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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It's not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change -- Charles Darwin, Scientist We live in an era of constant change. Take, for example, even the virus CORONA has changed itself so many times in the last 18 months. Business, economy and materialism are always on the change. As they change, expectations are that the actors in the system also change seamlessly. How is that possible? Yes, if you don’t, you perish. Thus everyone tries to change. Is that change easy? My straight answer is No, it’s tough. Why? What they are demanding is a change which is very personal. Competencies that are all quiet, innate to oneself. We refer to it as “Soft Skills”. What are they? Soft skills include your ability.
The list is endless. I know most of you would have heard all these comments at least once in a financial year. Yes, during your appraisal feedback. The underlying problem is that everyone understands that importance but does nothing about it. Neither the education system nor the society framework nor parental guidance act. They do nothing to inculcate these skills during the formative years of the person. I am tempted to blame the education system at large for this mess. They take pains to make me understand Newtonian physics. Also, Einstein’s relativity, the structure of Streptococcus. In fact, who killed Aurangzeb and when did the battle of Plassey take place. Yet do nothing to improve my soft skills. They need to invest in improving one’s soft skills at school or college level. It’s left to the student’s responsibility. In the rat race of marks, these obviously take the back seat. OK, I got the problem, but how do we solve it? Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shores -- Andre Gide, French Novelist Men have always been perceived as people who are uncomfortable or who don’t share their emotions. But they have always felt that sharing emotions is not masculine. Call them as egoistic, unwilling to share, inconsiderate or what not. It seen many a time, men have to console themselves all alone. I am not blaming the other sect, but the ecosystem has portrayed masculinity differently. Crying, compassion, emotional feelings etc as not masculine. Men have a large barrier to overcome to seek help for the problems. For men, sharing their personal issues with a friend or a family is a great hurdle. Leave the therapist for now out of the picture. Why go any further than this classic example. Imagine a male in a car and lost. By lost let me say he has a little direction orientation disability. I mean hopeless and utterly lost. Even in this situation, the person is incapable of stopping his car and asking for directions. Men always feel they should know how to get to their destination and get embarrassed when they don’t. Men have always felt guilty to accept problems. Even when they knew someone else is having a bigger problem than theirs. What rationale is this? Men use the rational that unhappiness is not comparative. The Old Arabic proverb which states “I complained that I had no shoes until I met a person who had no feet”. Even after knowing this, men still do not share. Is there hope? Men have always been termed as people without compassion or with very less. Might be the currency of compassion is a limited resource, with the woman as a finance minister. [Not talking about the current regime at all]. One of the main reasons men don’t share according to me is the pride. The pride will turn angels into devils and it is only humility which makes men as angels. Even after so many years of evolution, some men have misplaced their priorities. They have hung on pride and left humility at bay. The only provenance that I have is that I am also a male. So is there no way out? As a recap of the last blog, let me start from there. Those who have followed the startups and their ecosystem for a while have always wondered. Like me about why many of them fail. Many of them have a good product-market fit, a good process in place, sound financials and yet they fail. The reason for those is present in the previous blog "Let's see the correlation".
Let me start from where I left. In the previous blog, I stopped at this message. Yes, it is very much possible to predict the time and the team size for a startup to fail. When the trajectory of the business will take a sharp U-turn. Let me show you how? Mathematics provides a lot of input for leadership and decision-making. It is not used as wise in the current context. The most common reason for start-up failures is bad organizational design and development. And one of the reasons why we often do a poor job of that is the subject’s inherent immeasurability. It is very difficult to predict the success of the measure - in the short term. Consider as an example, the stance which we take on many actions is not good. Consider on training or on infrastructure investments or organization culture. Also, consider restructuring or new technology. Is it actually making our business function better or worse? Worse, it plainly costing time and money to an otherwise neutral effect. Organizational complexity exists but the important one is the metric or data availability. In most cases, the data which is available is inadequate to make decisions. For example, it’s not enough to say that a bad organization will show up with bad revenue sooner or later. It's true that it will, but revenues are lag indicators like the iceberg warning. As soon as the captain goes down the deck, it hits you. So what do we do if we cannot measure? My advice is that if you cannot measure it fine but at least we can still model it. Qualitative models deal with cause-and-effect, relationships, and relativity. They are powerful in aiding our decision-making and understanding of the organization. Stop beating around the bush, where is the math? How can you predict the slump? Before I go there, wanted to only say this small concept. In mathematics, an environment has the Markov Property. The property manifests if all data required for a decision is available in the current state. In plain English, it means that we do not need to know the history to make a decision at the current moment. For example, in a chess game, we do not need the history of the game to access our possible next moves. Of course, some history is fine but all I am stating is that it is NOT necessary. OK, without wasting much time let me dive into where I left last time. Life improves slowly but goes wrong very fast and only Catastrophe is clearly visible - Edward Teller (American Physicist) The above quote really tells us the whole story - only the catastrophes are clearly visible to us. Before we even start, I think we need to clearly understand the catastrophe theory and then look at the possible connections. According to the scientific dictionary - Catastrophes are bifurcations between different equilibria, or fixed point attractors. Due to their restricted nature, catastrophes can be classified based on how many control parameters are being simultaneously varied. What does it mean in plain English? Catastrophe theory, in mathematics, a set of methods used to study and classify the ways in which a system can undergo sudden large changes in behaviour as one or more of the variables that control it are changed continuously. So what is the importance of this concept? A simple example is the change in shape of an arched bridge as the load on it is gradually increased. The bridge deforms in a relatively uniform manner until the load reaches a critical value, at which point the shape of the bridge changes suddenly—it collapses. This example is for a discontinuous process. While in a continuous process such as heating the gas, the process is very smooth. The temperature change and the rate of change are smooth and predictable since it is continuous. (Calculus and differential calculus solves these) So there was a need to predict changes in non-continuous process, which is what a catastrophe theory does. In the 1960s a French mathematician named René Thom (1923- ) developed a mathematical tool known as catastrophe theory. Thom used his theory to study and make predictions of processes involving sudden abrupt changes. OK, now what is the relationship between startups and this concept? |
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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