Attrition Blues: Myth & Reality Date:   Thursday , August 04, 2011 In the just concluded NASSCOM HR summit, I moderated a panel discussion on “How much is too much” when it comes to employee turnover. It evoked a lot of interest and provoked much different points of views at the event. As managers, all of us are obsessed with and worried about the invisible revolving doors we are battling with. The concern is real and for good reasons. Our on-time delivery and customer satisfaction depend a great deal on stable workforce. The cost of replacement is negatively impacting the not-so-high margins heavily. There is a general sense of helplessness on the part of all of us as managers. It is against this backdrop that the above Summit deliberated the issue at length. Opening the panel, I had a few key points and pointers to share. In a nutshell, these revolved around the following, not necessarily, anything out of the world though! *The HOBO Syndrome: Way back in 1974, Dr Ghisseli researched the challenge of employee turnover and presented his findings in American Psychologist. He observed that there has been an increasing desire on the part of employees globally to change from one job to another. He termed this attitude and behavior as “Hobo Syndrome.” This simply is the tendency of employees to engage in job-hopping behavior. In a hot market, this tendency or syndrome is even more heightened. Understanding this reality is helpful to manage our anxiety and often a desire to contain attrition. ? The ‘Shock’ Theory: Lee and Mitchell researched into the causes of voluntary turnover and published their findings in the Human Resource Management journal (Fall-2005). Their findings reveal that job dissatisfaction contributes much less to the employee turnover than different kinds of ‘shocks’ they experience from time to time. A shock is defined as a particular jarring event that initiates the intention to quit. The shock could be positive, neutral or negative, expected or unexpected, and internal or external. Typical examples are an unsolicited job offer, change in marital status, transfer to another location or company being subjected to a merger and the like. Lee & Mitchell examine four different paths that lead to employee quitting. Knowledge of this theory and how it works will be useful to understanding turnover in depth. ? Mali’s Law of returning Indian: With overseas job opportunities still commanding a lot of preference with knowledge workers, this law has its impact. Simply translated, this law implies: “for every Indian working overseas returning to India, there is another Indian of the opposite sex accompanying back to overseas through the institution called marriage!” This in effect means that whenever an Indian working overseas returns to India, expect one more to quit his or her job, get married and go back to find a job overseas! ? Lack of a progressive people management process: Perhaps the most frequent cause of employee turnover, organizations seldom realize that they need to pay significantly more attention to how they coach managers to manage people and how they measure their performance against this responsibility. Corporate Leadership Council studies suggest that employees rarely trade off the manager quality for any other benefit including more money. This is so very evident but why many organizations do not do anything about getting this right remains a puzzle! ? Simple supply-demand situation: Given that there is a huge demand for professionals with deep domain knowledge and engineering principles and given that most organizations have challenge in planning and grooming people for the jobs (thanks to the very nature of the industry), organizations resort to easy (in reality very difficult!) path of hiring away from other firms. But then, this becomes a circus when everyone does this to everyone else! Now that we know, what can we do about this? The issue is not so much about achieving a zero attrition situation. This is unrealistic. And this was not the case even during the 2009 depression. Employees did move. Most organizations averaged around 6-8 percent attrition. We are talking about how we as managers can do our bit to control and contain attrition to a manageable level. Here are some thoughts I shared during the panel discussion: ? Become good at profiling employees @risk: Smart managers always knew that attrition is hardly a surprise. Normally, employees give away symptoms of disengagement- loss of interest, withdrawal syndrome, dislike for travel, silence in meetings, change in dressing habits, becoming overcritical and cynical about almost anything and the like. We follow a 5-P framework that has helped us to profile the employees at risk. This framework covers assessing the situation around the employees on following parameters / criteria: *Performance: Employee performance levels, particularly noticeable dips *Penetration: on the salary band applicable to the employee grade, where is he or she now. Employees penetrated low will likely leave sooner than later *Pressure: Pressure of work either caused by the manager or even by the clients. Prolonged pressure at work makes people seriously consider change *Participation: Employee participation levels in organization-wide initiatives. *Personal issues: Personal issues often trigger the desire to leave. Organizations can define their own framework for profiling employees who may be at risk. And once the profiling is done, managers have to engage with the employee at risk to fix the cause of the problem – the sooner the better. ? Strengthen the internal job market: Yet another obvious tool that managers can leverage. It is an irony of sorts that most of us lose employees on grounds of better responsibilities elsewhere and we ourselves are constantly looking for people who can shoulder higher responsibilities. Companies like GE and IBM leverage internal talent before they explore bringing in external candidates. Sadly enough, organizations pay a price for some of their managers unrelenting to let their best folks go and work for another unit of business in their own company. And in the process, they end up losing the good employees to the competition. In good organizations, an important measure of promoting a manager is to assess them on how many of their team members were offered by them to other teams! *Career Coaches: Employees do need a coach at work, especially those that are at cross roads on career issues. Identifying good managers and technical specialists with an aptitude for coaching and then training them in coaching processes will be very helpful. Coaches can help shape the aspirations of employees, guide them into making use of multiple opportunities that a growing organization always presents and clarifying career myths. *Manager action trackers: It also pays to track the progress and effectiveness of the employee engagement interventions including communication initiatives such as one-on-ones, skip level meetings, round tables and the like. One of the most frequent comments from exiting employees is : ‘if only my manager spent 10 percent of the time he spent after I put in my resignation before it is too late!” Trackers help to measure how well some of the well-intentioned initiatives are implemented and provides senior managers with an opportunity to do course correction with their first-line managers. In the final analysis, attrition control may not be all that difficult. What makes it manageable is proactive action on the part of managers. Back to good old wisdom from grandma: “A stich in time saves nine.” Are managers listening? The author is Executive Vice President & Chief People Officer, Symphony Services. He can be reached at mahalingam.c@symphonysv.com