Voice & Data, September 2006

Stakeholders discuss ways to accelerate the BPO industry’s growth.

MUMBAI

Session – I
Going Beyond Attrition: Manpower creation in the secondary cities.

May 11, 2006: Keynote
Richard Scoldale, CEO, Llyods TSB Global Services
Attrition destroys two things, which are vital to the continuing growth – cost advantage and quality. It takes away quality, services and delivery. You can’t do that if you continue changing people. So there you have the price ramping up, it’s becoming expensive, and the quality ramping down. And so with attrition, you have a very major challenge that you have to cope with. And I know that you have been talking about that here. The second is data protection. Let’s forget the attrition in KPO, let’s focus massively on data protection in KPO because that is where the real focus has to be, as KPO will carry major amounts of intellectual properly.

Ruvina Singh, Senior VP, HR Training and Administration, CFS International
Attrition in itself we can discuss till the cows come home, but one of the things that we do need to focus on is that people come to this country for cost advantage, but they stay for quality. However, this cost advantage is fast reducing, we are reducing the dollar differential by our inflation, our wage inflation. Now one of the things that we are all focusing on and we make a mention of, is that attrition is not great. It is all within the industry, we are moving from one company to the other, nobody is leaving the industry itself.

Sunil Bellara, Associate Director, Copgemini
The challenges we face in India are common to all industries, and not necessary restricted to ITES, The second things is that when you move people away from their hometowns and you bring them into cities, or the places where you have choose to be, you need good infrastructure which is developing right now. So you have connectivity, you have roads, you have flights which are cheaper than trains. I think we are nearly there as a country, as an economy, we are nearly there so that piece we are able to overcome now. But the cultural point how do you move people away from their hometowns, how do you convince them to come there and come there for a sustainable period of time, not just to look at an opportunity that is here today and then go back.

Pradeep Phatke, Chief Business Development Officer, I-Bridge Solutions
If I look at people leaving, less than 15% of them actually go out of this industry. Most others simply join other BPOs, so as far as the ITES sector is concerned, there is no loss of manpower. The real problem is not that attrition per se from the industry to other industry but within industry, from one company to another, and that’s totally an internal problem for each company to solve. But if I look at it from the perspective of ITES as a business sector, then what is the real problem. The real problem is that the demand is growing at a particular speed – 60-70% y-o-y – and to that extent people are not coming into this industry, to feed that demand. So my personal feeling is that India has a huge talent, industry and people to be flexible.

Kishore Velankar, Head, HR Integreon
We need to look at it a little more closely, more seriously. Typically, the people we recruit are either just graduates or finishing graduation and they leave us for further studies. That’s another reason why there is attrition. And of course the stress, the whole body cycle goes for a toss, somebody who gets up in the morning at six o’clock now goes to sleep at six o'clock, and it time for everybody to get used to it. So the biological reason could be one of the reasons that leads to attrition. The equation between demand and supply is absolutely messed up.

Monica Doshi, VP, IT Enabled Services, Karrox Technology
When we are recruiting people for a BPO, what happens is that through the various sources that you select for recruiting people, which could be agencies, or advertisement in the paper, you get hundreds of CVs, and then you shortlist about 10 CVs, and you call these people for an interview. How many turn up – about five, and then you put them through various tests and you probably select two or make two offers. When you make two offers you are still not sure that these people are actually going to turn up on the day that you mentioned. Why is this happening? This is happening because of the demand-supply gap. The candidate knows that if he doesn’t get a job here, he will definitely get a job somewhere and he has a lot of options available to him.