Conclusion & Employee Attrition in Other Sectors

 

The hospitality industry represents one of the most dynamic and thriving industries in the world. In some countries hospitality industry have retained as a large supporting industry to shape country’s economy. Hospitality industry is a broad category of service industry that includes lodging, restaurants, event planning, theme parks, transportation, cruise line and additional fields within the tourism industry. It is a wide range of organizations offering food and beverage service and accommodation.

           In hospitality industry employee attrition is generally acknowledged to be high, especially in comparison with other sectors. One of the biggest Human Resource challenges in the hospitality industry is staff attrition. This term refers to when an employee leaves and their position is not filled. Therefore, hospitality organizations have unfilled vacancies. In HRM, poor decision-making regarding selection, performance assessment, and lay-offs often result in resentment, low levels of commitment, higher turnover rates, loss of productivity and revenue, and damage to the employer's reputation (Cheng, 2017). This employment gap directly impacts the customer experience, leading to longer wait times and a shortage of expected amenities. It can even lead people to take their business elsewhere.

            Employee Attrition is the identified challenge in hospitality industry related to Human Resource Management in order to develop this blog. In each article of this blog, have written about human resource key themes and how those have related to employee attrition in the hospitality industry. Solutions for employee attrition has been given end of each article relating key HR themes.

             Employee attrition is related to all other sectors as well. In any sector, there is no doubt that talented people are the most valuable resource. The management sets goals, processes, and HR metrics for tracking their progress towards the goals. Successful organizations know that exceptional business performance and competitive advantage is driven by superior talent. Employees who are positively engaged have higher levels of productivity and profitability, better safety, lower absenteeism rate, high morale, and higher retention levels. The organization should use proactive strategies to combat talent management's challenge at every step, starting from hiring. Having a strategic human resource management practices can solve the problems of high attrition in any sector.

Here, I will do a brief explanation of how employee attrition will impact on few other sectors.

Information and Technology (IT) sector – In the last decade information technology has changed the entire prospective of the business scenario in the global market where the fast evolving knowledge economy coupled with the latest information technology is providing unlimited job opportunities to the highly trained and efficient professionals in the IT sector. Information technology has become one of the major market leader in global human resource market.
              With the growing opportunities for the IT professionals, who are catering the international clients needs there is a huge requirement of IT professionals in the global market. With so much demand for the Information Technology professionals there is a shortage in finding right people for right job and who meet their job expectations. Not only finding the right candidate for the right job is a challenge but retaining the candidate for a longer period has become a major challenge to the employers. With the alarming growth of the employee attrition in the information technology sector which has turned out to be a critical challenge for the employers. Employers and HR managers are striving hard to address the burning issue of rise in the attrition among information technology professionals which is affecting the overall performance of the organizations profitability.

Some of the common reasons for high attrition are as follows:

• Ambitions or Career Aspirations: In growing economy employees at all levels aspire to build their career. There are economic aspirations, professional aspirations, family aspirations and all kinds of aspirations and ambitions that affect person’s desire to move.
  
  
• Inadequate Training and Ineffective Management: Other reasons that lead to job attrition are inadequate training and ineffective management style. Many employees need training and directions to do their jobs. These training and directions should be provided by the company and management team. Without proper training, workers feel lost in their positions leading to unproductive performance, which may affect the confidence and self-esteem of the individuals.
  
  
• Conflicts between work strategy and goals: Sometimes the employees may feel that the work strategies the companies are using are not in line with the objectives the company wants to achieve. The employee may be unhappy with the way the performance graph of the company is shaping up, thus he may decide to leave.
  
  
• Looking for better working conditions: If there aren’t proper tools to perform the job, not enough staff, leadership and etc. affect the working condition in the organization.
  
  
• Seeking more opportunities to express creativity: Now a days IT professionals need more creativity in terms of creating new software and etc. If the organization not empowering their associates show their creativity, they tend to leave the organization.

 

Banking sector - In today’s scenario Banking sector have emerged as most employment generating industry and contributing a large portion in economy. Banking sector reform a great arise in the world. Followed by globalization, liberalization and other international events lead banking sectors to reform and adjust to attain competitive edge in multinationals environment. In order to cope with the changing trend as well to provide effective and efficient service to the customer implementation of advance technology has changed the face of banking. Installation of ATM machine, e-Banking, computer implementation and lot many inputs have changed the work patterns of the bank employees.
               One of the biggest issues currently faced by the banks is the remarkable rise in employee attrition rate. Since, there are plenty of banks opening branches and expanding its reach throughout the country, there is a demand in both the entry level positions and senior level positions. There are impatient staff seeking more secured and profitable career options leading to increase attrition in banking sector.

Some of the common reasons for high attrition are as follows:

• Work Environment: If working conditions are substandard or the workplace lacks important facilities such as proper lighting, furniture, restrooms and other health and safety provisions, employees will not be willing to put up with the inconvenience for long time.
  
  
• Job Stress: High rates of mergers, acquisitions, increasing economic interdependence among countries due to globalization, technological development, and restructuring have changed the organizational work over the last few decades have resulted in time pressure, excessive work demand, role conflicts, ergonomic insufficiencies and problematic customer relationship are causes of stress.
  
  
• Compensation (Salary): One common cause of high employee turnover rates is low pay and benefits packages.
  
  
• Employee relationship with management: Nature of management influence the individuals in terms of values of organization, image and existence or firm (Gregory and Henry, 2005). A poor relationship with the management can be an important reason for the employees to leave their jobs.
  
  
• Career Growth: Larson (2004) says career progress creates stress on employee’s understandings of the worth of his or her career prospects. Obstacles in career development can appear at any time during an employee’s employment period which serves as stressor for them. These stressors can include an array of problems like being stuck at a position, without any hopes of progress or threats of downsizing (Smith and Cooper, 1994).

Apparel sector – Employees are the key players in any industry. Therefore, retaining them in the workplace for a long time would provide many financial and non-financial benefits to the respective organizations. In the existing contemporary competitive business world, employee attrition has become a challenging issue in the apparel industry.
             Textiles and apparel is a major sector for both the industrialized and the lesser developed economies, contributing both to wealth generation and employment. The textiles and clothing industry is highly diverse and heterogeneous. There is a wide gap in the skill sets required as the lifestyle retailing segment grows towards organized retailing. Retailers source globally for their textiles and apparel products to acquire these cost benefits and in time to meet their fast moving and demanding consumer needs. Since there are more job openings in the apparel industry, there are impatient employees seeking more secured and profitable career option leading to increase in attrition rate in the industry.

Some of the common reasons for high attrition are as follows:

• Increasing recruitment cost: If the turnover rate is high, there will be a cost to relocate and train a new employee in the organization.
  
  
• Leadership skills: In this global competitive environment, effective leadership style is necessary to reduce the attrition rate.
  
  
• People management and poor grievance handling skills: Apparel industry is a high labor extensive industry. Hence there should be strategic HR practices in places to handle people and their grievances.
  
  
• Low morale among continuing employees : Where there aren’t enough employees to perform job, the workload will be high for the continuing employees. Also low recognition will affect the low morale among continuing employees.
  
  
• Compensation (Salary): One common cause of high employee turnover rates is low pay and benefits packages.

 

               Today, attrition is not only related to hospitality industry, it is one of the major problems faced by various organizations across the globe in many sectors. Several researchers have found that attrition is the second important issue related to HR department. The impact of attrition has received considerable attention by senior management, HR professionals and industry psychologists. It has proven to be one of the costliest and seemingly intractable challenges confronting organizations.

                 According to Mr. Goel of Global Hunt, views attrition as healthy and was of the view that “A balanced attrition is healthy for an organization as it opens the avenue for fresh talent to come and create innovations in turn can add lots of value to an organization. Low attrition will block fresh ideas and people will become too comfortable in their approach. But high attrition may not give an opportunity to individual and organization to understand and to optimize strength. Quick job hoppers will have difficulty to get a good job as they will not be widely accepted for long term or larger roles” (The Economic Times: December 24,2010)

                 Employees are the backbone of any sector and essential human asset for organizations to operate smoothly. Organizations require employees to apply their personal abilities in their works and deliver the best performance to drive the company towards achieving its objectives and goals. Hence any organization try hard to retain their employees and reduce their company’s attrition rate so that their resources can be saved and used on other productive purposes. When we are aware of the facts leading to attrition of an employee we can take few measures to retain them.

1. Provide good working conditions and introduce positive work culture so that an employee is at ease and not stresses while working.

2. Appreciate all the good work and mentor him. He will feel at ease and will be delighted that the company cares for him.

3. Fostering a culture of Management concern- Companies today must show an interest in helping people develop to their fullest potential. In addition to reducing bureaucracy, high performing, high –tech companies provide freedom in scheduled hours, and lifestyle choices.

4. Job enlargement- Don’t lock people into positions because they are “so good at it”. Managers must continually ask: “What’s the next step for this employee?”

5. Flexible working hours for those who really need to fulfill others important personal obligations.

6. Rewarding Managers- Many companies say they value people and train their management team to cope with people issues. Yet these same managers are too often rewarded solely on their technical skills and financial results.

7. Strengthening the Team- Marginal performers in management must be weeded out.

8. Clearly identify the people you want to keep – In recent years; many executives have focused on whom they should get rid of rather than whom they should keep. Unfortunately, those who decide to leave are often high-impact performers who can find other work quickly.

9. If possible provide him with an insurance policy so that he feels that company cares for him.

10. Recruit right person for the right job because a mismatch will hamper the work and cost a lot to the company.

11. Have faith in your employees and include them in important decision making so that they feel they are part and parcel of the company.

       As a summary, there is no doubt that talented people are the most valuable resource of an organization. The management sets goals, processes, and HR metrics for tracking their progress towards the goals. Successful organizations know that exceptional business performance and competitive advantage are driven by superior talent. Employees who are positively engaged have higher levels of productivity and profitability, better safety, lower absenteeism rate, high morale, and higher retention levels. The organization should use proactive strategies to combat on employee attrition challenge at every step, starting from hiring.

 

References

Dhillon, M. (2016) Attrition in indian it sector. Indian Federation of United Nations Associations, New Delhi [Online]. Available at www.conferenceworld.in . Accessed on 01^st May 2021.

Ganesha, H.R. & Sreeramana, A. (2020) Sales personnel attrition control and retention – An integrated framework for lifestyle retailers in india. Munich Personal RePEc Archive, vol. 4, pp. 78-95 [Online]. Available at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/102867/ . Accessed on 01^st May 2021.

Manda, V. K. & Naveenan, R. V. & Rengaswamy, R. & Matharu, H. (2021) Perspective on business management & economics. Vishwamitra Foundation [Online]. Available at www.pbme.in . Accessed on 01^st May 2021.        

Rungta, S. & Rao, M. (2018) Employee intention about attrition in india it sector. International Journal of Management and Applied Science, vol. 4, pp.1-6 [Online]. Available at http://iraj.in . Accessed on 01^st May 2021.

Shukla, S. & Sinha, A. (2013) Employee turnover in banking sector: empirical evidence. IOSR Journal of Humanities and Social Science, vol. 11, pp. 57-61 [Online]. Available at www.Iosrjournals.Org . Accessed on 01^st May 2021.

Subedi, J. Causes of attrition of senior level employees: A study on selected commercial banks of Nepal. Banking Journal, vol. 3, pp. 37-56 [Online]. Available at http://article%20Text-29949-1-10-20130904 . Accessed on 01^st May 2021.