Employee Attrition and Attraction

I recently attended an interesting seminar hosted by Nasscom on employee attrition management. The main message of the speakers, Shelley and Arindam was on highlighting the cost of attrition. They also brought focus on watching early symptoms of discomfort in the key employees.

I have myself noticed that the financial compensation is only one (and it comes 3rd or 4th) of the considerations for which the employees leave your organisation. Most of the time, they are uncomfortable with either the lack of clarity in the company’s future plans or their own growth path. Some of them consider moving if they cannot develop good relationships with their seniors.

So what can you do to retain more of your employees and avoid the massive hiring and training costs? Naturally this will vary from company to company but here are some quick pointers:

• Take steps to ensure that all the people have an idea of their role and future progress scope in the company. This will be easier if the individual departments hold periodic briefings for their people.
• Try to set up systems to identify enthusiastic executives and give them serious and challenging jobs. Every organisation has some very excited workers who either become dull or move away when consistently assigned boring and routine things to do.
• You should also have some system in place to notice early signs of discomfort in your employees and take suitable action at the earliest to put their mind at ease. Some are disturbed by any new development in the workplace, some may be losing sleep over professional or personal relations with colleagues or even concerned about their future growth in the company hierarchy.
• Give an occasional pat-on-the-back to people who do something more than ordinary. This is more encouraging than even financial rewards. However this should not become routine and predictable or else, it may even backfire on you if you miss someone some time.

Of course, you must realise that some people will move on despite all the great strategies that you have implemented. Stop pulling out your hairs and have an effective replacement strategy in place to cater to this. Having a basic level of redundancy, specially for key people is one good strategy. However you will have major improvement in your attrition rates if you apply the above tips.

But what about improving attraction? How to get the best talent in the industry to look forward to working for your company? We will discuss this in a blog post coming soon.

Meanwhile I will appreciate if you make a comment below and share what has worked for you in reducing attrition in your company.