Let’s begin with self-indulgent posture. When two leaders from different organizations meet, – “How’s business” is the cliched start and then one thing leads to another in hurried hops. A long halt is usually at the topic of ‘people challenges’. Cut to varied covid times when they are talking, a long halt now is at ‘Great Resignation’. Thanks to Dr.Anthony Klotz, professor of business administration at A&M University, Texas who studied resignations for half of his young life now.

Dr. Klotz has contextually calibrated attrition for us and offered it to us as a phenomenon. What is not sure is, if organizational leaders especially human resources managers have taken to the phenomenology behind the phenomena and explained the same to the business managers.

‘Great Resignation’ i.e., unusual numbers of people leaving the organization and creating upheaval within the organization is nothing new, particularly in the Indian context. Many sectors in India have already learned to outgrow attrition levels that are unimaginable even now by other industries. The Business Process Outsourcing Industry in India in the late 90s and early 2000 dealt with attritions as high as fifty percent or more and monthly dashboards moved on to the next slides when it came down to the forties. Around the same time, when Indian Media & Entertainment sector was emerging and began with its humble contribution of one percent to the GDP, what was happening was not attrition but ‘coups’. One media leader would leave as the pied piper of Hamlin followed by many en masse.

What is common across industries is that human resources professionals suffer from a phenomenological miss when it comes to attrition, the aggravation of which is called great resignation. The usual approach to managing attrition is retention, using the compensation and benefits handle. It does not work as it merely is a superficial bandage applied with little or no deep-seated long-term meaningful cure. Here is what happens! Once there is resignation, a reactive financial bandage is attempted and whether it works or not is anybody’s guess. Human resource professionals miss the phenomenological process that the act of resignation is a final act. Before this action, the employee has undergone a series of rational and emotional processes and failing to find a solution – has thus ‘decided to put her papers’. A costly miss by HR professionals. Indeed, for this miss, ignorance cannot be a blissful plea if claims of being professional people managers are to be sustained.

Here’s where leadership at all levels of the organization plays a role. When retaining people exclusively becomes HR’s performance metric, the beginning of the ‘Great Resignation’ starts. Instead, HR professionals must be mindful of the entire phenomenological process behind ‘great resignations’, preempt topples and tumbles by observing human processes patterns around them, describing, interpreting, validating and acting upon on them on priority. Everything else is an act of ‘taking for granted’ and alas one day the decision is taken by the employee.

If ‘Great Resignation’ is to be arrested, leaders across organizational levels need to start thinking, believing, and acting of the following:

Socio-psychological Involvement: Leaders must go beyond the numerical levels of the typified ‘Engagement Scores’ and endeavor to involve themselves at emotional level with the thinking process, feeling process and actions of their people at several situations. Leaders must truly ‘engage in spirit’ and the HR pros must help other leaders understand that engagement is beyond a mathematical score and pomp & show of festivals.

Psychology of Appreciation: Like trust begets trust, appreciation begets drive and motivation. The machinist metaphor is today not only restricted to organizational forms. There are managers who are machines and are detested covertly, if not overtly. An organization with more of these kinds of managers are at the brink of the collapse due to ‘Great Resignation’. HR pros must endeavor to develop the human skills and emotional intelligence of these business managers.

Lead: Lead for heaven’s sake. Either by thought or by action. People look up to leaders. If they cannot look up to their boss, they are discouraged. They have a sense of loss of grace that they ‘have to work’ for someone they cannot get anything from.

Help to learn, more than to earn: Enough data shows that employees remember those bosses from whom they learnt a lot. They say that those bosses made the foundation on which their careers stand today. They imitate those bosses and carry their legacy forward with pride.

Covid shall go away, but organizations will remain. What would remain is continued volatility, uncertainty, confusion, and ambiguity. Stability is a fatal illusion, and it is the leadership and its efficacy that will fetch business efficiency amidst all the dynamism. Amidst all this, it is socio-psychological involvement with people, a culture of appreciation, leaders who can inspire, leader who can truly lead individuals’ career growth and minds that would arrest ‘Great Resignation’.

This blog is written by Satyakki Bhattacharjee, Managing Partner at Growthsqapes Consulting.