"How to make them stay?" -- Diverse Counterfactual Explanations of Employee Attrition

Authors: André Artelt, Andreas Gregoriades

Accepted as a short paper at ICEIS 2023
License: CC BY 4.0

Results of the summarizing process for the arXiv paper: 2303.04579v1

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Employee attrition is a major challenge for organizations as it can directly impact their competitiveness and performance. The cost and time required to attract and retain talented employees make it crucial for businesses to increase employee retention rates. Machine learning (ML) has been applied in various aspects of human resource management, including attrition prediction, to provide insights on proactive measures that can be taken to prevent talented employees from quitting. However, the best-performing ML methods, such as ensemble or deep neural networks, are black box techniques that cannot be easily interpreted. To address this issue, several explainability frameworks have been proposed, including counterfactual explanation methods that can explain and recommend actions to obtain the desired outcome. However, current counterfactual explanations methods focus on optimizing changes made on individual cases to achieve the desired outcome. In contrast, in the case of employee attrition prevention, it is important to identify the optimum interventions that an organization needs to make to its practices/policies to prevent or minimize attrition probability for a group of employees. In this paper, the authors propose a new method utilizing counterfactual explanations focusing on multiple attrition cases from historical data. This method identifies specific business policy changes that can revert attrition of specific employees by providing actionable recommendations based on multiple instances rather than individual employees who left the company. This approach provides comprehensive HR policies that predict turnover intention and reduces negative effects on business performance and competitiveness. The proposed method goes beyond other interpretable ML methods such as SHAP by providing specific policy changes optimized on multiple instances (e.g., employees in a particular department whose skills cannot easily be replenished). It explains what management needs to do to prevent attrition of these employees by providing actionable business recommendations. Overall, this work highlights the importance of using multiple instances when generating recommendations for preventing employee attrition rather than relying solely on individual cases. Future work will focus on providing weights to features manipulated so that the method can provide ranked recommendations based on how easy they can be implemented. The method will also be extended to eliminate automatically infeasible solutions by enabling the user to provide a range of feasible feature values and comparing results with similar work under different scenarios.
AI-generated keywords: Employee attrition Machine Learning Counterfactual Explanations Actionable Recommendations HR Policies

AI-generated Key Points

  • Employee attrition can negatively impact an organization's competitiveness and performance
  • Machine learning has been used to predict employee attrition and suggest proactive measures
  • However, the best-performing ML methods are black box techniques that cannot be easily interpreted
  • Counterfactual explanation methods have been proposed to address this issue, but current methods focus on individual cases rather than groups of employees
  • The authors propose a new method utilizing counterfactual explanations focusing on multiple attrition cases from historical data to identify specific business policy changes that can revert attrition of specific employees by providing actionable recommendations based on multiple instances rather than individual employees who left the company.
  • This approach provides comprehensive HR policies that predict turnover intention and reduces negative effects on business performance and competitiveness.
  • The proposed method goes beyond other interpretable ML methods such as SHAP by providing specific policy changes optimized on multiple instances.
  • Future work will focus on providing weights to features manipulated so that the method can provide ranked recommendations based on how easy they can be implemented.
Also access our AI generated: Comprehensive summary, Lay summary, Blog-like article; or ask questions about this paper to our AI assistant.

Abstract: Employee attrition is an important and complex problem that can directly affect an organisation's competitiveness and performance. Explaining the reasons why employees leave an organisation is a key human resource management challenge due to the high costs and time required to attract and keep talented employees. Businesses therefore aim to increase employee retention rates to minimise their costs and maximise their performance. Machine learning (ML) has been applied in various aspects of human resource management including attrition prediction to provide businesses with insights on proactive measures on how to prevent talented employees from quitting. Among these ML methods, the best performance has been reported by ensemble or deep neural networks, which by nature constitute black box techniques and thus cannot be easily interpreted. To enable the understanding of these models' reasoning several explainability frameworks have been proposed. Counterfactual explanation methods have attracted considerable attention in recent years since they can be used to explain and recommend actions to be performed to obtain the desired outcome. However current counterfactual explanations methods focus on optimising the changes to be made on individual cases to achieve the desired outcome. In the attrition problem it is important to be able to foresee what would be the effect of an organisation's action to a group of employees where the goal is to prevent them from leaving the company. Therefore, in this paper we propose the use of counterfactual explanations focusing on multiple attrition cases from historical data, to identify the optimum interventions that an organisation needs to make to its practices/policies to prevent or minimise attrition probability for these cases.

Submitted to arXiv on 08 Mar. 2023

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