Employee Retention Strategies for BPOs

Retention of Key employees is critical to the long term health and success of any organization. It is a known fact that retaining your best employees ensures customer satisfaction, increased
product sales, satisfied colleagues and reporting staff, effective succession planning and deeply imbedded organizational knowledge and learning.

Employee retention matters as organizational issues such as training time and investment; lost knowledge; insecure employees and a costly candidate search are involved. Hence failing to retain a key employee is a costly proposition for an organisation. Various estimates suggest that losing a
middle manager in most organizations costs up to five times of his salary.

The BPOs in India face an enormous challenge in reducing attrition rate and this being a nascent industry needs to draw parallels, examples from other industry practices as well as develop innovative Employee Relation Initiatives as highlighted below. This has been classified into three groups
1. The Corporate level
2. Managerial/supervisory level
3. Employee Recognition Initiatives

Here this article attempts to highlight the strategies for the corporate level.

Corporate Level Retention strategies:-
· To bring stability in business and increase customer service process.
· Nasscom has estimated that the Indian ITES industry will gross over $5.7 billion by 2005 (based on a conservative year-on-year growth of 65 percent by Nasscom).
· Staff/employee satisfaction translates directly into money quite quickly in the BPO industry compared to other industries.
· To reduce the pressure on the recruiting process.
· Recent acquisition deals both domestic & overseas by BPOs makes it even more critical to stabilize their back end operations to service new customers

Excellent Career Growth prospects
Encourage & groom employees to take up higher positions/openings. If not fulfilled then they will look outside the organization.

Look for talents within the organization and encourage them. For instance,if a person has the potential to be a trainer, groom & develop the employee.

Night shifts
1. Have people from other walks of life to talk about their experiences.Other professions like Army, Medicine, and shop floor workers also have towork in night shifts.
2. Have doctors to advise & guide them about their biological clocks and ways & means to deal with them.
3. Dietary advice:- Do’s and don’ts.
4. Create the passion that they are doing a yeomen service to the nation by bringing the much-required Foreign Exchange.
5. They are helping people (clients) to make their life easier.
6. Special lights in the office/workplace to ensure their bodies get sufficient vitamin D.
7. One distinct disadvantage of night shifts is the sense of disorientation with friends and family members. Concentrate on this problem and develop innovative solutions and ways to deal with it.

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