Retaining the Loyalty of Finance Professionals

by Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, 16 January 2012

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topics:
Human Capital Management

tags:
Professional Development talent retention strategies

In this final part of a series of articles based on the CIMA report Ledgers to Leadership, we investigate the reasons for staff attrition amongst the finance function, and examine how organisations giving out mixed messages about their commitment to training in principle and in practice can lead to disappointment amongst recruits and the failure to realise the full potential of employees.

Reasons for leaving the company

Given the relative importance of people who are both business and technically competent, and the difficulty in recruiting these professionals, retention strategies will become ever more crucial in the war for talent.

With the ongoing transformation in the role of the finance function towards business partnering, and the ever increasing emphasis on both business and technical competency, it would perhaps not be surprising if finance professionals in mid-career felt that they had been somewhat ‘left behind’ because of a lack of exposure to business situations or appropriate training and development, and a lack of will on the part of organisations to retain them.

Reasons why otherwise highly valued finance personnel might leave an organisation could be as follows:

perceived lack of scope for promotion
desire to work in another country
career change
perceived lack of training and development opportunities
personal/family reasons
offer of a salary increase elsewhere

In fact, the lack of development opportunities is a reason for people to leave in only a minority (18%) of organisations; more common reasons for leaving are personal advancement in terms of salary increase (60%) and promotion (50%), as shown in Exhibit 1.

Click image to enlarge

Exhibit 1: Reasons for leaving the organisation

Career change is the third most frequent motivation for high calibre finance professionals to move on. This factor is particularly pronounced in Japan and the rest of Asia, an area where CIMA has seen that training and development support are weaker. This could point to a certain stagnation in the finance professional’s progression, thus prompting a change in direction.

Retention strategies

It appears, therefore, that training and development problems are not currently a significant issue in terms of retention of good staff. In part, this is because organisations, medium and large ones in particular, have a relatively good track record of using appropriate retention strategies, beyond simply raising salaries to match external offers, including:

personal development planning
formal talent management, for example structured training programmes
employee engagement initiatives, such as flexible working
exit management strategies, for instance interviews/surveys of leavers.

I was just reading the

Submitted by Zoom View on 4 April 2012 - 9:22pm

I was just reading the Tucson classifieds a few days ago and I saw many big companies looking for financial analysts. I guess that if you don't pay enough and if you don't offer promotion options some people will choose to quit and go somewhere else where they can achieve their goals.

Maybe financial specialists

Submitted by Daniel Green on 2 April 2012 - 9:39pm

Maybe financial specialists should try and organize global affiliate programs and that way the salary increase problem would cease to exist. I don't know how long it would take to design and implement such a network, but it could solve some real problems.

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