ERM – Employee Relationship Management

Another fashion has caught on!

Yes, I have no doubt that now is the turn of CRM (Client Relationship Management). We are finally going to retain our clients!

Before we were “Planning Enterprise Resources” (ERP – Enterprise Resource Planning). Now we have discovered that the axioms that we have been hearing all our lives are finally to be taken care of. I am talking of maxims such as:

“The customer is always right”;
“The customer is the reason for our existence”;
“Complaints are welcomed”.

Is it possible that only now has it become essential to retain clients? Only now are there systems capable of “discovering the heart” of the client to be struck by “Cupid's arrow”? Of course not! All this sounds a bit familiar: “Now we have finished the Vasco da Gama Bridge, our priority is now the motorway to the Algarve.

Indeed a consultancy that used to have 300 professionals in ERP could not have them simultaneously in CRM. Companies that used to be organising their back office, did not want to be simultaneously intervening in their front office. I fear that the problem of poor links between training and enterprises has continued and, in faculties, like ERP subjects, CRM subjects will appear when this concept is already out of fashion.

Indeed, I would like to propose the next fashion: ERM – Employee Relationship Management. I propose it right now, so that we can start thinking about it and preparing ourselves for it.

The objectives of ERM, as a concept, would be very simple. Let us see.

1) To attract/To captivate, in order to be able to choose
ERM would consist of designing marketing for the company, perceiving the needs of the people we would like to recruit. Essentially, it would amount to answer the question “Why work in our company?” and to create a structured project to design the position considering that the trio functions/responsibilities/challenges.

2)  To recruit, not buy
To adapt the job offer/salary, in other words, product/price, in order to make it competitive.
What is recognised here is the importance of the first point – captivating professionals on the basis of their needs – in order for the company not to have to “buy” the professional! When everything is more or less the same, the “client” always chooses depending on the price!

3)  To maintain, not retain
To retain the professional implies being capable of convincing them to stay – even if they have decided to leave. It implies responding to their complaint with something like: “I am really sorry but this won't happen again”.

Having us, Portuguese the theory of an answer for everything and an innate capacity to get round situations, we can recognise that to manage professionals in a company involves a concern to keep them satisfied. For this purpose, there are now tools that can be structured under this “umbrella heading”, that is, according to the objective of keeping the professional happy (examples: 360º Assessment; Performance Assessment; Incentive Bonuses, etc.).

Having said this, we have two alternatives. Firstly, we carry on wasting time: offering counter-proposals to those who want to leave; offering them a hasty promotion; creating a retention bonus; paying with stock options that cannot be exercised in the short term. Secondly, we can finally build the motorway, in other words, make the professionals who are required by the development of the company stay, listening to them and maintaining them.

Those who change will change for the good!

They will boost the economy with their entrepreneurship. They helped the company and will now help another one or else will do something that will work out better at another company than at ours. And then, long live change!