Labyrinth of Employee Turnover

The assets of an organization can be categorized as the fixed and the current. Whereas infrastructure and machinery constitute the fixed assets, human resources and material inventories make up the current assets. Whilst most of the organizational assets tend to depreciate with the passage of time, conversely, its human resources tends to appreciate progressively. Thus, it is the manpower component that has a decisive bearing on an organization’s performance, which in turn determines the state of its functioning, so much so that it is not the technological advancement that determines the viability, no to speak of the profitability, of an enterprise as the level of the managerial and operative skills available therein. 

Hence, high employee turnover is disquieting to any business venture in that it tends to drain its organization of its cream, as it is the more talented and enterprising among the employees that generally contemplate change and find new employers. An attempt is made here to examine the factors that unleash an abnormal turnover and to suggest possible measures to help check the same. These factors can be broadly divided into organizational, personal, ethical, and political.

Structural Constraints

The size of an organization has a direct bearing on the extent of employee turnover. Smaller organizations suffer most on account of their inability to keep pace with the employees’ expectations of financial gain and personal growth. In a way, the small and medium ventures become training centers of manpower in that those they train will eventually be pirated by bigger organizations with attractive offers.

The growth rate of an organization also influences its employee turnover for people tend to stick to a growing organization in the hope of personal advancement. Thus, in a stagnant setup, as the expectations of personal growth are dimmed in proportion to the level of its stagnation, there ensues a disproportionate employee turnover.

Also, the location in which an organization is situated plays a vital role not only in attracting talent but also in retaining it. Generally speaking, remote and ill-developed areas do not offer the possibilities for a way of life that the more enterprising employees tend to seek. Since the quality of life on offer in the so-called backward areas is far below the normal social want, employee turnover in the units situated therein is inevitable, notwithstanding their general organizational strengths. Just as an example, the lack of adequate educational facilities in such places makes the employees seek greener pastures for providing better avenues for their progeny.

The associated prestige of an organization, measured on the scale of public recognition, too tends to influence the turnover ratio. Normally, one tends to associate himself with reputed and well known entities as that would lend him tangible social status thereby augmenting his egotistic halo. Likewise, one would be wary to associate oneself with ill-reputed or less known firms, which tends him to lookout for greener organizational pastures.

The style of management functioning is no less a determining factor in employee turnover in that whether it is professional or otherwise has by far the most telling influence on the latter. Since self-actualization is possible only in a professional setup, the climate is conductive for heavy turnover in organizations that run on centralized practices. Add insensitive human behavior and the prevalence of bossism, the result could be an employee turnover akin to an exodus.

Wherever promotional avenues are not uniform across the organizational board, the affected departments will suffer from high employee turnover. Also, faulty personnel planning and unimaginative recruitment policy could lead to an unintended zones of stagnation even in an otherwise growing organization.

The general working standards of an organization’s manpower too influences the employee turnover in that the relatively developed and ingenious among the employees may find the experience of working with less developed or uninitiated colleagues uninspiring.

Besides, the industrial relations in an organization also have a bearing on the employee turnover. If an organization is continuously plagued by industrial unrest the incidence of manpower turnover could be high.

Nevertheless, the size of the pay packet can influence on the employee loyalty for it could push all other organizational defects and personal factors under the carpet of inconveniences. It is thus; even the best in the business can lose on this front with an inadequate compensation.

Moreover, since practical considerations preclude the possibility of a trainee rising to the top position in an organization, it is inevitable that an employee seeks to change organizations for his career growth.

Personal Proclivities

Underemployment is one of the premier contributors for a high employee turnover, which aspect is not generally appreciated though it being an offshoot of unemployment that compels highly qualified people to seek jobs that ill-suit their academic standing and thus are hurtful to their perceived self-worth. Besides, the tendency of the overenthusiastic employers in raising the qualification bar out of sync with the job requirements too contributes to underemployment. What is more, the prolonged stagnation in a given job situation too leads to a lack of job satisfaction or a feeling of dissatisfaction.

Inter-personal equations, exemplified by the lack of individual rapport with colleagues, more so with the immediate superior, also play their part in the employee turnover; it is not uncommon to find talented employees leaving organizations due to the harassment of jealous or mediocre superiors.

Then there is the nativity factor to contend with. Most individuals like to work and live in their native place or ethnic region. Even intraregional displacements occur solely due to the home pull which makes an individual seek work in a place as near to his home town as possible.

State of Affairs

Besides, the ethnic composition of the organization personnel too has much to do with the employee turnover. When a particular ethnic group is dominant, especially in the top echelons of the management, it creates an apprehension among the minority groups that they may not be able to make the grade after all. This prevents them from identifying their long term interests with the organization, which, in turn, tends them to lookout for an opportune moment.

Factors such as the prevailing political system, the type of government in power, prevalence of internal disturbances, presence of external threats, lack of general economic prosperity, an undercurrent of ethnic prejudice etc., contribute to employee turnover, often described as brain drain.

The State policy of reservation for the hitherto oppressed and the suppressed, based on the philosophy of positive discrimination in public employment, essential though viewed from a larger national sociological prism, yet affects the morale of the general public. What is worse, more so in India, the out-of-turn-promotions through the reservation channels besides causing organizational upheavals cause individual heartburns, which contributes to unintended employee turnover.

Steps of Alleviation

It should be appreciated that employee turnover can only be alleviated but can never be fully eliminated. Just the same, the phenomenon of employee turnover is even desirable, to an extent, in that it creates new avenues to inject fresh blood into an organization. However, what should be of concern to the top management is an abnormal turnover that could affect the organizational health, which can be stalled with the adoption of some practical measures.

For one, along with the subsidies and incentives associated with the setting up of industries in notified backward or no-industry areas, due attention must be paid to the local availability or otherwise of skilled manpower and its impact on ensuing scale of employee turnover. This especially is the case with small and medium scale units, which cannot afford to install adequate infrastructure to upgrade the living conditions and introduce welfare measures to facilitate the ease of living of the workforce. So, the remedy lies not in the art of swimming in the troubled waters but in the wisdom of not jumping into them without ascertaining the impediments lying therein.

However, for attracting the adequate talent, and then in retaining it, the compensation package should be not only commensurate with the qualifications and experience required, but should be in consonance with the paying practices of the competitors. And as for the under-employment factor, adequate care should be taken in framing the recruitment policy. The job requirements and constraints are to be carefully evaluated and the qualifications required in the candidates have to be accordingly specified. So, the recruitment policy should be guided by practicality rather than letting fancy govern its head.

Also, to attract the best possible talent, managements tend to project a picture of their organizations which are more in line with the expectations of the prospective employees rather than what they really are. But it is a poor strategy for it leads to an expectation gap in the employees and that results in premature turnover, which hurts all. As the employer tries to evaluate the suitability or otherwise of the prospective candidates for employment, an opportunity should also be given to the prospective candidates to ascertain the organization’s work ethos and such to figure out for themselves whether or not it’s the right place for them. That way the employees’ expectation gap will be fairly reduced as those opting for the jobs would be aware of the organizational constraints that go with those jobs.

Every organization, irrespective of its size and scope, has to budget for publicity with the objective of its image building. In the case of small and medium firms, the publicity can be confined to the local or regional base for this will suffice as their ability to attract talent is also generally limited to it. Besides, the competition, in so far as the employment turnover is concerned, is also usually local at most and intra regional at best. By this way, the organization is ever kept in the local limelight, and thus it need not have to suffer on account of employee turnover associated with unexposed firms. In short, the small players have to acquire a local aura of their own to avoid the pitfalls of their life threatening employee turnover.

An organization has to maintain continuity and keep the advancement channels open to the employees in order to cater to their promotional aspirations. Unimaginative and haphazard recruitment methods that do not take into account the age factor of the employees for various positions in the hierarchy will lead to stagnation and consequent turnover or a sudden vacuum caused by their simultaneous retirement. This can be avoided by phased recruitment of and   proportional promotions to various positions, in tune with the planned growth rate of the organization. In an ideal situation, occasioned by this regimen, the facilitation of the promotion of juniors on the superannuation of their seniors could be achieved.

Job rotation leads to job enrichment besides reducing individual monotony that is inimical to the organizations’ functional health. Managements should develop appropriate systems to ensure job rotation, wherever practicable, so that the employee enthusiasm for work is sustained. Besides, evaluation of the individual aptitudes and capabilities of all the employees in general, and the personnel occupying the key positions in particular, should be undertaken, to enable optimum utilization of the available human resources. This ensures a challenging working environment to the truly gifted employees that enrich the organization.

Bossism, the monster that boosts the ego of a few and hurts the sensitivity of many, which has a bearing on the organizational morale as a whole that is detrimental to its well-being should be banished from the managerial portals. Also, for creating an environment for achieving self-actualization, delegation of power should be made the cornerstone of the management edifice. The absence of bossism and the presence of an egalitarian work culture founded on decentralization form the double non-monetary bonanza for ensuring employee satisfaction and loyalty.

The recruitment policy should be so framed as to desist itself from the influences of casteism, communalism, nepotism, regionalism and such, and whenever unavoidable, an ethnic balance has to be maintained in order to avoid the feeling of domination by a particular group in the rest. In those areas where the non-natives are economically dominant, it would do good to recruit the natives in numbers, not only to gain the patronage and protection of the local population but also, in case of an agitation against the aliens, to guard against possible mass exodus of the latter. Needless to say, the location of the industrial units should be confined to politically stable and socially homogeneous areas so that the adverse effects of political instability and social discord can be avoided.

Whenever out-of-turn promotions are given to any, either on account of proven merit or due to the obligatory reservation system, a necessary evil, care should be taken to keep the official interaction to the minimum between the promoted and the bypassed. Job rotation, creation of additional portfolios and inter-unit transfers are some of ways to achieve this end. This way of removing the red herring from the sight of the affected employees not only would minimize their hurt feelings but also help dissuade them from possible resignations.

Though the causes for the abnormal employee turnover and the measures for minimizing the same discussed here are comprehensive, but by no means could they be considered exhaustive. Each organization may be confronted with unique situations leading to the problem of undesirable turnover ratios. The remedies for high employee turnovers in a given organization lay in taking corrective measures, envisaged with a professional approach and an innovative thinking to analyze its unique causes. Above all the key to the gates of employee turnover lies in human understanding and sympathy.   

The Led ‘n the Leader

An origination is the outcome of the desire of a group of co-activists of a given calling to organize their group activity effectively and profitably. Given that an organization needs a hierarchy to function, and, indeed, to exist, the group seeks to create one for it. The hierarchy, then, comes into being by the process of election, selection, and / or both for the ostensible purpose of promoting the interests of the group to which it owes its existence.

Human nature being what it is, each member of the group, though working for the group interests at large, seeks to promote or at least protect his individual interests, within the group, as he perceives them. It is this compulsion that influences the nature and quality of the hierarchy. As can be expected in such a background, the leadership naturally passes on to those individuals who generally seem to represent the common interests of the group. This is essentially a status-quo approach to leadership selection, which severely restricts the elevation of capable and competent people to leadership positions. Generally, the group dynamics favor either mediocre people with a pliable image, or those with a commitment for self-promotion.

Fortunately, however, in those groups where the group interests take precedence over individual interests, made possible by the collective enlightenment or a shared ideology of the group members at large, capable, and competent leadership emerges. This can be described as the professional approach to the leadership formation. Here the accent of the leadership commitment will be on the general group promotion as opposed to the narrow individual interests. Thus professionalism is the capacity of the members of a group to subordinate their individual interests to the group objectives, though as a means to achieving the former.

The study of the subject of leadership is as old as civilization itself and the philosophers of yore, as well as modern management analysts have tried to analyse and bracket the attributes, characteristics and dynamics that go with leadership in men. Similarly leadership styles variously described as autocratic, benevolent and otherwise have been analysed and the situational requirements for their practical application identified.

It is pertinent to ask as to why then most men, otherwise competent and qualified, who occupy leadership positions, fail to provide effective leadership. To understand this phenomenon one should appreciate that the effectiveness of a leader depends as much on his own leadership abilities as on the cumulative influence of the various factors that make up the organizational environment in which he operates. Understanding and analyzing these secondary causes that determine the functional effectiveness of a leader can only bring totality to the analysis and appreciation of leadership. What then are they?

National Characteristics

Peoples of various nations have distinctive characteristics, which, among other things, influence their approach and outlook to the organized way of working. The outstanding revival of Japan and Germany from the ravages of the Second World War is more due to the collective organized will of their people than due to any outstanding leadership contribution. In this context it is pertinent to quote from the Nazi intellectual Joseph Goebbels’ last testament to his people, written before his decision to give up his life in solidarity with his Fuehrer at the time of the disintegration of the Third Reich:

“In doing this, I believe that I am doing the best service I can to the future of the German people. In the hard times to come, examples will be more important than men. Men will always be found to lead the nation forward; but a reconstruction of our national life would not be possible unless developed on the basis of clear and obvious examples.”

Thus the national ethos developed over a period of time by the examples set by the leaders and the led alike has a definitive bearing on the functioning of the leadership. Likewise, the seemingly ineffective leadership in a given situation may be due to the lack of a perceivable national or organizational ethos as the case may be.

In one of its reports on the economies of the Third World countries, the World Bank had inferred that the poor state of their economy is due to the lack of managerial skills. To this it can be added that the poor sense of organizational commitment of the people in these countries has much to do with the tardy economic progress.

Organizational Nature

Organizations vary in their nature and scope and with them the content and extent of leadership. Broadly, organizations can be categorized as social, political and business or industry. Structurally, the social organizations are less cohesive and the leadership has to possess extraordinary commitment to have any impact for generally, service being the only motive of these organizations, personal sacrifices are implicit with their leadership positions.

Ideology, power or the pursuit of it provide cohesiveness and bondage to political associations and this unambiguity is at once the strength and the weakness of their leadership. The success or even the survival of the leadership lies in its ability to indoctrinate the organization with the professed ideology on the one hand and by actually achieving or seeming to achieve political power for it on the other.

However, the scope of the present analysis primarily confines itself to the business and industrial organizations’ leadership possibilities. In a country like India, where the concept of mixed economy is pursued as a State policy, these organizations can be categorized as private and public. Though the organizational aspects affecting their leadership are the same, the functional features differ vastly. Private organizations have a head start in that the commitment for obtaining a return on investment is the main motivating factor of the leadership. The leadership is generally self evolved as it is the major investors or the leading promoters who come to occupy these positions. And this assures a continuity of commitment for performance, made possible by the personal stakes the investment brings in its wake. The loyalty to the organization and the authority in it, stem from this source and the twin virtues of loyalty and commitment can easily be made to percolate down the organizational ladder.

On the contrary, in the case of public organization where personal investment is not a part of leadership, its commitment, and loyalty are subjective. Owing to the State control, leadership is either implanted from within or imposed from without the organization, as opposed to its natural evolution in a private one. The policy is laid down by the State, often without taking the individual organizational requirements into consideration, and this invariably cramps the leadership style besides restricting its authority.

Work Ethos

Availability or otherwise of adequately educated, sufficiently trained and properly motivated personnel in the organization in the final analysis determines leadership effectiveness. The presence of such personal attributes as devotion to duty, integrity of character and self-discipline in the personnel manning an organization adds to its effectiveness even under mediocre leadership. On the other hand, even an outstanding leadership will be ineffective in an organization devoid of these characteristic in its people.

Essentially, leadership function is to provide policy, give direction, impart dynamism, create harmony, infuse morale, and develop skills besides planning for the growth of the organisation. Basically, it is the people of the organization who have to put in their combined effort, backed by their collective will, in order to make the organization function effectively. When the effort is lacking or the will is absent in the people, the best of leadership comes to grief in such an organization.

Morale Factor

Morale is all about an individual’s disposition as regards to discipline and confidence. Thus essentially, it is a state of mind influenced as such by the background of the individual concerned and the environment in which he operates. Though it appears to be a personal phenomenon, no other single factor affects an organization as the level of morale in its manpower. The twin tasks of inculcating discipline and infusing confidence in the people of an organization can be achieved by giving attention to the individual’s basic as well as higher needs. We may call this morale management. Many modern methods have been developed to improve the morale of the people in an organization and one of the more effective ones is the concept of ‘quality circles’. The impact of quality circles on behavioral changes is summarized by BB. Skinner thus: “By a careful cultural design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave - the motives, the desires, and the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.”

Since various organizational aspects interact and influence the morale level of the people, the same are to be properly structured  as to maintain a healthy morale level. Any leadership can ignore morale management at its own peril, illustrative of this morale factor is the defeat, often, of well organized and well equipped armies but lacking in morale, at the hands of motivated though ill-equipped and loosely organized troops.

Leadership effectiveness thus depends to a great extent on various factors inherent in the organizational environment. The purpose of this article, however, is neither to propagate the theory of leadership susceptibility to the organizational environment, nor to provide umbrage for the ineffective leadership as such. The conclusion, on the contrary, is much different. It is aimed at focusing various organizational ingredients that leadership has to reckon with and to highlight the need for overcoming the shortcomings that are inherent in the given environment of an organization.

This understanding of the organizational environment with all its attendant strengths and weakness will enable leadership to mould it to suit the functional needs of the organization. This indeed is the hallmark of dynamic leadership. The first step towards achieving organizational excellence is for the leader to show unmistakable faith in and visible commitment of the organization. The art of leadership is in leading from the front as opposed to chasing from behind.

Since an organization is conceived by human ingenuity to perform those tasks collectively which could not otherwise be performed individually, coordination among the people is a prerequisite for achieving this aim. The onus is on the leadership to elicit co-coordinated effort from the people. To sum up in sports parlance, the individuals of an organization should function with the team spirit of relay racing. Where this spirit is absent, the organization is transformed into an arena for a perpetual race of hurdles. The referee, however, it is the leader and it is he who can call the name of the fare.

Rousseau’s Feminist Chains

Jean-Jacques Rousseau had set out to determine ‘whether there can be a legitimate political authority, since people’s interactions he saw at his time seemed to put them in a state far worse than the good one they were at in the state of nature, even though living in isolation’. Consequently, he had formulated The Social Contract ‘as the best way to establish a political community, in the face of the problems of commercial society’, with the immortal opening line, Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains, that is literally true for over two centuries now.

However, the socio-religious circles of individual freedom came to vary from society to society, in times to times; and the objective of this piece is to take a cursory look at the same. In this context, it should be noted that traditionally, societies world over, for the most part, tended to restrain women in chains that are far too shorter than Rousseau’s Chains that bound men, and that ensues female freedoms are encapsulated within the realms of male constraints. Nevertheless, for the purpose of this exercise, we may examine the changes in female ‘freedom’ circles in the Christian, Islamic and the Hindu societies.

Christian Ultra- feminism

The conservative Christian world, like much of the globe, had always been a man’s world, though not religiously inimical to women, that is till the early twentieth century, when it was shaken, on the legal ground, by the first wave of feminism, seeking the voting and property rights to underscore the gender equality. But it was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex that ushered in The Women’s Liberation Movement, in the middle of that century, which set the course for enabling women to gain equal rights with men in every human activity and social sphere. However, as the impact of the third feminist wave that ushered in ultra-feminism, which in my view, besides being detrimental to femininity, the charm of womanhood, began to uproot the family system, the fulcrum of social stability, a debate about it is bound to abound in its fourth wave, as and when it tends.

Muslim Male Chauvinism

“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her,” those were the words of Jesus Christ (John 8.7) when he was asked by a group of men whether the punishment to a woman accused of adultery should be stoning to death as prescribed by the Mosaic Law (of the Jews).

Given that none of them ventured to harm that woman, the New Testament  avers that “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John. 3.17).

Whereas Jesus broke the God’s rule thus, in later days, the Jews, His chosen people, having been driven out of their promised land and dispersed  all over the Christian lands, had no way to stone their adulteresses to death in the alien lands as commanded by Him.

Maybe it was thus, the Jealous God of the Jews, some six hundred years after His Son’s death, sent Muhammad as His Messenger into their cousins’ land to get tougher than ever with the fair sex; so, much so that His ‘brand new’ religion branded women as an inferior species in ways many, whereby, to cite an example, the witness of four Muslim women equals that of one male Muslim that is besides granting the men of the faith the right to take as many women to cohabit with, that too, on a contractual basis, of course, with an unfettered right to beat, and an inalienable right to divorce them, to name only two.

But as time passed by, the wisdom of some modern Muslim rulers, in countries such as Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Afghanistan, set aside the God’s Quranic diktats to grant their women-subjects what the rest of the world gave its womenfolk. But sadly, though not surprisingly, given the intensity of the Islamic belief-system and the ghetto-construct of the Musalmans, the gate-keepers of the faith were outraged for the female modernism began to alter Islam’s patriarchal ethos, the fulcrum of its dogma. So, in time, to the hurt of the Muslim women, by uprooting the progressive rulers and undermining the egalitarian measures, they had ensured that the very character of the faith that afforded them primacy in the scheme of all things Islamic was restored. Intended or otherwise, that Islamic regression gave raise to Wahabism, in turn fuelling Islamic extremism the world over, rendering the golden period of Muslim feminism into a transient rainbow lost in the gathering clouds in the God’s own dark skies.

Hindu Swayamvaram

In the Aryavarta of yore, girls were groomed in gurukulas to become satyavadini by the time they turned fifteen, and some of them pursued higher studies to blossom into scholars such as Maitreyi, Ghosa, Gargi, Lopamudra et al.

Even when India was Bharat, still a bride was entitled to choose her man from among her suitors, known in Sanskrit is swayamvaram, which only proves that the ancient Hindu men were wise enough to realize that woman’s liberation lay in her right over her body to entrust it to the man she coveted; that is proof enough if it were ever required.

The sum and substance of woman’s life in the Hindu ethos was that she was on an equal footing with that of her male counterpart in the social and religious spheres, which more or less held ground till the eleventh century as captured by Al-Biruni in his Indica.

However, slowly but surely, from that feminist pinnacle, women were insensibly and progressively pushed into the abyss of subservience and worse. Though no historical research is in place that delves into this inexplicable Hindu social degradation, exemplified by female-inimical sati, child marriage, illiteracy to name a few, it can be speculated that so as to spare their fair sex from the glad eyes of the Muslim invaders, the Hindu society would have felt the need to protect its women in ways that proved to be inimical to their well-being in the long run. However, as Islam began to spread its male chauvinistic wings, its corruptive influence on the Hindu male propensities could have exacerbated the feminist interests.

If anything, the evangelic thrust in British India, with its accent on sin and tirade against sex, further dented feminism in the Hindu society that was wont to celebrate female sexuality.

Nevertheless, after India gained its independence, it was only a matter of time before the Hindu society began to yearn for its feminist moorings of yore. But brainwashed by the leftist ideology, by then, it had thrown the Hindu baby with the ‘Brahmanical’ bathwater, whereby ensuing a cultural vacuum. And ironically the same is increasingly sough to be filled with the Christian ultra feminist setting, which, given the contrasting social moorings and the sexual ethos, has proved to be a square peg in the round hole.

If only Indian women look back into Vedic times, they would be able to gather enough cultural implements to wriggle themselves out of Rousseau’s Feminist Chains, once and for all.