Attrition rate, or churn rate as it is also called, is a measure of the number of individuals or items moving out of a collective group over a specific period of time, in this case, an organisation. For many companies, this is a highly pressing matter – one of the most worrisome. Retaining talent is difficult and more so if that talent is rare and valued highly. It is, therefore, no wonder that organisations leave no stone unturned when it comes to aiming for a stable and efficient workforce. Unfortunately, it is a difficult problem to grapple with and goes deeper than just a definition and numbers accompanying it.
Mr Rahul Varma, Assistant Vice-President, HR at Synchrony Financial, in his address to the students of the School of Human Resource Management, highlighted the fact that adding value to numbers through attrition impact assessment should be the way to go. Adding that the concept of IT is now vintage – people who haven’t updated their skill set according to market requirements are quickly becoming obsolete, and no one wants deteriorating assets! When an organisation employs an individual, it is because of the value he/she will add to it, so when an employee leaves, he/she will also take away some value from it. In this scenario, the Attrition Impact Management Model (AIM) gauges an employee on all his/her key attributes, remarked Mr Varma. Attribution is thus measured based on factors that point to how much of an impact the employee is making on the organisation and how much value he/she is adding to it.
Besides this, he also spoke about how HR and finance are indispensable for each other’s existence and how HR decisions are immensely significant for an organisations’ health as they might, more often than not, directly impact revenues.
Signing off, he succinctly said that the HR in any organisation takes on the doctor, advocate and a cop. The session was an eye-opener and a gateway into looking at HR from a different lens.
School of Human Resource Management, Mumbai (Hyderabad Campus) 