A human resource manager conjures up the scene in his mind. A highly competent employee walks into his room and wants to have a word with him. This employee's behavior is uncharacteristically cagey, restive, sheepish and tentative. When the employee slams the glass-rimmed door behind him, the HR manager knows intuitively what is going to hit him. A highly valued, productive and coveted employee is about to resign. A smack in the HR manager's face, one may wonder. Cut back to the reality. The possibility of the prized talent walking out the door is something HR managers are coming to terms with, albeit grudgingly. Employee attrition is increasingly becoming a ubiquitous phenomenon and its reverberations are felt across the companies in the broad swathe of industries.
In today's knowledge-driven business sweepstakes, people are emerging as the key competitive differentiators. A highly-talented, skilled and knowledgeable employee pool will help the company leapfrog the competition; therefore, managing this talented employee's base is of paramount importance. In taxing times such as today, unswerving commitment and indefatigable energy levels of employees are vital, but more often than not, they are very fragile than one can envisage. Today, opportunities abound for people with relevant skill sets even as there is enough talent pool for the companies to pick from, but the unacceptably high levels of attrition is bleeding the organizations dry.
Attrition is not a new phenomenon. It has existed all along. In earlier times, jobs were few and the evolution of technology was excruciatingly low. In the 1980s and early 1990s, people still believed in shibboleths like `jobs-for-life' and a `career within a company'. But in the late 1990s, the pendulum started to swing wildly. The unspoken, unwritten lakshman rekha between employer and employee got irretrievably broken.
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