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In the Indian ITES sector,
as many as 200 personnel are hired every working day of the year.
As per Nasscom’s annual market intelligence study—Strategic Review
2003, there would be a requirement of 1.1 million professionals
in the ITES-BPO segment by the year 2008. While this might spell
good news in terms of growing employment opportunities, it also
means increasing challenges for the HR managers of this industry.
In its nascent stages, the BPO industry did enjoy a positive demand-supply
situation favourable to the companies.
However, intense competition
in the industry has changed the scenario to a certain extent. From
just hiring anyone and everyone (due to shortage of manpower), the
requirement presently is for professionals with more domain-specific
skill sets and business analysts with programming skills. This trend
clearly reflects that Indian ITES companies are tapping high-value
service segments.
 Growing
challenges
High level of attrition:
While India does have a large talent pool (annually 167,000 engineering
students and 1.54 million graduates pass out of the country’s educational
institutions), not all are ‘industry-ready’ or equipped with the
necessary skill sets to become useful to the companies. This means
that while there is plenty of supply at the entry level (voice processes),
there are huge gaps in the middle management and senior management
levels. This has resulted in increased levels of poaching and attrition
cases. Presently, the average attrition rate faced by this industry
is somewhere around 30-35 percent. Praveen Kankariya, president
and chief executive officer of Impetus, however believes that the
industry is witnessing an attrition level as high as 60 percent.
"One would not find a person in the BPO industry working with
the same company for four to five years. In this period, on an average,
people would have changed three to four jobs."
Zia Sheikh, managing director
of Infowavz points out, "Competitors are very eager to get
experienced people and are willing to make very fancy offers to
cut short their training time and investment through poaching. Such
indiscipline has further accentuated the problem in India."
Experts state that the attrition rate in non-voice processes is
significantly lower than voice processes, in which the industry
average is somewhere around 35-40 percent. In the case of data-based
activities, the attrition rate is not very high with the industry
average being about 10 percent.
Not a serious career option:
Another very critical issue of concern for HR managers is that most
students and professionals working in call centres do not see this
industry as a long-term career option. This was also revealed in
a recent study conducted by NFO India, part of NFO WorldGroup, and
PeopleEquity Consulting, a Bangalore-based HR consultancy. Due to
the inherent nature of the job (monotonous and lacking challenges),
most of the time there is low interest in the work.
Mismatch of expectations:
Expectations mismatch leads to higher attrition. According to T
Hari, director of corporate human resources Daksh, this is partly
due to the perceptions created in the general public with respect
to the career growth, type of work, compensations offered, competition,
etc. Many a times, people are not able to create a work-life balance
and often opt out. Sunil Kumar, vice president of HR for Vertex
India feels that an effective way to deal with these challenges
is to position the ITES/BPO industry as a meaningful career opportunity
for young agents/associates. The right positioning will help attract
the right profile of agents, it will automatically manage their
expectations from the industry and this will in turn lead to lower
attrition rates.
Communication issue:
Lack of effective communication is another contentious issue. Says
Kumar of Vertex India, "Handling a large number of employees
does lead to communication gaps in BPO companies." The absence
of regular, two-way communication between agents, their immediate
team managers and the senior management is a common complaint and
one of the reasons for high attrition rates in the industry.
High training costs:
On an average, BPO companies incur three types of training costs—voice/
accent, soft skills and process training. For a start-up, in the
initial stage the training costs maybe high as the company may have
to outsource the voice/accent and soft skills training. Process
training in the case of start-ups is usually done by process trainers
from the customers’ side while the BPO company has to bear the expenses.
However, on reaching a stable growth stage, companies are able to
build up a resource base and avoid outsourcing. Says Kankariya,
"Training is very important in this industry, due to the nature
of job and the kind of requirements, which an employee has to fulfil.
It generally accounts for four months salary of the agent hired,
though the actual training would probably be for just for a month.
In the last two years, the training cost has grown by 45 percent
as against total cost of one employee which has grown by 190 per
cent." According to Sangeeta Gupta, vice president for Nasscom,
the industry is facing a major problem as it is unable to source
the requisite trained manpower.
Solutions
Moving towards B class
cities: Due to the high demand and supply gap and scaling attrition
numbers, many companies are moving towards ‘B class’ cities like
Chandigarh, Bhopal, Lucknow and Dehradun, to attract talent and
set up their operations. There is also a change in employee profile,
with organisations looking for older and experienced people who
will bring in stability. The requirement is for those people for
whom salary is not just a pocket money, but a career opportunity.
The ideal employees for BPOs would be people from middle and lower-middle
income households, who are willing to work hard and have a strong
sense of responsibility and dedication towards their employers.
Initially though it might lead to scaling of training costs (upto
30-40 percent), as this section might lack in basic communication
and soft skills. But the effort would be worth it, believe experts.
Formation of forums:
To prevent poaching/ swapping and manage recruitment consultants
in the market, many companies have formed forums. One such has already
been set up in Hyderabad and other cities are likely to follow suit.
Educating about career
opportunities: The common misconception is that there are only
three positions in call centres—that of an agent, a team leader
and the project leader. There is however more to it. According to
Deepak Dhawan, vice president of HR of EXL Services, there is an
immense opportunity for professionals with a CA or MBA background:
"An individual can choose from managing quality, get into training,
Six Sigma process, problem solving equations, relationship management,
HR and workflow activities or business development."
It is necessary to communicate
to the agents that there is a clear growth path for them in the
next five years and an agent need not retire as an agent from the
company. In terms of growth opportunities, data management, transaction
processing and other back-office support activities are really going
to be the key growth drivers for the offshore BPO industry in India.
Government initiatives
Nasscom has recently started
a project with different private players (like Wipro, EXL, GE),
training institutes and academia in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and
Kerala, for preparing an "employable" ITES workforce.
The Kerala Government, under its PeopleFIRST initiative, plans to
create readily available employable manpower for the ITES industry.
According to Aruna Sundararajan, IT secretary of Kerala, such an
initiative will open up large employment opportunities in various
disciplines in the ITES sector, empowering students with industry-relevant
skill sets. "It will help chart out indicative domain-wise
manpower requirement projections from the industry. Skill set standardisation,
government recognised certification in ITES, inclusion of ITES as
a discipline in graduate studies by universities, etc, will help
in making ITES as a career choice by students," she says. The
programme will be launched in November 2003 and the training is
expected to get started by January 2004. In addition, states like
Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and West Bengal are also looking for such
an option.
In the future, HR managers
have to continuously evolve career paths, motivate their employees
and create a culture of oneness, which will also act as retention
tools. In case of training, there would be an emergence of specialised
training institutes with the customer care skills being outsourced
to many training companies.
Contact the writer at punita@expresscomputeronline.com
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