Retention Strategies from 5000 Year-Old Indian Wisdom on Human Resource Management

Efficiency, effectiveness and survival of any organization anywhere, whether big or small, depend on the recently rediscovered human capital. Thus acquisition of qualified human resources, developing them and maintaining them becomes all the more important. Employee turnover not only reduces the human capital in an organization but also organizational productivity besides incurring the costs of acquiring human resources for replacement and developing them. Hence increased emphasis is being laid on retention of human resources now a days especially with the onset of recent Revolutions such as Information Technology, which is labor intensive in nature, supported by increased globalization. Text books on HRM suggest that retention problem is caused by organizational factors, lack of competitive compensation and rewards, inappropriate job design and work, lack of good employee relationships, etc. The prescriptions, by the text books, on retention intervention are: presenting the realistic job preview during the recruitment process, matching applicants to jobs, effective orientation and training after selection, giving competitive, fair and equitable pay, create opportunities for career advancement, fair and non-discriminatory treatment and enforcement of HR policies, etc. However this paper attempts to rediscover the Indian wisdom on HRM with special reference to the causes of employee turnover and the retention strategies as spelt out more than 5000 years ago in Panchatantra, a classical work on management, yet very relevant even to this day!