Do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do -- Oprah Winfrey (America TV Personality) Attrition is a silent killer with a very adverse effect on any organization. It has the potential to bring down any corporation down on its knees in a quick time frame. All IT firms face this problem and it has existed since long time. Many firms have made innovative solutions, and yet the problem lingers. Even if you had the best of all, there is someone who is contemplating of leaving the organization. The best compensation, healthy work culture or even smashing benefits is not enough. So are you telling me to leave this problem hanging? No. Every company puts in a lot of efforts and investments in recruitment and hiring process. Yet they have not looked deep into why people leave you. There is a general perception that compensation is the main reason for attrition. When we look into the data analysis - it does not feature in the top 10 reasons at all. Then what are the reasons? Before we go there, let us look at the problem first. Organizations need to put efforts into understanding the motivations behind employee attrition. Then they need to address the causes rather than the symptoms. Else they will only have a chance for damage control. The most logical step is to know your employees well. In the current fast-paced environment, there is no time. With Agile adopted worldwide - is there time for us to pause and look at the people? Well, one of the main KPI for a people manager is to know his people, so they cannot hide behind time constraints. With many tools and methods at his disposal, one needs to figure this data fast. If you are looking for a sustainable solution. OK, enough of the Gyan - let me have the top reasons please.
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To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace - Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup The people who work for you are the lifeline of your business. It doesn’t matter which industry you are, it’s the same. There is a very sacred relationship: employer-employee one. It has to be positive for both of them to be successful. It is a very sad state of affairs. This relationship deteriorates as the business stabilizes or scales to the next level. Might be that they get comfortable for their own good. They got distracted by other priority tasks. Whatever the reason, the worst thing they can do is to come across like organisations that don’t care. This is where the rubber meets the road, the employee decides on whether to stay or move on. The moment the employee exercises his veto power, the caring reappears magically. This does not come without a warning. There are several indications which come up. Let me list the top 4 and the most important one:
The list is endless; I accept, but these symptoms are easy to detect and stop the system from getting rot. Why should we do that? Isn’t it too expensive? In today’s cutthroat business world, Organisations do not care about you. They cannot take care of you. All the employee motivation and employee engagements are only on paper and theory. No one has time to put in place, even the first few lines of that policy. Let me take a very simple case, does the bank care about you. NO, they only want your money. They don’t care about you, it’s the plain truth. Neither does your hospital or your company cab service. Does your car dealer really care about you when they ping you for a service reminder? I am surprised that people get amazed when they discover this. Why this amazement? It’s because they are people, simple human beings. What does that mean, they can care. People care for people, but I do not think organisations can. It’s only when demands and regulations (Red-tape bureaucracies) get in the way caring fades. So do I mean to say that Organisations cannot care? No, I definitely say they can care. Then how? If the organisation can fill in caring people at sensitive posts. Simple, fill them in with people and get corporate out of the way. The caring culture will germinate and sustain for a long time. There is a simple way to get into this habit. When you free up your employee to behave like people, caring culture germinates. As opposed to looking at them as pure profit maximising machines. If done so, caring can’t help but grow. So let us put ourselves in the corporate shoes and think for a moment. In the short run, not caring saves money and brings profits. Don’t bother improving the facilities, let the cubicles become smaller. Don’t worry about those small customers, etc. It may seem to work, but only for a short time. They may be busy. Hiring people and improving infrastructure costs money, effort and time (Triple constraints) So what is my conclusion? In the long term, caring pays multifold by itself. Those organizations which put extra efforts, go the extra mile are always rewarded. Their reward is Sustainability and Loyalty. Finally, not to mention that caring makes us more humane, it’s worth it. Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a right to do and what is right to do -- Potter Stewart (Associate Judge of the Supreme Court of US) Everyone has a different view of Ethics but all of those views finally merge into one pattern: Right or Wrong. I also had the same issue when I decided to start full-fledged research on this topic. What suddenly prompted me to go into this topic - well it was the last blog of mine. What can you learn as a leader from the movie Drishyam-2. What's the connection you may ask? It was the last paragraph that got me to this topic. I wanted to know if what Georgekutty did was ethical or not. Let's begin that journey and see where we end. Are you ready folks? Let us start with what is ethics anyway? At its simplest, ethics is a system of moral principles. They affect how people make decisions and lead their lives. Ethics is concerned with what is good for individuals and society and is also described as moral philosophy. The term is actually derived from the Greek word ethos which can mean custom, habit, character, or disposition. Most of the concept of ethics in any country is basically derived from the religions, philosophies, and cultures of that land. Philosophers have divided Ethics broadly into 3 buckets: metaethics, normative ethics and applied ethics
Now you may ask if there is any use of Ethics, especially in today's environment. Since the environment is fully infected with Greed and partially hypocritical disease. I feel that Ethics is the only available tablet for these diseases. There is a band of people who believe that Ethics affects the way people or community behaves and there is another group that says that it's only fit for literature study - since most of the people these days are irrational. Ethics works only when you become rational. When I listen to both sides of the story, for me both of them look correct from their perspective. That brings me back to the basic question - which is right? One thing which we must clearly understand is that Ethics will never give you the right answers. Then what does it give? Ethics doesn't always show us the right answer to a moral problem. Indeed more and more people think that for any ethical issue there isn't a single right answer - just a set of principles that can be applied to that case to give those involved some clarity in the choices. I feel that all Ethics does it that it can really clear the confusion and disturbing noise from the issue. After that, it's basically upto the individual to see and make the choice on their own will and judgement. Now - where do Drishyam-2 and Georgekutty come into the frame? I'm not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep ; I'm afraid of an army of sheeps lead by a lion -- Alexander The Great Drishyam 2 is a really good movie with a very simple plot. It is a gripping tale of a police investigation and a targeted family which is threatened by it. So what has that got to do with leadership lessons? Well, there is a lot of learnings that we can take from the protagonist role - Georgekutty. Mohanlal has done the role to perfection and what has he done is the main moot point of this blog. How well he has handled a crisis situation in his family in a very calm and composed manner. There has always been a question - what makes a good leader? There are 1000s of blogs and books that give you answers which to most of us (include me first) enters through one ear and flies through the other within seconds. Since there is no right way or a wrong way, everyone can have his or her point of view and the debate continues endlessly. So rather than pondering over what are the skills required I would like to change the perspective of trying to learn from every person or activity that we encounter around us. There is another school of thinking which even questions if leadership can be taught or learned. Basically, their approach is that it is an inborn skill that can only be sharpened and never created. Now let's drop all these debatable viewpoints and just try to learn small things from our everyday life - that is a better teacher than books, videos, and blogs (all put together) Most of us always think that leadership skills are much like any other normal soft skill but in reality, we are wrong. There is no one size fits all solution in terms of leadership. Let us see for example in the current political arena - there was Trump, you have Kim Jong-un, Putin, Modi, and Angela Merkel. All of them are good leaders but when you look at them closely - they all approach the same skill using different techniques and points of view. This means that leadership needs to be learned from everywhere and not from a single source. I do not wish to dwell on the movie or the plot but want to highlight a few instances from the movie and then connect them into practical corporate life and share a few lessons on leadership. Of course, Jeethu Joseph did not think of this story from the leadership point of view but he has certainly created a great leadership experience in the form of Georgekutty who is not well educated and hails from a remote village but has a great presence of mind - on a mission with a strategy to get his family out of a crisis. So let's get to the moot point before I forgot what I started. Are you ready? Ensuring that the benefits of globalization are shared widely remains a challenge. -- Sushma Swaraj Globalization has been a buzz word for more than 2 decades and also the most over abused buzz word in the corporate world. Even before I try to denounce it, let me try and understand what it is anyway. In this frame of mind I started researching on this topic and I landed upon a really great book titled “Small Is Beautiful” By Ernst F. Schumacher. Before I get into the book, let me tell about this author Ernst F. Schumacher, a renowned German-British economist and statistician who is best known for his proposal on the human scale. Mr. Schumacher wrote on economic topics for the Times (London) and slowly became one of the chief editorial writers. This book “Small is beautiful” is a collection of essays and was bought to the wider audience by one of his friends. The main theme of these essays was that we cannot plainly assume that the problem of technological production will be solved by capitalism which meant eroding the finite natural capital that nature has given us and depriving the future generations of its benefits. As globalization and its effects have been studies over and over again by many researchers and organizations, the subject has been divided into three sub-categories: political, economic, and cultural. Political globalization refers to the presence of the international governing body that acts as a world government. UN is the example of political globalization in practice. Economic globalization deals with spreading good, services, technology, and information among nations. Finally we have cultural globalization: there is a very strong trend in making all cultures around the world turn into Western lifestyle. This has be done via the pop culture, international trade pacts, communication and media via Internet and social media platforms. All these combined have made the modern world to be summed into one thing: Consumerism (Which was also started by the Americans) To put it simply, the east are slowly getting translated into a miniature west – slowly decaying the long lasted local heritage and culture. There are some good things in globalization but when added the negatives, it seem that the negative angle has a clear edge. There is a huge negative force which performs only one thing – the loss of national identity. This book argues the same and I will try to summarize the book in a crisp and concise mode possible. [Warning: Lengthy read] |
AuthorVasudevan is a Leadership Mentor and an Executive coach. I run an online website geared towards helping creative entrepreneurs and future managers to build their dreams. Archives
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