Humane side of The Great Resignation

During early February 2017, I happened to bump into one of my ex-colleagues while coming out from a business lunch meeting at a Japanese restaurant by the name Harima in Residency Road, Bangalore. At first glance, I found my ex-colleague to be stressed and worn out. He was working with a consulting firm in AI domain and was frustrated and aghast with the work culture at the client side. The issue was client was expecting him to share his desktop for 4 to 5 hrs long stretch daily while working for the client. I could feel his pain of sharing his desktop while he would iteratively try out various AI (Artificial Intelligence)/ML algorithms to finalize any predictive model. He quit 2 days before our chance meeting and disclosed that he has written back to client stakeholders citing harassment and eventually resulting in his parent company losing a revenue of approximately 300K USD. Was it a case of “Karoshi” – death by overworking in Japanese workplace ? a coincidence to my visit to Harima, the Japanese restaurant? Here it was not overworking but “micromanagement” at its peak.

Another scenario- We were at a birthday party of one of our family friends last week. It seemed the Chef from the catering had wrongly estimated the counts for Chole Bhature as the dough for Bhature was not enough to feed the guests. There were still some party guests who missed the chance to relish their favorite North Indian dish “Chole Bhature”. What followed was a verbal spat in presence of entire party crowd between the owner of the catering company and his chef. This spat culminated into the Chef barging out of the venue in aghast leaving the owner to manage the predicament on his own. That could probably be the shortest notice period I might have witnessed.

“The Great Resignation” phenomenon is not only confined to Indian tech industry but is pertinent across the globe and spans industries other than IT and ITES, organized and unorganized sectors. Millions of employees across the globe have voluntarily quit their jobs last year partly due to the changing work culture dynamics due to Covid-19 pandemic.

As per a recent MIT Sloan study, more than 24 Mn people in US has quit their jobs between Apr’ 21 to Sep’ 21. Third quarter of FY22 reportedly saw a high attrition rate amongst Indian IT giants: Infosys @22.5 %, Mindtree @ 21.9%, Wipro @ 22.7% and TCS @ 15.3%. Intrinsically, pandemic might appear to be the sole reason for attrition and ironically for layoffs too with most ominous being the recent layoffs in better.com due to market performance. Hybrid and remote working have destroyed work-life balance, creating an ‘always on’ mentality and the pandemic has made workforce across the globe to reassess their priorities and career paths.

Some plausible reasons and food for thought for HR professionals….

1.??????Poor appraisal behind high attrition: As per Deloitte India-NASSCOM survey, one of the key concerns of IT?employees?for leaving an organisation is muted growth in increments followed by poor employee benefits, rewards, digital skilling and so on. Average increment in?IT sector for year 2022 is estimated to be between 9 to 11%, In the year 2020 it was worst @ 5.2%. The age old conventional appraisal system conforming the thumb rule of bell curve and the rising inflation rate had a sinister impact on the lifestyle of Indian working population.

2.??????Better job opportunities: Majority of employees are quitting their current jobs in search of better job opportunities in terms of new challenges and better monetary perks. A September 2021 survey conducted by Amazon India suggested that over 50 per cent of job seekers are looking for opportunities in domains they do not have experience at all. A report by McKinsey and Company stated that more than 100 million workers will need to transition to a different occupation by 2030 in a post-Covid-19 scenario

3.??????Toxic Culture: A company’s success depends on its work culture than money, revenue, customer base etc. A culture scorecard with positive KPIs is very imperative for a company’s perennial growth in the years to come irrespective of whether it is impacted by a pandemic or a geo-political war. Toxic culture has behavior components which includes actions of failure to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion; workers feeling disrespected; and unethical acts. A vibrant culture with happy employees is the difference between a successful and failed organization

4.??????Rise in startup unicorns: As of February 2022, India is home to?88?unicorns with a total valuation of $ 295.99 Bn and since the beginning of pandemic, number of startups attaining unicorn status is on a steady rise. With increased funding, these?startups?are attracting the best talent in the tech industry with lucrative salary packages and other additional perks like ESOPS, upskilling making it a major challenge for big IT firms in India to hold on to their best talent.

5.??????Gen Z Workforce: 50% of India’s population is below 28 years and the next generation of workforce specially the Gen Z are digital experts with varied personality attributes. Most important being the risk-taking ability and aspirations to pursue non-conventional career paths. Gen Z along with MIllenials are redefining the dynamics of Indian workforce with reference to loyalty towards employers, dynamic career paths and everchanging mercurial professional and personal aspirations.

Indian tech giants are responding to the great resignation by planning to hire around 360,000 fresh graduates in FY22.

Can AI and data be used to combat this great attrition? Yes, if HR professionals collaborate with AI experts to measure the employee sentiments. Verbatims from regular employee surveys can be analysed using NLP (Natural Language Processing) and ML (Machine learning) algorithms to measure the sentiments and predict attrition.

Few ways to combat attrition:

i)???????????????????Data driven HR function: HR needs to be tech savvy and embrace wider technology to understand the experience of the workforce which would proactively help to find trends and anomalies in employee behaviour.HR tools powered by AI/ML algorithms would act as a strategic decision-making tool to address employee dissatisfaction as well as attrition.

ii)??????????????????VoE (Voice of Employee) Analytics tool: MNCs do have a VoC (Voice of Customer) Analytics tool to measure the sentiments of customers; same can be replicated to measure the employee sentiments and mindset. One of the additional features we can bring in here is have a one-to-one session with employees and record their interviews which can further be analysed using tonal analytics.

iii)????????????????Culture of empathy: Foster a culture of empathy amongst reporting managers, employees and decision makers which ultimately leads to work-life balance, valued by organization, managers and coworkers, trusting teammates, feeling engaged, potential for growth, mental wellbeing, flexible work schedule, care for family etc.

iv)????????????????Physical meetings & Communications: Meeting and greeting employees, customers, and vendors, pitching to a new customer, white boarding, collaborative brainstorming etc in person has a larger business impact than doing and operating online or digital.

We might be curious and all set for the NextGen digital metaverse, but at the same time our real physical world and universe is inhabited by humans with sentiments, emotions, compassion, kindness, and feelings.

Compassion, empathy, and kindness can turn attrition to attraction.

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Author: Dr Rajesh Devasia, Data Analytics & AI Consulting, India

Disclaimer:?The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belongs solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author’s employer (past or present), organization, committee, institutions, or another group or individual.

Author can be reached at:?[email protected]?Mob: +91 9819903380