Employee or Agent Attrition and Six Sigma

 

Attrition is one of the dreaded things in service industry.

In a BPO center I have worked in I mentored a Green Belter working on an attrition reduction project.

Agent Attrition was at 15% for their department. 

This was high and it leads to high agent training cost and recruitment cost. 

In general, causes of attrition are endless and plotting them out using Fishbone analysis would be futile.

Here are the few strategic advices that I provided to the GB project leader:

1. Properly select the scope of the attrition that one should work on
   • What department, team or shift
   • From what employment stage up to what employment stage ie. from Training stage up to employee exit or from endorsement to operations up to employee exit.  Number of attrition may differ according to the points of measurement
   • Wanted (dismissed employees) or Unwanted attrition (voluntary resignees)
   • scope should still be big or small enough to have acceptable financial benefit for the company because working on reducing the attrition of 1 team would not provide us at least 50,000USD annual est. benefit
2. Measure phase:
   • Process mapping should be aligned to the employee’s employment life such that it would be enough to cover the potential causes of attrition occuring in each step of his/her employment life
   • Project team can subjectively do prioritization of the causes using Prioritization matrix.  Prioritization can be based on their interviews, Focus group discussions (FGD), observations, expert knowledge, observation and/or reports
   • Employee survey maybe helpful but it would only give results pertaining to the motivational factors or employee retention factors because only the active(existing) employees of the companies can only give feedback.  Unless the project leader would be willing to do exhaustive exit interviews and call backs of resigned (attrition) employees.
   • Data supporting the prioritized attrition factors can help solidify the hypothesis statements that can be formed for the Analyze phase ie. excessive overtime, poor leadership or teamwork, uncompetitive company benefits
3. Analyze Phase:
   • Data gathered earlier can be used for making conclusive hypothesis statements
   • Survey results can also be analyzed using proportion tests
   • Qualitative analysis may help identify the causes but again these should be backed up with data
4. Improve Phase:
   • Proposals should be supported by the Champion, the top management and by the HR department
   • Improvement items that would come out of the Green Belt project are usually strategic and would need management support for it to be rolled out or deployed
   • Improve phase for Attrition reduction project does not need much of analysis and optimization such as DOE.  However, as mentioned by another Black Belt colleague of mine, it is also possible to model the probability of attrition mathematically.  This part remains an area for research for me, I might first look into the usage of the Binary Logistics Regression
   • It would be helpful as well to try using the Kano analysis if the improvement items would really impact on employee retention and reduction of attrition.  Employee engagement should not be considered as directly proportional to Employee retention based on my observation.  It does not necessarily mean that an engaged employee would have small probability of considering moving out of the company given an attractive or enticing opportunity.
5. Control Phase:
   • It would be helpful for the company to develop a regular monitoring of the employee attrition, set up of early detection for demotivation leading to attrition
   • In one of our learnings, we found out also that there is a some percentage of demotivated persons does not really lead to attrition especially if the company did an extra mile of converting those persons back to being engaged and happy with their work.  That is where employee relations come in.

 The GB project leader working on this attrition project actually finished the project with the support of the Department head.  Attrition gradually decreased.  Monitoring is still being done in a proactive manner that is by earlier detecting the employee motivation levels, settling of employee grievances at the onset.  It is also important that management should be wary that attrition is also seasonal such that it is always lowest during the 4th Q of the year because of the bonuses and 13th month pay coming out on the last month of the year.

PS.  If you want to know more details please post or consult me. Thanks.