Oh boss, help me to stay here !

By Vinod Bidwaik

I always surprise why all HR related matters are placed on HR table. Off course, it is the responsibility of HR to look into all HR related matters. But most of the times, HR is not responsible for all HR related issues. Employees work with their team and line manager for more than 8 hours. The real issues are with this. Most of the times their line managers are responsible for HR issues in the organization. 

You must have identified few reasons during exit interviews. The list goes like this:

a) Compensation

b) Learning opportunities

c) More responsibilities

d) Organizational Culture

e) Employer Brand.

There can be other factors apart from this. The exit interviews are conducted by some junior HR person, mostly getting filled the exit interview format.

When I had grilled such employees, most of the times, the reasons which I find which nobody wanted to put officially are as under:

Relationship with bosses: 

 

The fact of the life is bitter and compensation is definitely important. But when any employee decides to change the job as per the market he gets 25-30% rise on his current CTC. And the cases I have seen most of the times are not the compensation. It is the boss, line managers who are responsible for the attrition. 

 

New learning opportunities is the another reason employees tell. The programmer ends up doing the same job what he was doing in his earlier company. The maintenance engineer gets the title of Executive Maintenance, not adding any further value to his personality. Off course every experience is the learning.

Employees are like elephants. They remember and they act. You need to manage them properly. Sometimes, employees need emotional support. When you takes extra care of new employee and ignores old employee, he get hurts. Logically new employees struggle to create their position in the organization and hence may be more effective than old employees. But most of the managers favour this behaviour and give more weightage to the. The “left out feeling” creates dissatisfaction.

Generally speaking, when any employee leaves the organization, he assumes that he is going to get 4 more things in new company assuming that 10 things what he is getting here will also be available in new company. But when he joins there, he comes to know that yes he is getting 4 more things, but missing almost 4 another things which he was getting in his earlier company. 4 things, which can be more important in totality. That can be respect, culture, challenges, and even may be other benefits.

When line manger and off course HR will be able to gauge these factors, attrition can have little impact.