A leading European maritime company, which is regarded as the pioneer of premium equipment manufacturer has an important division in Singapore. This division was suffering from high employee turnover and was looking for a recruitment specialist to fill the vacant positions with incumbents who stay and serve for a long haul.
Their concern over attrition became serious when they started seeing this issue as a barrier to their growth. Frustrated by the ineffective solutions of external consultants, the company came to Comaea Consulting.
Rather than merely a high employee turnover, we anticipated this scenario as a bigger problem that needed close examination. Therefore, we offered our consulting service to discover whether the problem as posed was what most needed to be solved or if there were other underlying causes. Both parties agreed and it began the engagement process.
This client approached us mainly for recruitment, but our experience hinted to us to pay emphasis on discovering the context of their high attrition issue. Therefore, our first challenge was to convince the client to let us dive deep and avail our consultancy service.
Also, another challenge was to take care of things economically. It was the first time that this client was working with a consultant to avail holistic and strategic consultancy service. So, we had to ensure that there would be a good return on their investment.
Our consultants performed a diagnosis to assess overall organizational effectiveness. To perform this diagnosis, we adopted the approach of forging a deep connection, observing the context, and producing impactful solutions.
Establishing Trust by Creating True Partnership: Developing trust and partnership with the client was of immense importance because our consultants wanted to interview employees of this maritime equipment manufacturer to extract authentic information so that they could reach the heart of the problem.
To ensure to the staff that this is not an unwanted inquisition or a blame game exercise, instead of suited booted consultants, we embraced the demeanor of average employees and spent time with them at their work premises. This way we built an effective partnership that turned into a collaborative search to seek answers to the real concerns.
Through these interviews, we found out that employees in a department were not talking the same terms, they needed more clarity about their roles and job responsibilities and there was limited collaboration and communication among different departments.
While listening to the client's concerns about the engineering department, our consultants attempted to relate them to what was happening in other departments. When talking to managers to discover what's hindering the progress, the consultants also considered other possible barriers.
By correlating the immediate issue of attrition with sensitivity to its larger context, our consultants discovered that the high attrition rate was there becauserecruitment process was inadequate without the use of never followed any psychometric tests, competency models, and robust job descriptions. In fact attrition was not the only problem, but this maritime capital equipment company was unable to progress and move forward because the sales customer services and sales departments also lacked skills such as language proficiency andpersuasiveness to close the deals respectively. Plus, there were other human capital management issues like the absence of a proper performance management system and other organizational structure and design problems issues.
We kept untying one knot after another by devising effective solutions and eventually untangled the complete rope in which the human capital structure of this company was stuck.
With a greater degree of pragmatism and candour in engagement, our consultants succeeded in producing the outcomes that the client was seeking.
Recruitment done in the guiding light of the competency model and further backed by in-depth assessments resulted in best-fit, which in turn reduced employee turnover by more than 50%. Training sales staff enabled them to attract more clients and increased the sales. Establishing a performance management system brought significant improvement in employees' morale and satisfaction.
All in all, this maritime capital equipment manufacturer came out of the tough situation and started moving forward toward new heights of growth and profitability.
Surely, successful consulting does not rely on presenting convincing reports to clients; rather, the secret lies in being a true partner to your client so that you can reach the heart of their problems, offer viable solutions and render support in institutionalizing these solutions.
Interested in establishing a partnership with us? Get in touch at: sales@comaeaconsulting.com.