The Retention Practices at Marks & Spencer
By: Anika Raisa Khan
213325337
Staffing Organizations, HRM 6100 – Fall 2014
Dr. Christa Wilkins
York University
December 12, 2014
Abstract
This paper outlines the reasons behind the high rate of turnover at Marks and Spencer and analyzes the issues with retention bonus and succession planning as their retention strategies. Furthermore, this paper gives suggestions and recommendations to M&S in order retain their key talents by introducing family friendly policies, ensuring competitive salary and benefits, career advancement and professional growth, using evidence based practices for recruitment and selection decisions, feedback mechanisms and lastly training and development opportunities.
…show more content…
With the retirement of the baby boomers, M&S has taken up succession planning as a talent management process. The key individuals are informed that they will be the successors to the line managers and as a result it has been seen within the company that the level of trust and faith in the company has increased and employees now feel that they are an important part of the organization. While this is one of the vital ways to retain key talents, a few issues that they are facing is that the line managers are not too happy about the fact that they have successors in place. Their levels of insecurities have risen and I feel that the reason behind the insecurity and the discomfort is because the communication has not been done in a proper way. Furthermore, due to the fact the policy is still very young, a lot of information is unknown and proper tools such as set criterias for selection of successors has still not been unearthed. According to the government of Alberta, Human Services (2012), the five steps of succession planning includes creating a demographic profile of the employees, establising the positions in order to identify the roles and qualities, creating the profiles for the job, establishing and identifying the potential employees and lastly implementing the development plans for transfer to knowledge. This process need to be in place in a professional manner that M&S has yet to establish and create the culture of retaining employees through this