Attrition Story in Consulting

Well, the story isn't very different in consulting either. We have not been able to retain many people whom we may have wanted to. Though it may sound quite surprising, coming from one of the largest professional services firm, but it is true. The Indian member firm has to serve the Indian clients and our clients are not very generous. Most cases than not, we win engagements though competitive bidding where very little emphasis is given to the quality of proposal, team and experience. Only the financial quote decides who gets the assignment. That makes us squeeze our margins, and, several times we work at our cost. This has been true for some of my key government-owned clients. They like us to bid for work on a fixed fee basis and the initially estimated as six-month engagements last more than two full years, while all the money one would expect to make would go paying to the airlines for flights to attend meetings. In such a case, how can we pay lavish salaries to our people even when we wish to? This is quite in contrast to knowledge process outsourcing companies who serve US or European clients and earn heavy hourly rates, thus can easily afford a higher payouts to staff.

The other crucial reason is the way we work. Our engagements have never been structured pursuits for well defined goals. I have worked on assignments where the Clients haven't been quite sure of what they wanted. Our thought process has to begin much beyond the imagination of the clients. We have helped some of our clients to define the scope of work even for consulting assignment. The courses of engagements too are the same way. Then our solutions have to be within the regulatory, economic, socio-political and financial framework and those in the know of how India works may find such framework too restrictive at one time and utterly ambiguous at the other. Many of our business school graduates join us with an expectation of highly structured assignments, and when they encounter the hard and chaotic realities of the work they shrink back. Consulting in Indian context is a continuous battle, with enormous number of challenges and needs a fighting spirit to succeed. Many can not take these in their strides.

The biggest professional hazard in consulting is traveling. Half the week on an average you need to be traveling if you are indeed doing good. While going places, meeting new people, exchanging ideas and sharing experiences are the most enriching aspect of a consulting career, jet setting and sometimes traveling even by trains and buses take the fun out. I have heard of stories where people developed back-ache and such other ailments while they were globe-trotting solving client issues. The difficult part is the future does not hold any hope either. In fact, as you grow up the ladder, traveling time may go up since you focus more and more on business development than on engagement execution. One of my acquaintances called up from his business school campus to find out the details of the consulting job and decided not to appear for the interview just because he didn't wish to travel!

There may be more reasons than these. I wrote about attrition today since we had a farewell in the afternoon. Mohit left to support his father in his family owned business and we bid him quite a unique farewell, where he sang, mimicked and cracked jokes. He may have just set a trend of joyous separation!