LifeScience ORG has been working with Prof. Amy Edmondson (Harvard Business School) and Prof. Mark Mortensen (INSEAD) to create a benchmark for European life science ventures. The iEVP is being carried out by 28 of our members.
Are you giving your employees what they want and is it what they need?
RESULT DAY
Whether you are in Boston, Oxford or Zurich a highly competitive labour market has made attracting and retaining talent a major challenge for life science employers.
In order to retain talent, many companies are following a similar basic strategy: Ask people what they want and try to give it to them (here and now). But is that the right approach?
“Temptingly simple as this response is, it can be a trap. It tends to focus discussions on the material aspects of jobs that are uppermost in employees’ and recruits’ minds at the moment. In the past the foremost issue was often pay, but most recently it has been flexibility - notably, remote and hybrid work. And while material offerings are the easiest levers to pull (you can decide to give a bonus tomorrow) and are immediately appreciated, they’re easy for competitors to imitate, and their impact on employee retention is the least enduring. An overreliance on them can set up a race to the bottom as employers strive to outbid one another for talent.“
Research at Harvard Business School and INSEAD has shown that there may be a much better approach - one that improves hiring and retention and shifts the focus of leaders and employees alike from what they want in the moment to what they need to build a thriving and sustainable future for the organization and for themselves.