HR SPECIAL.................. Organisations must care about employees’ everyday moments of truth

Organisations must care about employees’ everyday moments of truth

On asking my managers as to the causes for this and whether they had seen it coming, they shrugged their shoulders and said that despite regular one-on-ones, they had been as surprised as the rest of us when their people came and told them about the intention to quit. As we pondered over what we could have done differently and beat up on ourselves as to how we ought to have done more to retain these employees, it struck me that it wasn’t as much that we were at fault but that there were no systems in place that could have given us the information at the appropriate time. Every organisation talks about customer experience and understands that customer “moments of truth”, those instances from awareness through social discovery, consideration to purchase, to sharing the experience with others, where a customer interacts with the organisation, are critical to its success. A lot of time and effort goes into getting feedback from customers at every step of this process and rightly so. It is only by understanding the specific painpoints of a customer that organisations can take the necessary actions to not just alleviate the pain but to also ensure customer stickiness. Contrast this to the rather cavalier way in which organisations treat employees despite professions of putting their employees first. If we look at the entire employee lifecycle, from attracting them to the organisation, through engaging, onboarding, and retaining them and eventually to transitioning them out of the company, employees have way more touch points with the organisation than customers do. However, there really are no systemic ways in which organisations can understand these everyday moments of truth for employees. Leaders often bemoan attrition and almost always list employee retention as a key challenge and focus. However, attrition is not an overnight phenomenon. Employees don’t just wake up one fine day and decide to leave the company. Rather, their decision is a result of the cumulative effect of their everyday experiences with the organisation. Existing systems like year-end surveys, while indicating broad trends, are more akin to postmortems. What’s even more surprising is that organisations base their decisions over the next year on just this one set of data points at the end of the year. This is as preposterous as expecting a sales or marketing lead to make their business plans based on the previous year’s balance sheet, income statement and statement of cash flows. While we would certainly be pilloried, and rightly so, for suggesting the latter, companies don’t find anything wrong with the former. A recent report indicated that while even a decade ago, new hires took about six months to decide whether an organisation was right for their long-term career goals, that time has now shrunk to just a month-and-a-half. In a fast changing world, the future of work is dictated by three predominant trends. These are the rise of the millennial workforce with their unique technology driven worldview, pervasive digitisation and more importantly the move towards agile, self-managed workforces. With so much dynamism built into the system, organisations don’t have a choice. They must find ways to listen to their employees at much more frequent intervals, even continuously.  Arun Krishnan The writer is founder & CEO of HR analytics start-up nFactorial Analytical Sciences

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