Why fixing attrition might sometimes mean firing people

True leadership lies in the ability to see invisible toxic behaviours in your company and then root them out for good

- Somak Ghoshal

Last week a post by Vedika Bhaia, a Mumbai-based co-founder of a marketing and branding start-up, blew up on LinkedIn. It began with a counter-intuitive remark that resonated with many on the professional networking platform: "We fired 3 people in one month and our retention actually improved."

Bhaia went on to explain that over the last year her agency saw an alarming rate of attrition in spite of paying competitive salaries, allowing flexible work hours, and giving out decent perks. Talent still kept quitting every month, until she decided to look deeper and lay off underperformers.

Bhaia followed it up with changes in the culture and ethos of the company. She rented a physical office space instead of operating fully remotely and started offering hikes proactively rather than waiting for someone to fight for it. While none of her measures was novel, the first one isn't usually where most human resource executives start when they are looking to solve the problem of talent drain. That's largely because retention is correlated with transactional quick fixes.

Most talent teams tend to offer carrots to entice an outgoing resource. From a salary hike and promotion, to softer touches like periodic office parties and offsites to create a feel-good factor, to public praise for individual excellence, a combination of these familiar levers is deployed during such exercises. It's not that these strategies are ineffective. But such actions can only arrest attrition in the short term—not "solve" it in any meaningful way.