I just had a chat with one of my friends who was also one of our ex-employees. It was all about a confession and frustration where he wanted to get rid of his current company-especially his manager!!

Talking about this friend, he was an excellent resource for our sales team and always had been rated highest for his outstanding performance. Due to some personal reasons he had to quit his service with us and then join one of the newly emerging Telecom companies in India. In fact he had been influenced by this company (our competitor) with a higher salary (while we couldn’t meet that monetary requirement).

Now he has been struggling to handle the egoistic approach of his new manager who wanted him to increase the sales figure by fraud activations. In the Telecom industry companies compete to establish their own customer base and their sales figures are determined by how many connections they can activate. So you can understand in this case when I am say ‘fraud activations’, they are activating a connection with a fake customer who might not exist.

Managers can be competitive and excessively aggressive but should keep the integrity of a job and should be a role model to their team. Whether all the managers in that company are the same is a question now!!

When a manager is the first and prime person to touch base with, it increases the necessity for him to be highly engaging and motivating. And obviously he can achieve this best by building a trustful relationship with each team member. In my friend’s case his manager is creating an intricate situation of getting things done in an unethical way.

This got my friend to make the decision to not continue with the company. And here is where a manager drives attrition!!

HR has been researching on how to bring in new employee engagement initiatives to keep their employees engaged and motivated. But I feel that managers should primarily own the responsibilities of engaging and retaining an employee and their team. They are the leaders with good intentions which should align to the business objectives. But despite these good intentions they may have limited impact on reducing attrition and improving retention of their key talent.

One of the main highlight of the above scenario is- Motivating an employee should happen from where he really works and which could possibly be done only by their manager. Recognizing below points can be a catalyst to keep your team staying connected and motivated –

• Whether the employee enjoys doing his work.
• Whether his initiatives, contributions and opinions are welcomed.
• Whether he receives support and feedback for improving his performance
• Whether there is room for career advancement internally.

If all these points can be taken care of and considered by a manager, should HR be the sole owner of engaging and retaining an employee? I don’t think so!!