A brisk walk into our history expounds facts whose traits are still found in our current work culture. Hitherto, we saw an era where the title “King” had all powers in a kingdom. All the people were to obey the orders of King and working people had no choice but to abide by his rules, even if they were to disagree.

Zamindar system then setup ordinary people to work for landlords. Again the people had to obey his/her orders and honor his/her title. It’s a big transformation in India from dynasties to British Rule to Corporate world. But even today some of the old traits continue to show up in today’s corporate work culture in India.

Superior-Subordinate Relationship

It’s still a norm we see in India where subordinates abide superiors. “Boss is always right” still holds good. Subordinates follow his/her decision without any objection even if they do not want to. It’s a give-in attitude most of the time. There is no right or wrong behavior here. We Indians by nature do not like to be in bad books of anyone, and we are being nurtured in the family that teaches us to respect our elders. Most of the times seniority takes precedence over talent (or merit).

Who vs. What

Superiors usually do not check what issue has been escalated to them instead look for who escalated an issue. Title, status does matter in Indian management. A subordinate challenging a superior is taken as insolence or hurting the ego of the superior instead of being open to new thoughts.

“Growth” – A Mistaken Word

This is perhaps the most widely mistaken word in work environment. Growth is calculated in terms of promotions and title but not in knowledge and experience. Every individual is worried of his/her promotion and tries to compare his/her position and title with peers they are aware of. Promotions appease job contentment. If there is no progression in one’s career, he/she is considered as non-performing individual. We need to be mindful that professionals like Doctors and Lawyers do not have promotions. But they are still highly respectable professionals in the society.

Work Takes Precedence Over Family

It’s the other way round about family here. Not that we don’t love family and don’t like to spend time, but market competition warrants individual to slog for more than normal hours. Fear of being considered as non-performer, if they are not being slogged. Also it was the expectation set by predecessors during “unemployment era” to woo the employers and that trend (and expectation) continued for years thereafter.

Never Say “No”

Saying “No” is considered as impolite behavior. Most of the times a straight no is masked (or camouflaged) with long statements that might confuse the client and make him feel we are beating around the bushes. It’s again just the cultural difference that we don’t want to be seen as impolite by not saying No.

As you can see we have acquired some of the behavioral traits from our history and some from our culture. Time would tell us if we continue to behave this way or if we would change.

Image Credit: KM Photography

Popularity: 38%

Attrition, for a long time has been a taboo word in the Indian employment workspace -primarily driven by the fact that there is a lot of hush hush and secrecy surrounding this. India is probably the only employment market in the world where there is no published industry data for this. If you still doubt it, ask the consulting giants.

They will give you an apple hood mother pie statement saying “Well, attrition in India varies from 10% to 120% – this is driven by a host of blah blah!”. Oh Jeez – That’s a 1100% range spread! (Range spread is (max-min)/min expressed as a %)

I don’t know if it is for the right or wrong reasons – this gets a lot of attention. People in the higher echelons of power want to review this every day, “clients & business partners” who are constantly worrying about the service quality as a result of attrition thankfully want to review it on a monthly basis and there are a host of other stake holders who want to slice and dice this information for statistical joy!

So how does one define attrition? “Someone leaving a firm on his/her own accord?”

How should organizations compute and report attrition?

What I was taught in school by the profs was to look at the number of people who left in a period, upon the average headcount

((no of people who left)/ (opening headcount + closing headcount)/2))

For a long time, this was the way firms were reporting attrition (at least that is what I think). With the rise in attrition numbers during the boom days, firms obviously were under a lot of pressure. Apart from the analysis of the data that separate teams were commissioned to do, there were multiple meetings to discuss this and task forces created to manage this. The numbers were so large in some cases that companies set up separate teams to do the traditional exit interviews – yes, they created a new department in the HR function!!

The thought leaders of the business obviously didn’t like the numbers they were seeing. With no immediate fix to the problem in sight (no one saw the recession in the hay days), they asked the fundamental question – is this the right way to compute attrition?

Now that’s a subtle way of the management saying, “listen, reduce the number!”… Wow! Talk about radical thinking!

In July of 2008, I was in a NASSCOM HR summit in Chennai. The Chief People Officer of a large Indian IT major, also a very good friend of mine was a panelist to speak on a topic titled “HR Leadership: Paradigm shift from process recruiters to business leaders”.He shared the dais with the heads of HR of two of India’s largest IT services firms. (Satyam wasn’t there ok! ).

While delivering his address, he looked at one of these speakers and said “I don’t know how you compute attrition, but the 10% number you report is incredible”.

While the speakers themselves burst into a chuckle, this was greeted to a rousing applause and roar from the near 3000 strong HR audience. The point to underscore here was the HR community, through their reactions, reiterating the fact that the methodology of computing is something that is rampant. His counterpart didn’t answer the question by the way!

Let’s get a sneak peek of some of the techniques that I have been exposed to:

1. Number of people who leave – Can we relook at the reasons for people to leave on their ” own accord”
2. Someone wants to resign and asks for leave. Manager says “NO” – the guy absconds. Great! He didn’t leave on his own accord
3. All leavers in the last two months of the performance measurement cycle are rated as “below par performers”. They would have been asked to leave anyways and hence must be considered as not having left on their own
4. What’s the ideal time to leave – first 30 days is not counted as this amounts to bad hiring. This is in some firms a HR metric and the poor recruiters are held accountable for this.
5. Process improvements on the above – 30 days is too little – let’s determine something between 60 and 90

Those were some of the ways to reduce the numerator. Sadly, the denominator can’t be changed – unless of course, you are Ramalinga Raju and decide to fudge headcount. Average headcount remains as it is. So where are the changes?

Here they are. While the formula gives you the result for a month, what does it look like for a year? The solution is in “annualizing”.  Read on for some of the industry best practices!

1. Compute your monthly attrition and multiply by 12. (That means my numbers will change on a monthly basis. If one month’s number was high, then I am dead)
2. Let’s look at calendar year – Annualized attrition is sum of attrition over 12 months. (Attrition will be high in the beginning of the year if it happens, but will reduce as the year goes on. Expect to have a few good months – read as low attrition)
3. Calendar year is a bad idea – let’s do rolling 12 months. This is a more holistic representation (peaks and troughs will get ironed out. This is my personal favorite as this is the right way to do it)
4. An American multinational with a long standing record, pioneers in the outsourcing space and an American giant, absolutely statistically inclined uses this method. Compute the monthly attrition; divide it by the number of the month (1 for Jan, 2 for Feb, 3 for March and so on) and then multiply this by 12! Wow.. how confusing. Is this were the adage of saying, if you can’t make someone understand, confuse them comes from!
5. I bumped into this Indian American in my last job. He was well educated and his gyan around attrition was like this. There’s a financial concept of Risk Adjusted Rate of Return. When you compute return on an investment, you discount the risk and look at the absolute return. So let’s assume that the risk on an investment is 10%. Your return on that investment is 15%. Therefore, your absolute return is 5%! So, define a risk adjusted target and knock off your attrition by this number. Eureka Eureka!! This is THE way in which my attrition will be the lowest. By the way, how defines the Risk Adjusted number? Does this change every month? What happens if the number goes negative? While I don’t have answers to this, he made me do it. I didn’t have a choice so to speak as he was well connected and I hence had to budge!

I don’t know if I want to go on here. There are a few more methodologies here!

I’m left with two choices.

A)  Hire a smart techie and a smart MBA graduate as interns – have them develop a “cute” methodology to compute attrition in a manner that the outside world will see this as scientific, rationale, thought through, scale proof and all the other management jargons that I know! (Hopefully this will be a big hit and I will be called a Management Guru. I will call this the Nars methodology of computing attrition and will become world famous. If I am not dreaming, I’ll be invited to talk around the world in forums, colleges and companies!)

B)  Write to Bill Gates and have him incorporate another function in Excel – ATTRITION (RANGE) where there is a standard method across and organization will hopefully be more willing to adopt!

While I know which way I am going, do you want to take a guess?

Attrition is maddening by the way eh!

I just got a note from someone here late last night saying they want to quit! What a way to start the day!!!

Image Credit: J Botter

Popularity: 60%

Hyderabad is a happening City. After it turned BPO hub, it has become even more active. You find traffic all through the night and especially the cabs which are shuttling for the BPO employees.

Most of the drivers, have a great sense of humor and they bring it out to display on the radio that is used in the cabs. I happened to be on one the cab, where a funny conversation was taking place. Here it is for your reading.

*ing: Salim the cab driver, Balraj the Supervisor and other drivers

Supervisor: Salim bhai line pe aao.

Salim: Aan ustaad bolo

Supervisor: Suvarna medam ko pickup karna tha kya hua

Salim: Hau ustaad, udaritch jaaroon

Supervisor: Kab jaate miya, rasta maalum?

Salim: kya baat karre, merkoo maalum, wohitch birdge kane hain na, wahaan jaage line pe aatoon.

10 min later…

Supervisor: Salim line pe aao, Salim line pe aao…. Kahaan ho message clear hain?

Some other driver: Bilkul kilear hain, paani hain paani

Supervisor: Kaun bola, yahaan channel number dikhra, aane ke baad kilometaraan kat kartoon

Some other driver: aan karlo karlo

Salim: Haan Haan, Balraj anna (supervisor), yeh galli mein hoon, doosra ya teesra ghar hain?

Supervisor: Gaadi aage leke jaa, ek ghar ke paas kutta bhownkta, vohitch ghar hain

5 min later

Salim: Balraj line pe aao, Balraj line pe aao

Supervisor: Haan bolo

Salim: Yahaan bahut kutte bhownkrey

Supervisor: Tereko dekhoto koi bhi kutta bhownkta, haaran baja medam aate…

By the time they finished their conversation, all of us in the cab were in splits laughing. You will relate to the above if you know Hyderabadi accent and lingo. Watch “Angrez” a movie full of Hyderabadi language, you will be up to speed totally

Wish you a Happy New Year!

Popularity: 29%

Whenever we think of performance some key questions come to our mind

• Why does performance dip?
• Was the performance high at all in the first place?
• How or why does a high-performer migrate into a low performance zone?
• Does interest level play any role?
• Does monotony set in after being in the same role for some time?

These and many more such questions haunt the employers of today. Some insights into the key aspects that try to answer these questions have been described here. I have given a shot at how two of them – knowledge and enthusiasm/interest level play a major role in the performance of an employee. Well one could call it a theory of performance lifecycle, since lifecycles is the word being used everywhere. It’s become pretty hep in the corporate lingo.

The different stages of performance levels are given below:

1.   Low Performance – High Enthusiasm / Low Knowledge

This is the stage when an employee joins the organization and is new to the environment. He wants to know more about the job and is highly thrilled about the new environment. Like with all new things, he is obviously highly enthused. However, like in most cases there is a gestation period to this too and it takes a while before he learns the dos and don’ts of the job. Therefore he goes through a low performance period.

2.    High Performance – High Enthusiasm / High Knowledge

Once the employee is up the learning curve, he is ready to kick a@%! He has just finished all his knowledge acquisition on the project/process and is just waiting/getting started with his initial phase of getting into production. Another point is that he also wants to prove his worth and build credibility; hence the performance level at this stage is invariably at the highest level.

3.    Mediocre Performance – Low Enthusiasm / High Knowledge

By now, the employee has proved his mettle and is more relaxed and composed now. The adrenaline rush is not there any more, nor does he get a kick out of the regular mundane tasks. But since he is already well acquainted with his tasks, he is still good with the job. The performance is no more outstanding as the enthusiasm level starts dipping.

4.     Low Performance – Low Enthusiasm / Low Knowledge

There comes the last stage, where the employee’s enthusiasm level heads southwards and hits the rock bottom in no time. This also affects his know-how of the job. As days go by, his interest levels dip and he doesn’t bother keeping himself updated with the ever-changing work environment and the processes and procedures. This added with the mundane routine without any new challenges, with nothing exciting happening around him, in turn leads into frustration and the performance further dips.

A point to note is that there is no set standard timeline for one to move from one stage to another. It just happens at its own pace depending from one individual to another.

Popularity: 9%