Decision Making – Easy or Not?

Businesses all over the world constantly make decisions towards achieveing certain goals or objectives, these goals or objectives vary across different industries and companies. For instance, in a furniture manufacturing Company, deciding the source or supplier of raw materials may be a challenge due to impact on deforestation. While producing a car with low emmission may be an objective that requires critical decision making in a car manufacturing company, due to impact on the environment.

However, management of service oriented organisations such as Banks, Insurance Companies, Consulting Firms and other Financial Services, are faced with key strategy decisions that borders on talent acquisition and retention.

Events in recent times popularly know as “Japa Syndrome”  has affected the service delivery of some financial institutions, especially Banks in Nigeria. This condition has left many employers with the challenges of attracting and retaining talents within their Organisations.

Critical decision needs to be made to sustain the business operation of the affected Organisations, while making these decisions, 7 steps of decision making model for effective decision making is recommended.

Organizations need to come to terms with the realities of current events, as it is no longer news that the unprecedented increase in resignation across different company within Nigeria is due to migration, these has also posed a huge problem on replacing exited staff in many organizations.

Employers also need to identify the key issues created by the exodus of staff. Reportedly, a good number of staff that resigned from their places of work (estimated to be about 90% of total resignation) relocated outside the country, while the remaining 10% changed jobs within the country, in many cases, to fill the gaps created by people who relocated. Which caused disruptions in operations and led to service failure, subsequently resulting to customers’ dissatisfaction.

As we all know, Organisations are concerned with delivering quality and excellent service to their customers or clients across all business functions with minimal operational disruptions, so as keep various classes of customers and client happy.

There are three approaches that can be adopted to address the growing concern;

• Companies may decide to improve the compensation package to attract and retain quality staff
• Companies (especially banks) may consider embarking on full automation of their processes across all channels
• Outsourcing non-core aspect of the business can also be considered

If Companies decide to improve the compensation package, it must be competitive enough to attract and retain staff and the financial resources must be adequate to cater for the associated incremental cost.

Full automation will also require financial resources to implement, while the process might take some time to complete.

Again, financial resources will be required to engage a service provider for the non-core functions and the outsourcing Firm should have the competence to provide required services

Increasing salaries in order to retain staff may not be a good option in this case, this is due to the fact that the staff may still resign to go abroad. Information available suggests that people going abroad in recent times, do so due to lost hope in the Country.

Automating processes is a great idea, however, the nature of the business is a limiting factor for some processes to be automated, which makes this option less attractive. Also, implementing the automation might take some time which may not be favourable to the business in the immediate period.

The cost of outsourcing is likely to be high but quality services will be guaranteed. Also, where a team member within an outsourcing firm resigns, a replacement will be made available almost immediately.

Based on the pros and cons in the evaluation above, businesses may take decision as it suit their objectives.