INTRODUCTION
Attrition our asset walk out of the door each evening, we have to make sure that they come back the next morning, says Narayana Murthy chief mentor of Infosys.
Attrition meaning: "A reduction in the number of employees through retirement, resignation or death" The upshot, from an organization’s perspective, is greater staff turnover or, in some cases, the development of an ‘employee- retention problem’. It is increasingly hard and more expensive to find suitable replacements quickly when people leave, leading to inefficiencies and lost business opportunities. Moreover, because people are occupying more highly skilled jobs, greater potential damage is done to organizations when people leave. Precious accumulated knowledge and experience leaves through the front door with them when they go. Despite these truths about our contemporary business environment, many managers seem to find it hard to adjust. There remains a tendency to run organizations in quite an autocratic, inflexible, controlling kind of way. Unwanted staff turnover results because attractive, alternative job opportunities are more readily available, yet this rarely seems to lead to any kind of critical self-appraisal of the way we manage our people. The truth is that most times when there is an unwanted resignation it should be seen as an organizational failure. A valued asset in which the organization has invested time and resources has been lost. This should lead us to reflect on the causes, to think about how things could have been made to turn out differently, and to adjust our practices so that the chances of its happening again are reduced. However, such a response is rare. Instead, we brush aside the departure, blame everything and everyone but ourselves, and cheerfully resist the need to change the way we operate. In tight labour markets this just results in higher levels of unwanted staff turnover.
Self-evidently, it is necessary to find out why