How are you dealing with Attrition in your company, given the fact that the whole industry is going through a churn with 40-50% hikes?

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In a typical non-Covid year we saw 15% churn at a minimum. Many years we would layoff 10-15% of our employees as part of “Top Grading”. (See GE history and Jack Welch)

Last two years it hasn’t exceeded 25% so hardly out of the ordinary

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I work extremely hard to prevent attrition to begin with. Out of 50 members, I only lost 2 in 2021, so I'm quite below those percentages.

How?

Caring first. Deeply deeply care for the team, listen to them, fight like hell for what is right and what they need to be successful. Make sure to assess their states of mind (I use non-anonymous surveys every 2 months to see what they are going through and how they feel).

Then, remove toxic employees. I did it in 2020 by removing 2 individuals that were very negative and lazy, and this helped dramatically with their direct co-workers.

Replacing 2 people was not too difficult, but I would not want to have to replace 40% of my workforce. Honestly, I'm not sure I would know where to begin.

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Our attrition rate is relatively low. Our biggest challenge is our exponential growth, and finding the right talent to grow our teams. We are not seeing 40-50% salary/compensation hikes, maybe more like 10-13%.

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People will leave regardless of the actions we do to retain them. But, in order to minimize it as much as possible I always aim to print intrinsical motivations within each member of the team.

To achieve this, I talk 1-on-1 with them, to find out what makes them itch, what is their drive to go thru everything and I ignite them often and constantly.

Some want pure knowledge, to learn more & to apply it.

Others are seeking for recognition.

Others require challenges that they don't found anywhere else.

More want to be part of a structured "family".

In the end, people will stick with you if they found a purpose of what they do in their lifes. This is for work-life as well as personal-life.

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Utilizing several different tactics such as caring for employees, offering non-monetary benefits, and implementing flexible work schedules.

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I am not sure about the 40-50% hikes, would love to look at data on this.
I lost a few employees in the past year, I would count this as normal, in fact, the ratio during the past two years was better than pre-COVID.

Several aspects play a role, company culture, management attention, transparency, and keeping open doors (or open video-chats), all contribute to retaining your good talent.

There is no one size fits all practice since it varies from company to company and person to person, but good/positive genuine practices are more likely to get you satisfactory results, I personally spend time (Real "Quality" time) understanding the pains of my team, once I find what's wrong, I do my best to fix. I even go beyond my team whenever I hear that someone's upset or having issues at work, and I keep a close eye on their issues (Make sure you follow up on their issues, not them reminding you), it requires an effort from your side of course, but it's worth it.

The hardest part for me honestly, is finding new talent that fits.

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We are trying to replace open headcount as quickly as possible. It’s not going well.

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At present we are lucky in that we have not lost too many staff. However, the professionals we hire (Forensic Engineers) are difficult to find. What we do is try and identify individuals who we can thoroughly train. Our attrition rate is below 5%.

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Some really good points already called out. I will add although the below is not the full approach or view as so many factors can drive attrition. just looking to compliment what others have said.

In addition to the usual and very important aspects of career, growth, compensation, manager and belonging, I would look at:
- Company & team culture - is it evolving with our customers and our industry
- Remote/Hybrid - are we offering a competitive/differentiating opportunity in where/how we work, supporting perks and technology for the new virtual workplace
- Impact - do each employee see and understand their impact to the strategic business agendas/goals and the culture
- Mitigate - can we offload some of the less interesting work but still very important work to a third partner service provider giving more time for folks who are there to deliver on new business capabilities/outcomes

Food for thought. :-)

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We're not really dealing with it, as even prior to COVID, attempting to decrease staffing was a goal. It began with a hiring freeze and then also included a separation / buyout offer for 80-100% of the person's annual salary if they'd been here long enough. Additional attrition moves towards the headcount goal without creating a situation where leaving is involuntary.

Sadly, however, this does have the effect of additional workload on those who don't leave, which feeds back into the attrition, if people are picking up 25% more work with no extra pay. That needs to be handled smoothly to avoid a spiral into people continuing to leave beyond the target.

How are you dealing with Attrition in your company, given the fact that the whole industry is going through a churn with 40-50% hikes?

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