"Never ignore a gut feeling, but never believe that is enough" - Robert Heller
Let us say that you arrive at a splendid idea for the next path breaking app in ecommerce. You immediately show it to your friends. They dissect it to the core and tell you it will not work. Hmmmm Now you face a tough decision. Do you go with your guts or your friends’ scientific reasoning? Do you want to go with your gut? Why not? When you look at your statistics, they split the data exactly in the middle. Your gut has worked 50% of the time while the other 50% times it has got it wrong. So what should you do? This analysis, which is based on the past events, certainly seems to be sound and justified. Just wait ... Your gut has only helped you in making many of those dicey decisions which, at some times, looked unsound. When you look at the history, many of the unsound things have only become disruptive hits. Sound ones never do disruption. Dhoni going to Joginder for the last over, Netflix and the other OTT options, Ola taking on the unorganized taxi market, to name a few. So what am I finally saying? The challenge is not in trying to convince those who are in search of soundness to change their minds. The challenge is to only ask them to do a complete gut check to decide whether they should defend their instincts and then do it. Agree with me, what’s your gut feeling?
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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. 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? 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. |
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
June 2023
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