If you are a Human Resource professional working in the Indian market, you would be all too familiar with the deadly menace of absconding employees. Attribute it to the booming job market, lack of professionalism or plain mercenary opportunism, there is no denying that this is one of the biggest challenges which you probably face today. And the experience is probably quite uniform across the size of the company which you may be hiring for, although the largest companies and the so called ‘best employers to work for’ may have been spared the worst of this menace. Since becoming the largest company in your industry or becoming the ‘best employer to work for’ is generally not a very feasible solution, most of us are left wondering how to beat this ‘Gone with the wind’ challenge.
The impact of absconding employees is not trivial and manifests itself in many ways:
• Sudden disruption in the business continuity for that team, group or department. The higher the abscondee in the food chain, the bigger is the disruption.
• Increased work pressure on other remaining members. For startups and small firms, this can definitely become a killer as all the members are generally already over-loaded with work.
• The entire time period – in which you discover the act of absconding, confirm it, begin re-hiring, wait out the notice period of replacement hire, on boarding, training and reaching reasonable levels of productivity – can stretch from weeks to months in some roles. All this time, energy and effort could have been unleashed in other more productive directions.
• A nagging feeling in the pit of your stomach – did this employee take confidential material, customer list details, source code, vendor list, contract copies among other with him? Agreed that even employees departing in a cordial, mutually agreed upon situation can do so, but with the absconding employee, this risk appears to be much higher.
So is there any solution for this menace?
While, there is no fool proof solution which I am aware of (If you are, please feel free to comment), a series of processes and procedures can help minimize the impact:
• Have a multi-tasked team. Let each member rotate around the roles within a team and ensure that one person can do multiple tasks with ease.
• Have a formal backup role distribution plan within every team. That is, who will do what if the primary owner of a role is out sick, travelling, not available or absconding.
• Perform periodic information security audits to ensure that your company is always ready for any information security breach that an absconding employee may perpetrate.
• Perform comprehensive employee background verifications on every employee, contractor or temporary staffer. Give special attention to employment history, continuity of jobs, potentially hidden gaps, and lack of documentation about earlier jobs. (I agree that this still does not solve the problem entirely; case in point, an absconding employee can always cite sickness, personal issue, sabbatical, temporary studies, volunteer work to hide the period of employment when they absconded. You can always insist on confirming each of these reasons.)
In the next post (Part 2), I will explore some of the other more creative and industry wide solutions which have been proposed to tackle this menace. May your good employees never abscond – amen!
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