Employee Attrition

Organisations spend valuable time and resources to find the right candidate for the job. To find the person who will fit within the organisational culture and contribute towards the organisations is now an opportunity as well as a daunting challenge.
While competitive salary and job perks are important motivators, prospective and current employees are now more critical about organisational culture and how an organisation pays attention to the values, ethics and emotions of employees. With companies now embracing globalisation, a multi-cultural and diverse workforce exists that is more aware and resists traditional techniques of management and control. Philosophically, employee retention is important; in almost all cases, it is senseless to allow good people to leave an organization.

When they leave, they take with them intellectual property, relationships, investments (in both time and money), an occasional employee or two, and a chunk of your future. Employee turnover puts a huge drain on company resources. According to Recruiting Resources (a recruiting consultancy), those organizations with high staff turnover find their HR budgets consumed by recruiting and training costs. But the damage and costs go ahead of the monetary time lost; to find and teach replacements translates to a loss of business momentum. Poor retention also affects clients, especially in the service industry as employees form single point of contact with clients. With the fast pace of competition today, this can be a blow to a company's strategic plan.

This paper's objective is to explore my point of view on the subject supplemented by Organisational Behaviour theories of working in an organisation that boasted of an enviable client list, but had a huge employee turnover due to an organisational culture that lacked in paying attention to employee value, and a mindset in developing and motivating its human resources. In my experience being employed as a communications specialist in one of India's largest and oldest public relations agency, I witnessed high levels of employee attrition while I worked with this organisation.

During the course of my tenure I saw close to a hundred individuals leave the company. The organisation saw most exits at the junior or entry level, thus gaining the dubious nickname of being called the 'PR High School' - training ground for future public relation managers by other agencies operating in the country and an excellent ground to poach skilled talent from. Various factors that could have attributed to this are listed below:

Communicating Values & Mission
Values dictate our priorities, preferences and actions. Similarly, an organisation which is essentially a group of people working interdependently towards a common goal , gains it cultural value from collective individual value.
In case of this company the two founding partners played a pivotal role in creating and defining the ethics and value system of the organisation, which were then in turn passed on to employees and formed the basis for guiding their management and interpersonal interaction. The guiding principle was to grab the account (new business), or do the job at no matter what cost. Business was always placed ahead of employee needs. This led to a conflict of interest between the employee values and organisational beliefs. According to a study by Chatterjee and Pearson, Indian mangers see significant differences between their personal values and organisational practices and as organisations are moving rapidly towards new directions, this gap is bound to widen and leads to dissatisfaction.
While the top management in Perfect Relations had drafted out the company goals, and mission, this was not communicated to the employees.

According to a manpower consultancy, Human Capital Management, an organisations vision or mission must be communicated clearly to employees so that they know how their work fits into the big picture. Having a clear cut vision and strategy implies a certain level of stability, while communicating organisational goals is an important task for modern employees, equally imperative is ensuring that employees are able to communicate freely with management.

Culture, Environment and Job Assignment
How an organisation should treat employees is articulated in this quote by Rod Eddington, Head British Airways, Australia, He says, “Management must treat staff the way you want to treat customers; otherwise you are dead.”

A good way to ascertain the cultural of the organization is to see how employees interact amongst themselves and across the organisations hierarchy. In Perfect Relations, seniors interacted with their subordinates in a dictatorial manner and blatant favouritism and power games that were played out in the open, emphasised the negative culture prevailing. The company was a hot-bed of organisational politics. Organisational politics represents attempts to influence others using discretionary behaviours to promote personal objectives. Power for most of the management in this agency was coercive. Sarcasm and Ostracism was a regularly deployed tool that subordinates and team members were subjected too.

Senior employees, who had been a part of Perfect Relations for a long time, were it seems culturally tuned towards being exasperated and irritated towards the junior lot. In most cases there was outright reluctance to communicate in detail with subordinates on job assignments. Information, used a tool to control and exercise more power was put into practise here, client briefs provided to the teams by managers were either incomplete or inconsistent, resulting in a output that was of inferior quality. This in most cases lead to the junior being fired or put on the 'watch-list' and becoming more dependent upon the management rather than thinking or acting independently. The watch list (term coined by the management), was a tool deployed by the company to inform employees that he/she is not performing up to the mark and thus could be asked to leave or would not be eligible to appraisal, when due. Interestingly, in most cases, individuals were put on the watch list close to their performance appraisal period.

There was no sense of organisation citizenship, thus employees were not motivated to perform beyond their normal job duties. The undue pressure and uncongenial atmosphere exercised and created by the management, encouraged team conflicts, selfish behavioural patterns and the most obvious; perception of injustice.

While the cultural environment had much to be desired for, the physical environment was equally challenging. The top management use to sit in a separate plush facility, reinforcing the strong divisional lines, while the middle and junior level employees were stationed in a basement storage unit that had been converted into an office.

No ventilation or natural light, overcrowding, lack of facilities (a client servicing team of three handling 5 accounts had only one computer between them and all did not have e-mail access), no recreation facilities, unkempt wash rooms were just some of the daily problems employees encountered six days a week. This reinforced the hierarchical mindset of the company and highlighted the company’s lack of or providing a culture that binds the employees and sends across a message that the company cares for you. The company's culture encouraged long working hours and blurring of line of 'Whom I am' from 'What I do'.

Retention, Learning and Rewarding in the Organisation
Simply put, the company policy was Hire and Fire, rather than developing, motivating and making the human capital feel valued. Employees cite interesting work, employer flexibility, feeling valued, having training, and advancement opportunities as top factors influencing their decision to change jobs (Human Capital Management).

While, this agency was considered as an excellent training ground as it offered employees to work on a client portfolio that included over 200 names across different industry verticals, the company did not offer much in terms of learning, further development or enhancement of skill sets. It is through learning that a person undergoes a change in his behaviour due to his interaction with the environment. Gen X employees place huge emphasis on learning because learning will lead to better performance, the opportunity to move further ahead, instils a sense of accomplishment and motivates them more.

In the time that I worked for the company, I became accustomed to media and public relation trends, however, within a span of six months, I started to feel a strong lack of fulfilment as there were limited opportunities to enhance and further develop skills.

While and effective reward system is not the only way to motivate an employee, it is never the less an important factor. An organisation that clearly instilled its mission, vision and value system into an employee and have aligned rewards with performance with in employee control will see a higher motivation to improve performance (Pay for Performance Report, March 2000). In Perfect Relations, reward systems for achievement of goals were not articulated, thus leaving employees not valuing their work nor motivating them to exceed or meet targets.

Providing perks endows the company with an influential gain in the job market. Perks can also be used as a tool to retain employees, and offering them can also be a cost-effective way. However, the company did not provide simplicistic perks like casual dress to earning time-off.

Employee Feedback (Performance)
Most organisations practice varying degrees of feedback regarding employee performance and also ask for feedback on over all company management, where specific questions or concerns are addressed.

Feedback influences behaviour and task performance through role perceptions, ability and motivation. Feedback is most effective when it is two way. If properly undertaken, feedback is also a source of motivation for the employee if efforts are recognized and also provides him/her with the opportunity to correct performance problems.

The idea should be to focus on the individual, and how they fit in the larger scheme of things, rather making him/her quit. Due, to its revolving door policy, Perfect Relations did not have a feedback mechanism that allowed for a two-way interface or a more comprehensive 360° approach. Employees were not given a structured feedback nor were they provided with a platform for addressing their concerns. This lead to employee not understanding areas where he/she needed to improve and good efforts went largely unrecognised, impacting performance and job motivation levels.

Conclusion
The difference in the cultural values defined by the top management as opposed to those practised lead to lot of instability in Perfect Relations. In an ever-changing and dynamic economy a company needs to understand its employees better, communicate effectively, build commitment and help teams work more effectively as business are now becoming more dependent on human capital whose skills are difficult to replace.

To improve employee retention and management Perfect Relations needs to change its mind frame towards the Human Resources structure as a whole. Organizations need to retain their high performers and for some, hire individuals who can help bring the organization closer to its goals. The commitment to employee retention is clearly worth the effort if one is trying to build a business and promoting a positive organisational structure. The simple rule of the thumb is; take care of your employee and they will take care of you.