Critical Attrition and the Organisational Faultline

How do you measure the effectiveness of your HR department and policies? By the attrition rate? A random Employee Delight Index? Industry wide surveys? Resumes received per day? Slot occupied during recruitment drives on Day Zero? Whatever the unit might be, the department has come across as an administrative policy machine, disconnect from the ground realities and vibes of the employees.
It might be a lofty idea to keep every single employee 'happy' (amidst the claims by many HR practitioners that it is impossible to keep an employee happy) in a mammoth organisation. But the HR practice is not a statistical exercise where the satisfaction of the majority can be taken as an acceptable criteria of success, the vision of the HR function should be to address the aspirations and concerns of every employee in the organisation.
A policy or an idea is only as good as its implementation....and this is exactly where the HR operations in many organisations faulter. A number of organisations fail badly in understanding the aspirations, abilities and skills of its employees and rarely succeed in drawing up any meaningful career path. This is extremely important in the case of attrition of high performing employees which i would refer to as critical attrition (another irony is that a number of high performing employees are not recognised as high performing by the organisation at all!). For companies in the knowledge space, critical attrition will mean loss of significant tacit knowledge and more importantly decreased ability to create incremental business and organisational value which will ultimately reflect negatively on the overall organisational performance. For me, critical attrition is thus one of the most important challenges an organisation in the knowledge space faces. Critical attrition is never a result of an impulsive decision, rather its the culmination of derogatory employee relation practices. That is good news!! For it implies that there is an organisational faultline, a gap in the organisation's people practices.
I would not attribute it to the HR Team nor their policies, rather the HR Team rarely has a significant impact on the 'experience' of employees in the organisation - it all boils down to your manager, your team lead.
A Team Lead is the most significant component in this chain of events and relationships. He is directly responsible for the development and satisfaction of an organisation's employees and acts as the first envoy of organisational representation to the employees. It's my take that the organisational honchos as well as the HR Team clearly underestimates the role played by the Team Lead in employee satisfaction and rarely focus on providing people management skills to Team Leads.
In the current scenario, a person with 2 or 3 years or experience can be leading a team, irrespective of his/her experience it is imperative to ensure that any employee who assumes the role of a team leader has the right people management skills and is given the authority to do things which he deems necessary to contribute to the development of his/her reportees. I do not know of many organisations in the knowledge space who do that. Organisations are obsessed with quality and process compliance, they ensure that team leads attend programs that make them conversant with the organisation's process standards, but I am yet to come across an organisation that mandates that any team lead has to undergo a People Management course.
I am sure that by making every leader aware of the right People Management practices and by ensuring that they practice it (we could have an HR Audit in the lines of a Quality Audit!!),organisations can go a long way in containing Critical attrition.