Recently met an acquaintance of a friend. Last time when we spoke, two years ago, he was a bright graduate, just out of college, with an offer to join well known MNC.
While discussing about various factors, understood he had resigned from current company. Being HR, was curious to know the background and conversed around it. What started as simple dialogue led to ponder on this subject – “Camaraderie at Workplace” and is it an “Invisible net for retaining talents”?
This individual was doing extremely well in job, under fast track lane, good exposures to skills and stakeholders, and despite that resigned, the reason was – my friends have left the company.
He was not a campus fresher with batch of classmates together in same company, but an off campus select, built his bonding around people and felt deeply connected with them. So when his friends resigned due to their own reasons, he resigned citing personal reasons, without any strong traditional exit reasons we usually tag. However deep inside, the trigger point was, loosening of inner strings due to few exits from his circle and it started falling apart.
Similar incident I could connect was with one my contact, stayed in the same company for decades, decided to quit and pursue his own business (though it was big risk). In his case, the trigger point was his set of close friends at work place had resigned to pursue individual’s aspiration and without having any issues in his current job, he too plunged in to the bandwagon and exited.
While we keep analyzing various data numbers, identify the solutions to retain people and offer various ring fencing options to make employees stay back, not many discussion happens on the issue of diluted camaraderie at work place as one of the core resignation reasons.
It is not easy to track as well. Only those who are part of such groups will be going through such dilemma of moving on triggered due to exit thoughts among others and when they actually resign, managers will tag them to any of the standard reasons – better prospects, personal etc.
As a social being, humans are tend to connect with people across spectrums, and along with that, when they spend maximum time with their colleagues, team members, unseen to us will be a select set of people around whom a web will be built over a period of time. It’s not something happens in a day or month but a gradual growth of the trust, dependency, common areas, issues or time given by each other which leads to nurture of this network among people. Having such network at any organizations will be common but the scale might be different.
This web of people helps in various forms for individuals and organization.
- A safety net for people to depend
- A cushion to let go any frustrations, unhappiness and not allowing such issues to turn in to desire to quit, at least immediately
- Better engagement of team and people
- Informal channel – for communications by stakeholders
While it’s important for organization to nurture individuals career aspiration , creating plan for growth and retention, should it also make efforts on retaining the larger set of people who are n this web and what is the effective way.? A food for thought, for another day.
Disclaimer: None of the above points are related to any particular organization. This write up is based on authors understanding through discussion in various forums, reading of articles on evolving situations and experience gained in people management domain.
