At TCS, one of the main objectives for the HR team is to identify disengaged employees who are vulnerable to the various pull and push factors, which are beyond the control of any organization. Thus, it becomes imperative for any organization to address such factors way before the employees start exploring other opportunities. Therefore, to address such a situation, developing analytics for attrition management becomes crucial.

Business drivers for managing attrition

Some of the core business drivers that prompt organizations to manage attrition are costs, employee disengagement, correlating HR data with attrition, and understanding the employee pulse. The breakdown is as follows:

• Costs: Attrition involves a cost of loss and cost of replacement, especially when it comes to a senior-level person replacement. is not only cost-intensive, but also time-intensive. There is also a training cost that follows attrition.

• Employee disengagement: When a dissatisfied employee puts in his resignation, s/he would have already given several interviews and explored other opportunities. At this point, there is hardly any scope left for the company to engage with the employee because s/he would have made the decision to leave only after thinking the decision through.

• Correlating data with attrition: TCS maintains historical HR data and currently, on a daily basis, we generate HR data for more than three lakh employees. This presents a huge pool of data to analyze as the data from the monthly Time Sheet application alone occupies more than one crore rows per month. Hence, collating relevant data in a way that can be leveraged to identify disengaged or dissatisfied employees is a challenging task.

• Understanding the employee pulse: TCS runs one of the largest employee surveys in the world where on an annual basis, employee views on significant issues is collated. Employees can also freely voice their views on multiple social forums within the company, which is put together and analyzed for understanding the employee pulse.

RoI of HR technology

At the outset, expecting different organizational data to reveal their correlation with attrition is quite challenging. Therefore, the leadership team at TCS started a ‘conversation’ on how disengaged or dissatisfied employees can be identified before the organization actually loses such talent. TCS worked on a solution for practically addressing the issue of attrition. The leadership team from HR and Strategy spent time identifying correlations between different data points and employee engagement in the organization.

Based on this complex and self-correcting algorithm that was developed internally, the HR team of TCS took proactive measures like communicating with employees ahead of time and having engagement with employees on a one-on-one basis. The results have been encouraging, as employees have expressed delight at having been approached proactively. Putting the current system in place has helped TCS to communicate with such employees and try to work out a solution that works for them. For instance, if an employee’s spouse is relocating to another city, the HR team, after a discussion with the employee, helps in exploring opportunities within the company in that particular city. For attrition modeling, TCS has been using its own systems for around three to four years now. However, the company also keeps exploring other vendor-provided solutions to empower its analytics platform.

As told by Arijit Biswas, Solution Architect, Tata Consultancy Services