Portability

Very recently came the concept of portability in Mobile telephony. It was to provide the customer the choice of migrating, in case he has service issues with his service provider. Customer retains his identity, his unique number.
I used this service few days back. No sooner, my application got registered with my next service provider; I got a call from my old service provider, seeking reasons for my leaving. The call from service rep. was apologetic with promises of improving all issues that I faced over next 7 days. I guess these promises & apologies were too late. I am now waiting for activation of same number with new provider now.
This experience set me thinking.
The concept of portability has existed for much longer. Employees make choices when they are not happy with their current organization. They look out for opportunities and change jobs to new organizations. That’s employee portability. His perspective. Organization perspective, call it attrition. Some organizations use the more positive term – Retention. Employee is a customer too for the organization. There is concept of internal customer discussed for a long time now.
Who owns the customer / employee after he / she has been acquired by the company? Are there any lessons to be learnt?
Yes of course. In the call I had from service provider, he only made promises to improve the experience, which was too late as I had already got my application submitted (akin to putting in resignation). The caller should have asked me what are those things which we need to improve apart from your reasons shared. He did not do so. He let go of an opportunity to get feedback and perhaps feed it into organization to be able to proactively improve services & retain more customers.
Portability / Attrition can be predicted or forecasted. If it can be, why do organizations and businesses do not consider proactive actions.
Like in case of customer it is fair to ask a question, who owns the employee? Is it HR? Is it the Function Head? Is the ownership shared by HR & Concerned Business/ Function? There are arguments for each of these. The one argument that I have seen most organization throw up to preclude any discussion when an employee quits is:
“Employees do not leave companies they leave their Managers”
To be fair, research does show & prove that, it is one of the top reasons among others, for people to quit jobs. When it happens more often, does it not make the responsibility to treat & go about resolving the challenge? Most often it is seen that, as soon as this argument is put forward, out goes the accountability and pain of Top Management & HR. Abandoning. My guess is that most senior employees in organization extend conveniently this argument to cover up deficiencies related to company culture, talent management etc.
Organizations would do well when they conduct a follow up analysis to highlight managers who have contributed to the highest or critical attrition. (High_PO). I have worked with few organizations and have talked to innumerable professionals but none have confirmed that any Manager was asked to leave because he had the highest attrition in his team.
Organizations need to truly acknowledge attrition (Employee portability) only then the perspectives will change. Till then attrition as a performance indicator is not owned by any. It is akin to orphaning the employee. Literally. So if & when an employee resigns / quits no one sheds a tear. No one owns him. He becomes a statistic. And then again we hear. People leave managers not companies. Think about it from the perspective of organizations facing high attrition at almost 25-30%. Such high attrition means that virtually all the Managers in the companies are to be blamed. Collectively these Managers make an organization.
Organizations now seem to resolving the attrition problem by analysing data as Voluntary and Involuntary Attrition.  That’s reduces the pain and effort a bit. To further distance the issue from HR ,  there is a thought process to measure attrition as only Critical Resignations % (people who have to be retained / have High PO).

 It seems an admittance that HR community did not understand the concept well and measures it all wrong. They have now redefined measurement rather than addressing the issues itself. Most organizations don’t seem to acknowledge it. At their own peril.