Seven Reasons for Attrition

I believe that HR and Marketing should be part of the same department. Marketing is about having conversations with the external world while HR is about having conversations with the internal world – aka employees. There is something lopsided about organizations. They will spend oodles of dollars trying to know about what the customers want, track their shifts, buy research on how their products compare to the competitors. Above all, a minor shift in consumer preferences will lead to long debates in the boardroom. Ever see the Internal Marketing department obsess about the needs, wants and aspirations of the internal customers? See, how you don’t react to that statement unless I say ever seen the average HR department obsess about tracking and studying employees with the same degree of meticulousness? Naah. It is just not in the DNA of organizations. It maybe the same behavior that prompts people to be more courteous and caring towards a potential partner than when that partner morphs into a spouse. Valentine’s Day is the one day that majority of husbands buy flowers for their wives. The other 364 days be damned.Until now I thought it is just Marketing and HR that should be merged. Now I am convinced that we need to bring CRM into the same department. I looked up the definition of CRM in Wikipedia.

“Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a broadly recognized, widely-implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service. Customer relationship management denotes a company-wide business strategy embracing all client-facing departments and even beyond. When an implementation is effective, people, processes, and technology work together to increase profitability, and reduce operational costs.”

In a world filled with options, it is easy for consumers to flirt with different brands. The same happens when these very consumers who are spoilt for choice walk into the doors of their organizations looking for a choice of employers. In high growth economies like India and China, employees are flooded with alternatives – especially the highly skilled ones that you’d hate to lose. Employees behave like consumers. So treat them with the same sophistication and attention is my advice.Wouldn’t it be great if there were to be a CRM aimed purely at salvaging employee grievances? After all the reasons why attrition happens can be almost mapped to the seven reasons why customers leave. These seven reasons come from my conversation with Dr Atul Parvatiyar , CEO of the famed Institute for CRM. He told me about the seven reasons why customers leave. I have mapped the same reasons to the scenario faced by an employee.

1. 1. Deliberately Ruining the Relationship : Poor behavior with the employee falls under this category. When the employee seeks a solution to a problem and the organization responds by shoving legalese in their face, it could be the first time a crack develops in the employer-employee relationship.
   2. Persistently Annoying the Employee : Even when the employee takes a forgive and forget attitude towards a badly handled response to a grievance, sometimes organizations do not correct their lapse. They institutionalize insensitivity in dealing with employee grievances. Most of the times a courteous “no” can work wonders instead of a rude “yes”.
   3. Compelling Offer : The competitor may sometimes give a compelling offer. That is just the way in the movie The Godfather, the mafia Don says, “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.” The employees too get courted in these days of the war for talent. The more talented they are, the more such “compelling offers” they are likely to receive.

1. Expectation is Not Shaped Properly :This can happen most typically when an employee asks the question most managers dread – “When will be promoted to a bigger job?” If the employee has been receiving timely and clearly articulated feedback about his/her performance, then the manager should have no difficulty in answering that question. Yet we all know that the world is far from perfect and many managers simply dance around when asked an uncomfortable question. They land up overcommitting to the employee simply in order to get over the momentary discomfort of telling the average or non-performing employee the truth. Sometimes even the top talent is also lost for exactly the same reason.
2. Life cycle Changes Not Managed : Significant events in the life of an employee eg their marriage, divorce, birth of a kid, death in the family etc are all occasions when the employer has a chance to cement the relationship. Instead when the responses to such significant lifecycle events is managed insensitively or inappropriately, the employee is likely to feel disillusioned about the employer. Especially during a crisis, the timing of the help provided by the employer matters as much as the nature of the help provided. Remember, what is in the policy book is seen to be a GIVEN by the employee. It is what is done over and above that drives employee engagement. After all employee engagement is reflected in the the employee going over and above the job description.
3. Developmental Needs Beyond the Functional Are Not Met : Fewer staff, reduced or wiped out spending on development, and higher expected levels of achievement do not present a winning picture. The first two factors seem to make the third impossible, says Paysacle.com. Since most people receive formal inputs in school or college to build their functional skills and limited to inadequate leadership development skills, the investments made in this are highly valued. Employees really respect and appreciate leaders who invest in mentoring and preparing others for future success. A high salary or benefits program is easy to match. Finding a great mentor will make more employees stay longer as long as they see visible improvement in their abilities.
4. Wrong Hire: Let’s face it, most people are never given deep training in how to hire. The ability to find people in your organization who make good hiring decisions are prized property. This is a rare skill. Have you ever seen a manager punished for making poor hiring decisions? Yet, the same person maybe given an hour’s dressing down for a poor judgment shown in ordering a $100 gizmo. If the hire made lacks the necessary functional skills, that is an easy fix. Send the person for a weeks training to fix the knowledge gaps. But if the employee has a poor attitude match and poor leadership, such gaps do not show up until the employee has already spent some time in the firm. It is not until these gaps prove conclusively that this was a hiring mistake that the organization tries to address it. So my advice is very simply captured in the title of my next book – “Do Not Hire The Best – Hire the RIGHT Person”.

In conclusion: Treat the employees with the same seriousness that is reserved for customers. The same attention, time and money spent on wooing employees will give you a more engaged workforce. JetBlue created an employee-satisfaction metric around its people’s willingness to recommend the company as a place to work. This “crewmember net promoter score” (modeled after the customer-satisfaction metric) has been used to study the impact of compensation changes and to help determine executive bonuses. Employees are asked annually on their hiring date if they would recommend the company, so JetBlue can effectively monitor employee engagement monthly. After all the cost of attrition is huge. So it makes great monetary sense to invest in a CRM tool for employees. Maybe that should be called an ERM tool. …. Someday … sigh … that too will happen.