussion agenda.

With hot tea and coffee’s in hand and after a brief welcome by host Justin Rush of the Abacus Talent Group, the presentations began.

First up, Barry Shannon with ‘The A-Z of retention through a time of change’. Barry, has over 15 years’ of experience working at a senior level in Human Resources within public, private and third sector organisations, he has extensive experience in delivering key strategic and operational results while managing teams of HR professionals. Barry definitely shared many key pointers on how to manage staff retention during periods of change.

Key messages the audience took away included:

• Being honest with employees when going through a period of change.
• How to manage the fear factor of fight or flight during a period of change.
• Communication is key in a period of uncertainty.
• Having empathy can go a long way.
• Informing and reassuring current employees can help with retention levels.

Next was Emer Hinphey with ‘Retaining Talent – Focus on the Human in Human Resources’. Emer leads a team that provides a portfolio of services across the areas of business transformation, talent management, learning & development and outsourced HR. She is an Occupational Phycologist and Chartered HR Professional recognised as one of Ireland’s leading commentators and advisors on people strategy. Emer provided the audience with HR theories that would help lead to better talent retention.

Key messages the audience took away included:

• Is your relationship with your employees designed around their needs or yours?
• What employees want from the company they work for.
• Ways in which business can improve their employee retention levels through gathering data, changing internal structures, improving diversity in the workplace.
• How managers play an important role in retaining employees.

After a quick comfort break the final speaker of the day, Ciaran McCallion gave his talk on ‘Retention Discussion’.  Ciaran is part of Allen & Overy’s, local senior management team and is responsible for all aspects of their Human Resource function. During the last 18 months, Ciaran has led a major initiative to support the further growth of the business, a key element of this initiative was to build upon the retained talent based in Belfast. Ciaran provided the audience with proven ways in how he helped improve Allen & Overy’s staff retention levels in their Belfast office.

Key messages the audience took away included:

• What drives engagement
• How employee retention was affecting Allen & Overy’s Belfast Office
• Allen & Overy’s Belfast offices retention strategy
• How to improve candidate and new hire experience

After the final speaker, the gathered audience partook in a live Q&A with the guest speakers. Topics covered included;

• How to deal with counteroffers from an employer and employee perspective.
• How to foresee and manage change when buying over another company.
• How to get senior executives to realise that managers play a part in talent retention.
• How much emphasis is on the employee to best manage their own retention plan.
• What is the sweet number of managers to employee ratio, plus much, much more.

Thank you to all of those that attended, we look forward to seeing you at the next instalment in March on Talent Development. To pre-register your interest for future Powered By Talent events, please visit www.poweredbytalent.com/get-tickets/

#PoweredByTalent #TalentAttraction #TalentRetention #TalentDevelopment