Organisations must care about employees’ everyday moments of truth
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On asking my managers as to the
causes for this and whether they had seen it coming, they shrugged their
shoulders and said that despite regular one-on-ones, they had been as
surprised as the rest of us when their people came and told them about the
intention to quit.
As we pondered over what we could
have done differently and beat up on ourselves as to how we ought to have
done more to retain these employees, it struck me that it wasn’t as much that
we were at fault but that there were no systems in place that could have
given us the information at the appropriate time.
Every organisation talks about
customer experience and understands that customer “moments of truth”, those
instances from awareness through social discovery, consideration to purchase,
to sharing the experience with others, where a customer interacts with the
organisation, are critical to its success.
A lot of time and effort goes into
getting feedback from customers at every step of this process and rightly so.
It is only by understanding the specific painpoints of a customer that
organisations can take the necessary actions to not just alleviate the pain
but to also ensure customer stickiness.
Contrast this to the rather cavalier
way in which organisations treat employees despite professions of putting
their employees first. If we look at the entire employee lifecycle, from
attracting them to the organisation, through engaging, onboarding, and
retaining them and eventually to transitioning them out of the company,
employees have way more touch points with the organisation than customers do.
However, there really are no systemic ways in which organisations can
understand these everyday moments of truth for employees. Leaders often
bemoan attrition and almost always list employee retention as a key challenge
and focus. However, attrition is not an overnight phenomenon. Employees don’t
just wake up one fine day and decide to leave the company. Rather, their decision
is a result of the cumulative effect of their everyday experiences with the
organisation.
Existing systems like year-end
surveys, while indicating broad trends, are more akin to postmortems. What’s
even more surprising is that organisations base their decisions over the next
year on just this one set of data points at the end of the year.
This is as preposterous as expecting
a sales or marketing lead to make their business plans based on the previous
year’s balance sheet, income statement and statement of cash flows. While we
would certainly be pilloried, and rightly so, for suggesting the latter,
companies don’t find anything wrong with the former.
A recent report indicated that while
even a decade ago, new hires took about six months to decide whether an
organisation was right for their long-term career goals, that time has now
shrunk to just a month-and-a-half. In a fast changing world, the future of
work is dictated by three predominant trends.
These are the rise of the millennial
workforce with their unique technology driven worldview, pervasive
digitisation and more importantly the move towards agile, self-managed
workforces. With so much dynamism built into the system, organisations don’t
have a choice. They must find ways to listen to their employees at much more
frequent intervals, even continuously.
Arun Krishnan The writer is
founder & CEO of HR analytics start-up nFactorial Analytical Sciences
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DNA 16JUL16B
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