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COWARD'S INBOX: Ignoring High Turnover as a Problem

21-Feb-12, 3:49 PM | Reylito H. Elbo

InterAksyon.com
The online news portal of TV5

I work in a call center industry where the turnover rate is as high as 75 per cent. It appears to me that in general, the industry is doing nothing to solve this growing problem as they are more than preoccupied in a talent war than improve its own individual employee retention program. In our company, we keep on hiring people of dubious background to fill up thousands in vacancies. Now, could you help me decipher what’s on the mind of management? – Dina Satisfied.

Let me start answering your question by telling you the story of The Farmer and the Viper from Aesop’s Fables. Once upon a time, there was a farmer who finds a viper almost freezing to death in the snow. Taking pity on it, he picks it up, and places it inside his coat.

The viper was revived by the warmth of the farmer’s clothing. Soon after, it bites his rescuer who dies, but not without immediately realizing his own fault. The moral of the story is – kindness to the evil will be met by betrayal.

This story is similar to another parable about a scorpion and a frog which was used by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman in their book First, Break All the Rules (2005): “The scorpion wanted to cross the pond, but being a scorpion, he couldn’t swim.

So he scuttled up to the frog and asked: “Please, Mr. Frog, can you carry me across the pond on your back?” “I would,” replied the frog, “but, under the circumstances, I must refuse. You might sting me as I swim across.” “But why would I do that?” asked the scorpion. “It is not in my interests to sting you, because you will die and then I will drown.”

Although the frog knew how lethal scorpions were, the logic proved quite pervasive. Perhaps, felt the frog, in this one instance the scorpion would keep his tail in check. So the frog agreed. The scorpion climbed onto his back, and together they set off across the pond.

Just as they reached the middle of the pond, the scorpion twitched his tail and stung the frog. Mortally wounded, the frog cried out: “Why did you sting me? It is not in your interest to sting me, because now I will die and you will drown.” “I know,” replied the scorpion as he sank into the pond. “But I am a scorpion. I have to sting you. It’s in my nature.”

Buckingham and Coffman tell us that “conventional wisdom encourages us to think like the frog. People’s natures do change, it whispers. Anyone can be anything they want to be if they just try hard enough. Indeed, as a manager it is your duty to direct those changes.”

Probably, some call center management people act like that – they hire people even if they appear to be rejects from other companies. They are doing it in the hope of changing their ways in the process. After all, management can “devise rules and policies to control your employees’ unruly inclinations.”

The trouble is that many of them are acting like the farmer and the frog. They fail to recognize that each individual is like the viper and the scorpion with its unique nature that can’t simply be altered by rules and agreement.

Buckingham and Coffman give the following insights which were echoed by “tens of thousands of great managers” in the United States: “People don’t change much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough.”

Of course, we can’t blame management. After all, there’s one bigger issue that you must also understand. And that’s the nature for every business to earn money. If hiring “people of dubious background” will help management achieve that purpose then they would do it at least as a Band-Aid™ short-term solution.

Maybe management thinks that hiring and firing people at will is economical than retaining people in the long-term, although I doubt it much. Again, the question is this – why would certain scorpion-employees risk their jobs by violating company rules?