Soft Skills

Managing attrition through corporate alumni

Instead of fighting attrition, organisations should manage it well by creating a network of corporate alumni, says Chandraprakash Loonker.

Recently, I was talking to my friend from India who complained about the high attrition rate and how his company is unable to retain talent as the multinationals would pay people more than twice of what his company could pay.

It’s a boon

Indian companies should adopt a model similar to an educational institute. Maintain and nurture good relations with employees who leave your company just as educational institutes do with their alumni. The word “corporate alumni” seems apt here. This can have following benefits:

Alumni are brand ambassadors. People have special love for their first job as they learn the most from their first job. These employees will continue to help the organisation even years after they have left it.

Alumni are the best marketing people you can have. Larger the network, bigger the army of people working free of charge for the organisation. Higher the attrition rate, faster the network grows.

If any of these employees are successful elsewhere, the organisation will get benefit if the alumni considers that his previous organisation helped him learn in his initial days, if he had enjoyed his stay there and had left amicably. You have more growth engines working or lottery tickets.

Corporate alumni can act as great mentors for your employees. Whenever an employee leaves, encourage his colleagues and juniors to maintain strong ties with him. This keeps him attached to the organisation. Also, your current employees will benefit from his experiences.

High attrition has led to great networking between employees of different organisations. The knowledge/experience sharing that occurred between different companies helped in the phenomenal growth of the IT industry. Do you think your company invented all the best practices that you have today? Ask yourself how many times you reached out to an old college friend who is in a different organisation. The same applies to organisations if they maintain strong ties with their alumni.

Besides helping in business development, an alumni can be very helpful in talent sourcing. Remember, your alumni knows your culture. Hence they can select the best fitting employee for your organisation.

How many times have you reached out to an old colleague to refer good resources in a specialised technology?

If the above reasoning does not convince you or seems like a theoretical blabber, then take a look at how McKinsey treats its alumni at the following:

http://alumni.mckinsey.com/app001/alhome.nsf/pageview/home?opendocument

Don’t confront attrition

Don’t push employees into signing contracts or bonds. Instead negotiate longer notice and transition periods with them. Disgruntled employee, even if he stays back due to a contract/bond will cause more harm to the organisation than good.

Instead of entering into non-poaching agreements in the industry, enter into longer transition period agreements, which the employees will be more open to.

Don’t hire overqualified people. Always make sure that each of your employee is stretched to the maximum of his capabilities. Any employee who finds his job boring will never be excited about his work.

After recruiting a person if you find that he is overqualified, act fast and move him into jobs where you can stretch him out. Change culture from project-centric to a balance of project and people-centric.

Encourage people to leave for better opportunities. Keep a very open culture about moving on. This will allow longer notice periods and hence no last minute transitions. This will increase outflow but it will increase quality inflow too. Remember that college presentation which had the list of who’s-who, “They are our alumni” said the presenter.

Higher training costs are usually compensated by lower salaries of newcomers. Add training costs to “cost-to-company” calculations.

Measure attrition and plan for replacements well in advance to avoid disruptions in projects. It is the same principle as manufacturing: you never know how much your sales will be, but you constantly measure, plan your production and keep buffer inventories.

If there is dearth of resources available in the market, implement innovative methods of sourcing and training people.

Top performing Math and Physics graduates can easily be trained into technology jobs.

Don’t restrict the scope by imposing educational pre- requisites. Hire them as trainees during summers and hire them full-time based upon performance.

Don’t pass on the alumni networking responsibility to the HR department. The alumni will not feel valued enough. Form alumni committees like the educational institutes. You can always find people who are interested in networking and would be more than happy to take over this additional responsibility. Invite them to your cultural events and company celebration events. Provide them a platform to just meet up with their old colleagues.

To conclude, think of one of your biggest problem as the biggest opportunity and start taking advantage.

Chandraprakash Loonker is Architect (Assistant Vice-president), Citigroup, corporate investment bank’s Trading Service Technology in New York.