Upping Our Game to Ensure Talent Retention

In today’s competitive world, talent management has become a strategic objective for companies in every sector of the economy. In the wake of the pandemic, companies around the world have had to reconfigure the way they organize their teams and workflow, and we are unlikely to ever return to what we previously considered “normal.”

Long-term employee retention can be achieved when team members establish genuine bonds with the organizational culture, which also contributes to improved performance. According to WTW — a global consulting firm in the areas of people — from a total of 837 global organizations surveyed in the 2022 Performance Reset Survey, those companies with a greater level of employee commitment to the organizational culture achieve a 48% higher financial performance than companies with low levels of commitment; and are likely to have 25% higher employee productivity than their industry peers.

With this in mind, taking measures to ensure employee well-being should be considered an investment that will bring benefits over time. At Element, we offer a comprehensive benefits package, including best in class medical and life insurance, access to wellness and support resources, and Employee Experience Programs. “Activate! Wellness,” one of our Business Resource Groups, provides resources for financial, mental, and physical health. During the pandemic, we introduced “Flexibility Within a Framework,” which allows for focus days and collaboration days to respect work-life integration.

Today, young professionals want to work in an organization with purpose and to feel that they can continue to learn. To this end, our employees have access to educational programs so that they can continue to grow and pursue their interests. Last year, we launched our learning experience platform Learn@Element, where our people can identify the skills they wish to hone, and track their development. Beyond supporting our employees, this also helps my area better manage and deploy our workforce assets more strategically. 

In order to ensure that communication flows within our organization, allowing midcareer professionals to have access to top management, we have established mentorship sessions with our Senior Leadership Team as well as a coaching program for leaders. These are one-on-one meetings that allow our people to increase their understanding of growth opportunities within the organization, which underlines our interest in their continued growth within the company. During 2022, we had the highest number of internal promotions, 10% of our workforce took the risk and now hold new positions.

It is an accepted fact that ensuring gender diversity (in addition to other types of diversity, such as socioeconomic, racial, and sexual preference) has a positive impact on a company's performance and its ability to innovate. In Mexico, we face challenges related to gender inclusion broadly, which are even greater within the transportation sector, where only 11.4% of those employed are women, a prominent gap that we are committed to help close. 

A correlation has been established between the creation of an inclusive workforce and the performance of work teams. Inclusion practices, like targeted development programs for women, improve a company's performance by up to 25%, according to a McKinsey study on Women in the Workplace 2022.

To make improvements, the leadership needs to come from the top. The same McKinsey study found that 80% of companies are expecting leadership to do more to promote inclusion. CEOs, senior managers, and board members must proactively communicate the importance of gender equality. We are proud that this year Laura Dottori-Attanasio assumed the position of global CEO of Element Fleet Management and that 40% of our board are women.

Ensuring our corporate values create a trickle down factor, we also have a supplier diversity program that can help drive social change, positively impacting the lives of women in the communities where we operate. At Element, when we purchase new vehicles for our customers’ fleets, we actively seek to include more minority- and women-owned or managed suppliers.

Finally, we cannot expect different results without changing the formulas used to obtain them. Establishing a diagnosis of the organizational culture and creating a roadmap to progress with explicit goals will help us move the needle. At Element, we are already making strides in achieving employee retention; this was evident in our 2022 employee engagement scores, which showed an overall engagement index of 81% globally, and 93% for Mexico.

Talent management should ultimately lead to talent retention and is crucial to running a high-performance organization. In today’s complex economic environment, finding new ways to adjust our corporate culture to encourage professional development and gender inclusion will give companies the competitive edge they need to be successful in any industry.