Glossary
Root cause analysis (HR)
In an HR context, root cause analysis is the practice of working backward from a people-related symptom — turnover, low engagement, complaints — to the structural cause that produces it, rather than acting on the symptom itself.
Root cause analysis (RCA) in HR borrows the discipline from operations and quality management and applies it to people-side outcomes. The premise: a turnover spike, an engagement-score drop, or a cluster of grievances is a symptom; the cause sits upstream in the way the system is designed.
Applied to engagement, an RCA does not treat "low engagement" as the cause to fix. It asks which of a small number of structural causes — most commonly decision bottlenecks, approval loops, priority churn, role ambiguity, or unspoken constraints — is producing the experience the survey is scoring. The intervention then targets the structural cause, not the score.
Common HR RCA techniques include the 5-Whys, fishbone (Ishikawa) diagrams, and pattern coding of qualitative employee statements. The Frustration Condition Tracker is a structured RCA tool: it forces the analysis to terminate in one of five named Architectures and one of three named doors.
How it is measured
- Output is a named cause per cluster, an owner, and a date by which the door (Remove, Defer With Clarity, Accept) closes.
- Effectiveness check: the same Architecture should not recur, unaddressed, in two consecutive listening cycles.
Dr. Tim Hough · ISBN 979-8-9965397-1-0 · Buy the book →