Study analyses high turnover

People join great companies, but leave bad bosses "" this is the highlight of an award-winning study on HR aspects which emphasises the need for greater communication between management and employees of any organisation.

Nandkishore Rathi from IIT-Bombay, author of the study, highlights the fact that faces represent organisations to many employees and perceptions of turnover among software professionals and HR managers differ substantially.

Rathi's research won the Mercer Award 2003 for the most innovative and practical research on HR from Asia from among 100 research projects from 38 top Asian universities across 12 countries.

His study reveals that bigger organisations have a lower overall satisfaction levels among employees. The career satisfaction and the person-culture fit are important issues that require immediate attention.

In the case of software companies, it has been found that the culture of the organisation does not get clearly defined as a large number of people leave and join simultaneously, at regular intervals. As a result, there is greater turbulence and cultural loss.

Speaking on the satisfaction levels of employees, Rathi said, "One reason for high dissatisfaction of extrinsic (pay, promotion, company policies etc.) needs is the availability of large number of job opportunities in other organisations. Large size and highly mature companies show lower level of satisfaction among software professionals. On the other hand, smaller companies and start-up firms show high levels of satisfaction particularly with extrinsic and career needs. Application and services software companies are more vulnerable to employee turnover compared to systems and product companies."

According to the study, the most important HR challenge among Indian software firms is retention and motivation of software professionals.

The other challenges include attracting the best talent, develop new systems of compensation and reward, to make the company a better place to work, to cope with the shortage of highly skill IT professionals, to integrate HR with business strategy.

Rathi's study involved 14 software development firms in three different locations "" Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore. In all, 1,028 people participated in the study. The data was collected through questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and focussed discussions.

Altogether 716 software professionals filled the main survey questionnaire, 76 participated in interviews and 61 in focussed discussions.

Apart from 28 HR managers who were interviewed, 147 senior executives participated to rate the cultural characteristics of their respective companies.