23- 25th of May 2022, it felt like all GBS Leaders flew and met in Lisbon for Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON) flagship conference incl. our great ecosystem partners such as High Radius or Transparent Solutions and EY or KPMG and many others. It was an excellent event full of provocative and very prompt content. I’ve chosen five topics to elaborate on. I would love to hear your feedback so please disagree or agree by sharing your comments.
Attrition – about our mindset and how to approach it
GBS which must die to be reborn as a Tech Enabled Service led by Intelligent highly qualified People
Future of workforce - we must understand to embrace it otherwise we will “die"
What is the best way of working i.e., fully remote, fully in the office or in a hybrid way
Charismatic Enabler as the new & potentially more effective way for GBS Leaders
I will start with attrition. The topic for everybody. I bet that most of you have it in your goals. Some of us look at it from the half glass full side and talk about retention, which I appreciate. In fact, by nature, I like the positive approach … can do attitude as we often hear it in US corporations.
The million-dollar question is what is the right level of attrition? By right I mean the one which is not disrupting your business continuity and does not damage your Customer Experience. So, what is it, 10%, 15% or 25%? During my past 20 years, I have heard so many different answers to this quite simple question. What is your answer? Have you ever wondered why we struggle with this answer and why it is so different among our peers? The closest to the schoolbook answer it is that the best unmanaged attrition level is in between 10-15%. If it is above 25% you have a problem but if it is below 5%, you have a problem as well. Agree … disagree?
As I have been checking – in the past - monthly attrition levels with my teams, the actual impact to the business varied i.e., sometimes 10% was causing a serious business disruption and sometimes even 30% was causing no issue whatsoever. Having said that, it is even more confusing. Don’t worry I have a solution for you. A couple of years ago – I said “no more” since tracking attrition monthly is pointless. What is key is the why and the outcome, this is where all your efforts shall be focused on.
Let us start with the outcome … high turnover can cause Business Continuity challenges, it can disrupt Customer Experience, it can increase the Cost of your Operations and I bet we could list a few other areas. The point is that we shall all stop talking about 10% or 15% but shift our mindset to the outcome. A couple of years ago, I replaced traditional attrition metric with a new one called Business Continuity Assured & No disruption to Customer Experience due to Attrition and magic happened. My team got empowered. My leaders started owning fully the outcome. We all stopped carrying about the level of attrition as such. We ended pointless discussions about attrition levels turning our approach fully to the outcome-based model. As a result, the topic of attrition disappeared, and the engagement of my leaders increased. I did it globally with my US teams and India teams and European teams so it can and works globally. Try and the magic will happen for you too.
Moving to the why, we have analyzed the root cause for attritions for more than a decade. As I led teams across all continents, it is clear that attrition can be greatly managed though two aspects. First one, it is about me talking regularly to my Direct Reports plus a very good practice to DRs of my DRs and then consequently all my managers shall talk to every and each person about how do they feel, are they happy or not happy with the role, do they understand where are we going, what is their feedback on what we do well and we don’t do well etc. Do I talk to them and then come back to them with actions or a justification why we must take a different decision? This magical triangle is key here and all elements must happen to make it work. One, I talk to the person – listen and hear. Two, I have it action-ed. Three, if I do not have it actioned, I shall explain why. Second aspect of managing attrition, it is about us creating an environment ideally trust based where the person feels safe to speak up and feels good at. Remember that this environment might be different for all of us since we are all different including our diversified cultures. This is not easy since it puts heavy responsibility on the leader but there is no other way. And yes, many of you will ask, what about salary? Yes, salary is important, but it only works to a certain level especially now in the context of Great Resignation being a global reality – us talking to the person and us creating a safe environment is more important than ever before.
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