Addressing Specific Root Causes
| At a glance • Root causes of attrition • Many root causes are outside the ambit of HR policies • Your leaders need digital tools of PSA software to stem attrition |
In the first part of this series, we discussed how the leaders of IT companies can use the PSA software-based digitalization technology to meet the twin challenges of attrition and productivity of employees. In this second part, we shall discuss various specific root causes of attrition and how leaders can use technology to prevent them.
Usually, the Resource Management Software (RMS) module of the PSA is a good place to start the digital journey. Implement it quickly, reap its benefits, and go forward.
During this journey, leaders at different levels need to use digital tools to make various project, task, and people-related decisions.
Here is how leaders can prevent root causes of driven attrition.
Employees are given work well below the level of their skills & competencies
Use anyone below their potential and lose them. It is that simple. Faced with a loss of billing or an unhappy customer this practice is quite prevalent. If project managers, the resource management group, or the delivery head all see the mismatches they can prevent them. Good Resource Management Software makes it easy.
At higher levels of leadership, the RMS shows analytics that can reveal patterns of such mismatched allocations in the past e.g. who all bore the brunt, who did it more often, etc. With full PSA deployment, the financial impacts of such decisions are also apparent.
Lack of learning & development opportunities
Ignore the development of your people and lose them. And you will lose those who wish to learn. Double loss for your organization. Digitalized operations can flag employees stuck with the same kinds of tasks or those with falling revenues per hour.
It is the job of leaders at higher levels to look into these and plan interventions like job rotations and training. A good RMS is a powerful tool in the hands of leaders at higher levels.
Lack of recognition of good work
There is nothing worse than not being appreciated -particularly for talented people. How can leaders ignore this? But this gets overlooked by busy leaders. Everyone works for money, but the really talented ones work more for recognition.
Pay and fancy parties won’t keep them back for long. A good RMS or PSA can show up people with consistently high revenues margins per hour. It can also show effects like reduced loss of revenues due to collaborative efforts of leaders across many departments. You can get objective information about the good work that is taking place.
Not happy with their immediate seniors
A very common cause of driven attrition is shown by survey after survey. While a digitalized allocation of resources will not flag bad behavioral traits of a senior it can provide telling data.
Patterns of overallocation of only some people, frequent switching of assigned tasks, delayed starts of tasks, etc. need to be investigated. It is possible that there are reasons outside the control of the concerned immediate seniors but investigations by leaders with good insight can identify toxic behaviors.
Facing unhappy customers
Your project managers may be under serious pressure from customers and their own bosses for missed deliverables or revenues. They may be struggling to get resources on time.
Your functional heads may be struggling to reconcile data on resources. You are running a risk of losing or demoralizing some good people doing important roles. A good RMS can help in this through resource forecasting and rebalancing and by presenting a Single Version of the Truth to all.
Conclusion
We have seen in this series that the root causes of the attrition of talented people are genuine leadership issues. HR policies for compensation, perks, and workplace flexibility can not address them. Your company’s leadership team at various levels can remove the root causes.
Your leaders can stop driving talented people out. Give them the tools provided by Professional Services Automation software-based digitalization. If you have 100s or 1000s of people you can not afford to ignore the PSA software. Please call for a demo and start evaluating.
Related reading
Resource Allocation For Successful Project Management Part 1 & Part 2
