How to Deal with Attrition in the Post-Pandemic Era?

The ‘great attrition’ is real & has mostly impacted the IT industry with the startup boom and GIG economy taking over. As per HAN Digital, more than one million employees would potentially resign this year, resulting in losses worth billions of dollars. The huge demand has led to supply challenges as employee attrition has picked up across IT companies.

Ways to Deal With High Attrition

Here are the 6 ways to deal with High Attrition –

Competitive remuneration along with benefits and perks

Digitization has introduced an abundance of job profiles that resulted in a rise in demand for relevantly skilled and highly equipped talent. The market for skilled IT employees is highly competitive. This shortage of talented workers is causing ‘talent poaching’ & high turnover rates as workers get better offers elsewhere and companies are struggling to retain them.

To address the demand, companies are expanding their workforce and are ready to offer relatively higher salaries. With more jobs becoming available in the market, the attrition rate becomes high as employees are moving to better-paid jobs. To combat this, companies need to pay more competitive remuneration along with benefits and perks as that’s the number one driving force for any employee.

Offer flexibility and hybrid mode

The emergence of the IT sector in terms of remote work and tech-enabled industries saw increased opportunities in the market due to covid-19. As per Adecco, 70% of junior and middle management employees have migrated to their hometowns during the pandemic. Almost 60% of them want to extend their stay in their home town temporarily.

With offices opening, employees are looking for remote job offers. With remote working becoming a trend and new normal, employees are able to easily give interviews while sitting at home instead of taking a leave from their current organization unlike before during the notice period.

Thus, employees apply for jobs at multiple companies and have multiple options, which ultimately leads to attrition as it’s difficult to retain the talent with multiple offers in hand. It becomes easier for candidates to interview and connect/discuss with recruiters in a less disturbed homework environment.  

No doubt, millennials prefer flexibility along with a great salary but industry experts believe that learning by example, overhearing, and social etiquette are greatly impacted due to working from home. Most companies including Google and many others are options for hybrid mode as it will bring the best of both worlds to employees and employers and reduce attrition. 

Improve engagement

Many companies couldn’t focus more on emotional connection as employees were physically not present and also remote onboarding at times results in employees missing connection with the company’s mission, vision, and team.

Since employees were working from home, things like chitchats, connection, and communication imbalanced their alignment with the company. If organizations are not able to proactively, constantly communicate, and provide clarity about the near-term and long-term future for the employees, employees tend to feel insecure about the future.  

Without effective management, employees can feel like they are lacking a sense of direction, drifting rather than being led. Companies’ first priority should be their employees, and their well-being and improve their employee engagement. Companies should strive hard to align company vision with employees’ vision and motivate them to grow in their careers. 

Re-skill and up-skill your existing employees

Most of the employees need training, reskilling, and directions to do their jobs as the “new normal” is new for everyone. In most cases, employees like to be involved in some of the decision-making and would appreciate delegations. They also love to be rewarded and recognized for the good work they do.

The lack of proper training leads to unproductive performance, which may affect the confidence and self-esteem of the individuals. This would certainly discourage workers from ongoing work for the same boss & the same company leading to their departure.

The best-case scenario in this competitive market is to reskill and train your people early (including college graduates) for the skills your organization needs and when it’s time to adopt that new technology or practice your people are ready. 

Flexible hiring

Over 80% of IT engineers are from outside their work location. With the option of remote working, employees tend to take up job which allows them to stay at home with their family. While doing so, they enjoy the perks and salaries of the cities they are working in. Employees realized that returning to the office has an additional cost, the cost of travel, food, masks, and rent. This fueled their urge for looking out for remote jobs.

Few types of research suggest that there would be an exodus of mass resignations when offices start as most of them would not be able to possibly relocate to their work city which they had chosen for higher salaries considering the work-from-home setup.  

To deal with this, companies can focus on remote and local teams by hiring from tier-2, tier-3 cities, and under-developed countries where IT skills are thriving and resources are ready to join organizations with an international footprint and exposure. Be flexible not only in work location but also in the hiring arena. 

Avoid excessive and unnecessary hiring

With so many job openings in the industry, employees are switching to wherever they are getting a higher salary. Employees fear that by staying with one company, they are missing out on better opportunities. Employees feel that another company might offer more advancement opportunities, value their input and experience more, or offer a better work-life balance.

With this feeling, they are bound to look around at other companies and jump at the next job opportunity that has the potential to be more rewarding.

Conclusion

On the other hand, because of the fear of missing out (FOMO) on better candidates, companies are hiring at an exponential scale with better salaries and perks.  Companies should only hire for an existing open position and build a 10% bench to support any extreme conditions in business to reduce attrition and avoid unnecessary hiring.

Employees should also weigh out not only remote working and incentives but also the work culture and trust their organizations have shown during COVID 1st and 2nd waves.

So, what are your thoughts on reasons for attrition and how to deal with it? Share your take in the comments below.