Sunday, March 26, 2006

Not so Ceremonious Exits...

Last Night, we organized a Farewell party for one of my colleague as he is leaving us and joining another IT company in his home city.

I was just thinking that how organizations deal with Attrition (termed purely germinated because of IT industry), I have a feeling that companies tend to treat attrition as bad thing, although it’s quite rampant in IT industry and is kind of a norm... and why shud companies not treat this bad thing? Lot of money is invested in growth of a resource in company. Companies invest a lot in terms of grooming, Training, H1B costs etc.
But things become wrong when the person who is resigning is considered as "traitor". I know I am using a very strong word. But this is what reality is. But they forget to think that outflow is a normal phenomenon as inflow particularly is growing knowledge industries like us.

Resignations should put Management into a retrospective mood as they need to find out logic and reasons behind people leaving company. They need to have a questionnaire (with questions on reasons of resignation etc) which must be filled up by person resigning the company. This process will mount the data, which can be digged and various employee retention and Management policies can be framed after all for a concrete steps towards effective employee mgmt, right data is prerequisite.

Most importantly, employees who resign and opt for exit should be given a ceremonious farewell and it should be made a point that the person will always be welcome with updated and renewed knowledge base with which he/she be returning back to former company....

Here HR and immediate line managers play a very important role in opening the gates for the person in future...

Hope to see more Ceremonious exits in future!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree with Anshu on this.

As treating an employee with the respect he/she deserves when they leave the org,is a timely addressal of their concerns.

As IT pursue differential compensation system based on performance(to build their numbers) they should show the same religious zeal in rewarding extra-mile efforts.Performance evaluation of each segment of employees should be customised to take into account the unique challenges they face.

A costly and ardous affair no question but it could prove the "real" HR differentiator.

Anonymous said...

The analysis of data on why an employee is leaving can go on till hell's day and HR managers would still not find out why. But, I have being seeing quite a few people around me who are leaving their current job. The reason is not a lucrative offer outside but a demeaning treatment inside. Its just not about rewarding the right peolpe but also about rewarding people who do not deserve it. The HR need to do a major rethink on that part. Why shud the performers take extra pain to do that extra bit when a non-performer but senior executive is getting more rewards? One other point that came to my mind was are people overestimating their capabilities or loosing sight of the bigger goal for short term monetory gains? Maybe thats another reason. But the bottomline is that a person never leaves if he is happy in his current job. He does not leave for a better job but he leaves a bad job.

Sajiv said...

Well instead of going retrospective as to why a person is leaving, better would be (which many of the companies are doing now) to consider attrition as a reality and work on plugging the gap left by employees and someways of fastening the learning curve. Accept that we have an attrition problem. Traitor would be a very strong word to describe people leaving coz each one of us would be a traitor one day :-)) the organization did not spent money to train people for the individuals benefit they did it for their own, they invested money they get some loose some afterall its business