The talent freedom pledge, free your team
Every company poaches talent from other companies but no one says it out loud. Most companies spend a lot of money and time to retain their talent with restrictive rules. What if these practices were a collective mistake? What if sustaining talent freedom would benefit all stakeholders: employees and companies?
Almost all companies are looking after their team like a jealous lover. When someone leaves, it’s all about drama. A departure is perceived as a failure.
Huge resources and tactics — from binding to incentives — are set to prevent employees from leaving the company. In France, social laws have created a lot of practices that contain the phenomenon (very long notice periods, non-compete agreements etc).
Most employees are afraid to leave. From their perspective, sharing their departure is most of the time a fearful step. Wanting to make a change and start a new adventure makes us feel like traitors.🙀
What if all these convictions were the wrong path? What if mobility was an opportunity for both employees and companies? What if this collective anxiety was blinding us? 🙈
Refusing change, isn’t that a first step to the end? Isolating yourself is forgetting about innovation, new ideas, diversity and a window to the outside world. It’s stopping to grow with others whoever you are.
Why are we spending so much time and resources to hold our team hostage rather create a work frame that makes them stay?
👋 Silicon Valley vs Jersey Shore
Let’s look at a point of view from the US, in a very good NPR article.
New Jersey was the country center of innovation back in the 50’s and state of Thomas Edison. “If you were going to place a bet on whether it was going to be New Jersey or Northern California and you placed that bet, say, in 1950, where would you put your money?” Leslie says in the NPR article. “You’d obviously put it on New Jersey.”
70 years later, innovation is an old memory in New Jersey. Silicon Valley won the battle.
The East Coast had become “insular, isolated, self-contained.”, explain Leslie in the article. Why? Because of companies loyalty obsession.
Talents have moved to Northern California where nobody would expect you to stay more than 5 years in the same position. Where creativity, entrepreneurship, and mobility are fostered. Where law is on the side of the free movement and no-poaching policies are illegal.
Where people stay an average of 2.5 years in the same company. And where companies fight for the best talents.
🆓 Set your team free
Let’s not repeat the same mistake!
The European startup ecosystem would most likely benefit from more talent freedom. Mobility sustains the sharing of best practices and helps new ideas come to life. Diversity enriches ideas, helps us take better decisions and lets us execute at our strongest.
From an employee perspective, no-poaching policies are unfair, useless and patronizing. Are all employees reckless and not autonomous? Sustained mobility helps people grow as individuals and as a team.
We, at Alan, are convinced that freeing people from your team is highly beneficial for both sides:
- It would put gentle pressure on companies on employee happiness
- It would help us grow as a company and as individuals and respect a fundamental right: freedom
- It would foster best practices and ideas circulation.
At Alan, we pledge for self-improvement as a team. And, we would be happy for our folks to take great opportunities.
We acknowledge that it can be counter-intuitive to say that free your team is the best way to keep them and attract best talents. It creates a trustworthy relationship. And it will be even easier for you to hire if your company is the step for a brilliant career.
✍️ Join the movement, sign the talent freedom pledge
Come and join us. We propose to favor team freedom with the poaching pledge.
Hereunder some of the rules we commit to:
- Be transparent and open. We stop blacklists. We are ok and happy that our team is contacted by other companies.
- Be polite and smart. When it’s no, it’s no, we won’t be pushy.
- Be accurate. We won’t send massive emails and only write to people we think could fit in our culture.
- Be moderate. We won’t contact more than 3 persons within one company under 100.
- Be explicit. We share job description, who we are looking for and why.
- Be constructive. We share our story and objectives. We help our team get onto their next adventure.
- Be fair. We won’t ask our team to stay more than a month prior to leaving.
Join our movement for a new way of working based on transparency, freedom, ownership, and trust.
A more inclusive and benevolent world, that helps people and organization to grow.
#FreeTalent
