A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were leaving for an evening walk. She was listening to Ilayaraja’s playlist. The song that was playing was “வெற்றி நிச்சயம் இது வேதசத்தியம்”. [Vetri nichayam idhu veda sathiyam - Translated: Victory is sure, it's Vedic truth]
Pausing the song, she looked straight at me. I sensed an impending event. Unaware of the headphones on, she yelled. “If success is assured, why have I not felt success?” The time bomb was ticking. I countered, “Who told you that you have failed?”. This works with my wife always. A return question as an answer. “Let me rephrase the question back to you. How long do we wait before giving up hope for success?” The bomb had gone off. I hinted we leave for a walk. Without a word uttered, we traveled half a kilometer. She looked at me and gestured with her hands. “Your answer, please” I knew my time was up. Her wait was for one of my motivational stories. But I had none in my kitty. Wanting to surprise her, I choose a non-mythological one this time.
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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. 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. 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? The greatest wealth is to live content with little. -- Plato Every one who has passed 40 would be able to tell you that all of them have only one aim in life from now on - to have a simple and happy life. All of them would be frustrated with this current dog raced complex and fast paced world. There are many blogs that tell us how to be happy but not many are there when it comes to simplifying your life. First let us see why do we need to simplify our life? Just for a moment, try and think what would be the most happiest place for you to be and it would never turn out to be our metros or cities. It is always a far away hill station, a clam and quiet remote place or your ancestral village home. What do these place have that the ultra modern cities do not have? Simplicity. The modern day life has turned itself into a complex machine where each day there is an ounce of complexity being added into it and we only try to adjust with that. We have never resorted to see how to reduce this complexity and make things simpler. Making things simpler is not a simple task - but certainly we should start somewhere. Extravagance is often a picture of an unsatisfied life. It is often in the most simple things that we actually find true happiness. As a young boy (back in the 80s) it would have just been that small cricket bat or the colorful top - பம்பரம் or the free flying kite which we used to chase and get hold of it. When we look back at it, we find that it bought more happiness than the crazy 128GB iPADs and Bose stereo headphones. Why? The answer is still the same - it was uncomplicated and simple then than now. If we already knew the answer then where is the toughness in it? It takes courage to admit there is the need to simplify our lives. It cannot be achieved by all and very easily. There are efforts which needs to be put to get it but let me assure you that once you get there, you will never want to return back to the current complexities. |
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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