Let’s Embrace Attrition and NOT run Away: Meenakshi Khera

The author of this article Meenakshi Khera is an HR Professional with more than two decades of comprehensive experience in end to end gamut of HRM in IT, Manufacturing, Hospitality & Health sector. She also happens to be the General Secretary, Professional Networking Group of India (PNGI) which is organizing HR Excellence Awards 2019 on coming SUNDAY, December 1. Asian Community News (ACN) Network is the Media Partner for the event. 

By Meenakshi Khera 

Oh No, s/he has put in her papers and I have no back up to execute the task. What do I tell my boss! I just heard that s/he has decided to leave our organization. The project will get delayed. How can I deliver to the customer now?

Aren’t these the worrying questions that we hear when employees leave the organization? Most times it feels like all hell has broken loose and the floor has given way!

It is indeed a loss (at times a big one) to lose employees but the fact remains that people will come and go and you cannot retain employees forever. So, attrition will always be there. That brings us to the moot point: should the focus be on controlling attrition, which seems the natural thing to do or should our attention be on reducing the impact of attrition? 

Let’s have a look at how both these alternatives seemingly have the same objective, but actually differ in their philosophy and thus the end results.

Reduce the rate of attrition: 

We frequently hear the following from our functional heads:

Our salaries are not the best and that’s why my sales guy left.

The HR policies are suffocating and not employee-friendly and that’s why my production engineer left

The culture of our company is very hierarchical / YES SIR and that’s why my finance executive left

The managers in our company are not mature enough and thus the junior employees leave us as they feel they cannot learn much here

The reward and recognition policies reek of nepotism making my process head felt neglected and quit because he needed a change.

Lack of self-development opportunities through training forced my professional Services lead to quitting.

Therefore, to reduce the rate of attrition, our focus automatically would be to suggest improvements in: 

Salaries (peg them at par with or at better levels than the market rate)

Policies (make them more employee-friendly)

Appraisals (offer annual increments higher than competitors)

Culture (more fun at work, better facilities for employees, open environment, etc.)

Reporting Managers (take them through a se

ries of leadership programs so that they become better mentors)

Skill Development(nominate your staff to series of skills development programs, to increase their confidence)

Also read: PNGI HR Excellence Awards 2019: Nominations reopened as top Cos make beeline for awards

However, many a time even with the best of efforts in the above areas, employees still leave. WHY?

Because, an individual who is happy with the salary, culture, etc. may still be unhappy with R&R policy that deprived him of the outstanding employee of the year award. An employee who is satisfied with the R&R, HR policies and salaries may quit due to lack of career/ skill development opportunities, and so on. Every employee differs on what s/he believes is important in the workplace and job

The point I am trying to make is that while improvements in salaries, culture, etc. will definitely bring down attrition (say from 25% to 15%), there would still be attrition.

So, that now takes me to the next moot point: Reduce the impact of attrition

The rate of attrition whether it’s 10% or 20% is just a number. By reducing the rate of attrition, we would probably save on recruitment costs but the real losses to the company could be much bigger than the savings on the cost of recruitment. They are as follows:

1. The company loses the specific and relevant knowledge and experience which possibly only that departing employee had.
2. Internal and client-facing projects could get delayed leading to a loss of reputation, delayed payments etc.
3. The exiting employee, if in sales, could take away clients resulting in big losses.
4. Valuable HR time that needs to go into strategy is spent on mundane transactions like recruitment, training etc.
5. The employee could have been instrumental in developing your best product. Programmers you have now may not be competent to manage that product leading to loss of clientele.

So the real losses are:

loss of clients, delayed cash flows, knowledge drain, cost of re-training, loss in productivity, delays in projects. All these lead to a loss of both money and reputation and require large investments in time and effort to regain.

Attrition is unavoidable.

You could plan to minimize it but when you focus on reducing the impact of that attrition, you will not lose sleep over employees leaving your organization.

Let’s now focus on how we could reduce the impact of attrition. Let me share one example here, which is IDENTIFY SKILLS AT RISK:

Step 1: Divide every department into ROLES. In sales, roles can be: front end sales, managing sales, making marketing campaigns, executing advertising etc. In technology, roles could be a programmer, project manager, architecting etc.

Step 2: For each role, list the skills required. A front-end salesperson must be a good listener, expressing, probing, qualifying and negotiating with expertise. A programmer has to be good in analysis, coding, unit testing etc.

Step 3: After listing out the skills, rate each employee against each skill.

Step 4: Once this is done, then identify areas where you have very few competent people etc.

THAT IS YOUR AREA TO PLAN FOR. 

Imagine, you did this exercise and figured that of the programmers you have, 9 are good in programming and only one is good in architecting and designing.

What would your next step be?

If you believed in reducing the rate of attrition, you probably would not have done this analysis and would have focused on salary increases and so on. You might have possibly retained all your programmers but lost your architect. Your attrition would be just 10% but the loss would be huge. Now you have no one to manage the designing of solutions for new clients. This would be a big impact loss.

However, if you worked on reducing the impact of attrition your focus would have been more on training the other 9 programmers on Architecting. As a result of which you may have lost 2 programmers (attrition 20%) but you would still have architects to help you

attract and retain new clients. Big impact losses averted!!!

LET’S EMBRACE ATTRITION AND NOT RUN AWAY. 

LETS PLAN TO REDUCE THE IMPACT OF ATTRITION