With the advent of the information revolution, knowledge has become the means to sustain competitive advantage and knowledge employees, the mainstream resource.
This gold-collar category of employees, with its high level of skill and expertise is extremely valuable to companies and therefore has created its own demand in this knowledge society.
Driven by new ideas and creations, they place a high priority to individual goals and professional growth. As a result, they have a different set of needs, aspirations and expectations than the other categories of employees. This brings greater challenges for the knowledge organisations to adopt innovative people management approach that can attract, motivate and retain them.
The knowledge employees are not restricted to the IT industry. This category also includes people such as the professionals in telecommunications and electronic industries, the academic professionals, researchers, lawyers, scientists, etc. IT professionals, however, typically represent this section of employees.
This article is based on the responses of over 400 IT professionals from leading Indian organisations, but can hold true for other knowledge employees and knowledge organisations as well.
Human needs that motivate employees are dynamic and complex. Employees' needs and aspirations are influenced by several external factors that include the educational level, standard of living, personal values, and job status.
Knowledge employees truly represent the highest stage of Maslow's model of hierarchy of needs, namely 'need for self actualization' where they may not be motivated by money alone, but other factors have greater relevance to them. They have predominantly 'post-modern values' which emphasize quality of life and not just wealth and security, and give high opportunities to self-expression, creativity, and in individual values.
To examine what factors attract and motivate knowledge employees, eight most preferred factors were identified and responses are collected. About two-third of the respondents are men and 70 per cent of them are below thirty years of age.
The IT professionals ranked their preferences that may motivate them to continue to work for the existing organisations out of the following choices:
It is interesting to note that a majority of the respondents believe that having cooperative seniors and group members is the most important factor for them to decide to continue or to change the organisation. This explains the importance of relationships at work for these professionals.
This supports the statement that 'people join the company but they leave managers, not companies.'
The opportunity that company provides for career growth is the second most important factor for the IT professionals and therefore lack of corporate strategy for career progression can be one of the major reasons of employees to change their organisation.
Close to this is the preference for a suitable work culture. This means how much autonomy the job provides, the creative opportunity at work and flexible timings of work are also found to be important factors for these employees.
The other preferences in the order of importance are skill enhancement opportunities, salary and incentives, company brand image, opportunity to go abroad and lastly the job security the company provides.
Less than one per cent of the IT professionals mentioned job security as the most important factor that influences their decision to decide the organisation they would work for. Lowest preference of job security explains that IT professionals are quite open to mobility. It is understandable as these knowledge employees have more job opportunities available and they do not necessarily expect job security from the organisation.
The employees' preferences have, however, not been the same across gender and age. Though cooperative seniors and team members remained the most important factors for all categories of employees, it is interesting to note that women professionals have given much higher preference to skill enhancement opportunities that company provides than men.
However, men are found more concerned about career growth prospects that the company provides to select the organisation they would like to work in. No significant gender-based differences are found in other dimensions.
Further, IT professionals above 30 years of age are found less concerned about the company's career growth opportunities than those below that age. It means that having a transparent career growth plan by the company can be a better retention strategy for the younger IT professionals. But for employees above 30 years of age training opportunities that the company provides is a greater motivator.
The level of education also influences employees' preferences. The analysis shows that education levels of employees have a significant but negative relationship with 'salary and incentives,' 'work culture,' and 'opportunities to go abroad,' which means that higher the level of education, relatively lower is the importance of salary and work culture and opportunity for foreign assignments as motivational factors.
Relation between the length of service and the employees' preference has also been traced. The only significant and positive relationship is found to be with company brand image, indicating that those who have higher work experience have preference to work for the organisation which has a greater brand image.
The number of knowledge employees is growing fast. It has been estimated that in advanced countries about 40 per cent of the employees today are knowledge employees while in certain industries such as IT, they are close to 100 per cent.
These gold-collar employees need to be treated differently. HR strategies must be reexamined in a knowledge-based industry like IT and should be designed with a proper understanding of their expectations and unique preferences. Work environment for these employees are significantly important which must be informal and less hierarchical in nature.
With the growing number of knowledge employees and considering their unique skills as well as preferences, the HR professionals need to demonstrate proactive HR strategies, quite different, innovative and well-researched from what are the popular practices.
This article is based on global empirical survey of IT professionals.
The author is Associate Professor, HRM, Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Lucknow.