Stemming Attrition: An Insight

I have been working in the hot favorite IT industry since some time. And one issue I have seen organizatons grappling with is attrition. Every day, more and more org. are entering India, more and more work is being outsourced to India, with the result that skilled manpower, or even manpower, is in shortage today. The way by which the new players can enter the market is either to recruit or discover hidden talents and put them on projects, OR to poach existing talents in other org. and get running.

This scenario has resulted in an “Employee Driven Market” rather than an “Employer Driven Market“. Org. run after employees to get their work done, rather than employees running after them to get themselves recruited.In such a volatile scenario, for a successful org. it is as important to recruit skilled ppl, as to retain them.This is what I am gonna emphasize in this post.

So, what is attrition, what forces it to happen, and is there a way to stem to rot, if not completely stopping it? Are there any answers.Let’s examine.

An employee leaves a job either for a better prospect, better money, better profile, better work env., OR coz he’s either pissed off with his boss, or the work culture, or the kind or quality of work he is doing. It is said that employees don’t leave their companies, they leave their bosses.I will not discuss this issue here, but will try to focus on the other kinda employees.

Many a times I have seen ppl hv left organizations due to job dissatisfaction which encompasses
- Poor quality of work
- Monotonous work
- Lack of challenges
- No prospect of reskilling
- Strengths not getting utilized i.e. not given work they are good at

I feel stemming attrition is the biggest challenge for HR in today’s IT industry.So, how can they go about their job.Let’s look at a scenario first.
IT industry works on an ad-hoc manner. They don’t hv ppl of certain skillset available at a particular point in time.They just make one of their employees learn the technology and start working.With the fast changing pace of technology, employee along with the company has to be on it toes to learn it.So, what happens is an employee learns a technology, implements it in a project, and then becomes slave to it, in a sense he is the one who has implemented it, who has spent months or s.times yrs. mastering it. So, now when the implementation is done, and there is very less scope of him learning anything more in it, he is left with no options. He can’t move out of the project, as the company can’t find his replacement.He gets bogged down by this, doing monotonous work day-in & day-out, and one fine day decides to move out of the organization to work on sthg different.If you analyze this scenario properly, the employee doesn’t want to move out of the org., but the org. forced him out.

Another scenario can be when an employee is getting a lot of diff. kinda work, but is losing interest in wht he does, or is not getting interest in wht he does. He has no qualms with the org. as such, but somehow is not able to build up his enthusiasm in his work, for which he indirectly blames the org. Slowly this indifference gets converted into resentment and the employee decides to walk out.
Who is at fault here? Could the org. had taken some precautionary steps to stop such ppl from moving out.

Here are some of my suggestions.
I feel in an IT industry, a typical kind of job involves interest for not more than 3 or max 6 months. Employee rotation is very important after this period of time.If a person can’t be shunted out of an assignment, at least his role and responsibilities can be swapped within the particular team working on an assignment.E.g. A software developer does out and out coding, and a tester does out and out Testing.These are specialist roles and a swap may not seem advisable at the start. But with the lapse of the timeframe I mentioned, resources can be swapped within the team. Of course, this is a high risk scenario, but is a sure shot hit with the employees if the manager can pull it off.

Another suggestion is to create backup resources. This idea can be pretty useful for a big org. which keeps no. of ppl on bench at a time, but can still work for a smaller org., if implemented tactfully.Generally, a team working on projects comprises of the no. of members being billed to the client. Generally, to overcome lack of skillsets or to make use of the existing employees, a company involves more no. of ppl to get the work delivered at any cost; means 2-3 ppl may be working on a module for which the company doesn’t hv a qualified resource, though the billing is only being done for a single resource. This is a pretty common scenario in industry.After all, such a large population needs to be fed.How can this idea made to work to stem attrition? Let me explain.

A company can profile all the members of a team, and then can push new or the existing resources into newer roles or greater responsibilities.By the time the fatigue may start to creep in the team, its tht time when to push for this process change(ideally as I said this period can be 3-6 months).
Let’s talk it out with an example:
Imagine a project implementation of 6 months.After that, the project goes into a support phase, or doesn’t involve much critical changes as such.What happens normally in such cases is, that most of the team moves out after implementation, and some support guys are left to clean the shit. They grow so bored out of their work in 3 months, that they wanna either move out of the project, or if the company doesn’t let them do it, move out of the company.What can be done is that those ppl sitting on bench or being released can be pushed to take over their role before the fatigue factor sets in. This time duration is project specific and has to be decided upon by the manager on a case-to-case basis.
What it does is, it helps the employee on a project to keep tht enthu running, not get bogged down with the monotonous work; and secondly for the back-up resource, it puts up a great opportunity to learn sthg new.Ideally, i wud wish this new resource stepping into the shoes to be a notch lower in his profile. This wud not only make the new work challenging to the new resource, but wud also help the org. as it wud result in building resources.This cycle should continue as above for the new resource, if the existing project runs for yrs on end.

Another aspect I wanna touch is to sort out the scenario 2 I listed above, where ppl lose interest in work, and fail to understand the reason of it, and finally they blame the org. and quit.
I wud not say tht wht I am gonna suggest is applicable to all cases, but will definitely work out in quite a few cases if worked upon diligently.Ppl lose interest in work due to plenty of reasons, I am not gonna delve upon it. But there is one category of ppl who lose interest in work coz they are not being given the work which they like or they can do best.
An old adage goes “Find the work which you like. And you don’t have to work a day in your life.”
So, how can the org. tap on such aspects or rather problems with their resources. Every industry deals with a document named “Appraisal Document“. It lists all the work done in a given period by a person, also listing “Strengths” and “Weaknesses” observed by both tht appraisee as well as the appraiser. This is the section which will help out the HR deptt, if they focus their efforts.
Peter Drucker says effective ppl “Make the strengths Productive“.
Many a times, ppl either dont understand wht is best for them, or they dont hv the bandwidth to figure it out. They mostly put the blame on their work, or org. as such.
What HR deptt. needs to do regularly as an exercise is to analyze these strengths very properly and try to map the person’s strength to a role in a project or an org.In short, make him work on his strength. This will not only keep him happy, as he is being made to do the work which he does best or loves to do, but will also help the org. as the productivity for tht person will go up dramtically.
This wud require lot of efforts on the part of HR deptt., they can either hire more ppl or involve Managers to contribute to this process. Ideally, managers are closest to their teams, and they can gauge a person much better than HR. But as they are pretty busy chaps, HR needs to do the bulk of work.

Though I have made a few positive suggestions, but they may come with their own pitfalls, and can completely bounce if not carried out effectively.And also, this is not an exhaustive list of suggestions which will help the org. stem the outflow of ppl.
But I feel, these are just some of the steps which are missing in today’s industry, and if implemented with rigour and sincerity, can help a lot in retaining ppl.

N at last, as they say “No idea can be stopped whose time has come”
Similarly, no employee can be retained who has made up his mind to quit.

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