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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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. If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it Albert Einstein These words are wise and for a sound reason. However, most of the organisation do not seem to heed them when faced with a crisis in hand. Indeed, when developing new products, processes, or even businesses, most companies aren’t sufficiently rigorous in defining the problems they’re attempting to solve and articulating why those issues are important. There is always a rush to solve the problem and I think the education system has to be blamed. The moment the exam paper is handed over, all of us scramble to the solution - never are students encouraged to study the problem and then attack the solution. The solution is what mattes, never to understand the question. If we do not correct this at the beginning how can we expect to correct it when all of them are in leadership roles? Without that rigor, organizations miss opportunities, waste resources, and end up pursuing innovation initiatives that aren’t aligned with their strategies. Many a time's leaders have realised late in the game that they may not be tackling the right issues. Let us take this example (made-up) Leader: "Why do you need that lubricant?" Engineer: "We need this lubricant since the machine gets hot before the product completion" Leader: "Why don't you get machinery that doesn't heat up?" Engineer: "No one makes a machine which is an exact fit for us" This raises a deeper question: Does this company need the lubricant, or does it need a new way to make its product? The example is like many we would have seen in our combined experience: Someone lowest of the organization hierarchy is assigned to fix a very specific, near-term problem. But because the firm doesn’t employ a rigorous process for understanding the dimensions of the problem, leaders miss an opportunity to address underlying strategic issues. There are two sides to a problem, giving information, and receiving information. Initially, I faced a lot of issues with my team, I used to start with "WHAT I WANT" and ended up with lengthy meetings with a convoluted ball of scenarios and suggestions - all unclear. When I went to my mentor for short conservation about this issue, he instructed me to rephrase the moot question and asked me to start with the "WHY I WANT TO SOLVE THIS". It is universally understood that "WHAT" creates a defensive team and "WHY" creates a bonding team. Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them - John C. Maxwell The current community trends shows very negative information floating around. It projects data as though the communities are becoming more and more self-centered and individualistic. I tend to agree with this generalization to an extent. We have become a lot self-centered than we were 30 years back. I do not want to delve on the WHY part but want to see how to improve the situation. With this as a background I did some research on how to change the way a community works. I wanted to get people to do more work such as getting them to come out on VOTE on election day, save water in their houses, give more to deserving charities, consume less electricity and finally keeping the office pantry clean by not washing their lunch boxes with left overs. In my current work place I tried to get many of the people to reuse the one-side printed papers and also to try and reduce the number of papers used in the printers. In order to get this program going, we introduced new initiatives and processes. It was all good but there was an inherent weakness in the system: PEOPLE. People needed to adopt this initiative for it to become a success. We made many colourful posters and employee reward programs for using less paper but I was not successful. The number of people who signed up for this initiative was very less but everyone kept saying it was a great initiative. So I went back to the drawing tables with a select team to think on how to get more participation. One of the members in the team suggested a small change. Instead of sign up portals, posters and email registrations, we just put up a small sign-up sheet near the printers and asked them to give their Name, employee number and sign it. Within a week the participation doubled. Wondering WHY?. Wise men do not need advice, Fools will not take it Benjamin Franklin In the current state of competitive corporate business today, all the managers (I know I am making a very broad generalization but am pretty sure it is not off target) are always having a constant constraints in their working environment. The speed at which both technology and the market connect is increasing, it is very evident that managing a project in this pressure cooker environment is not a cake walk. Also added to the resource constrains due to the advent of start-ups who lure the talent pool showing challenging jobs is another headache that the bigger and grown up organisation needs to face. Here are the most common constraints that one manager has to face in his daily walk of life:
Most of the middle management in all the companies have a strong belief that the entire work force at ground level always needs to be told what to do. They never have a feeling that the actual ground reality is that the team needs their voices to be heard. Also going with this are the pains of keeping the ground level teams motivated both on the task front as well as on the financial side. Even if one of the parameters take a dip, the resultant is a crash which is exponential to the change. So how does a manager keep working to save his team and also provide concrete answers to the management? |
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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