Use Contracts to Retain Key People

Contracts, usually in the form of Service Level Agreements (SLA), can help provide some continuity and reduce turnover. An SLA helps ensure that key people are not removed from a customer account for a set period of time or without prior permission. These agreements may include a provision stating that workers cannot be trained on your account and then moved to other accounts. And significantly, some customers have also built in the right to remove underproductive workers from the account.

Karene House, Senior Consultant, Morgan Chambers, an outsourcing advisory firm, says she has created a number of contracts with staff-retention clauses. “The majority of these are for the protection of service and to ensure that appropriate knowledge transfer happens without the supplier swapping people who may be less expensive,” says House.

The bad news in the industry is that attrition is rampant despite these agreements. The good news is that most of the movement of people is within the industry itself. Most employees leave one BPO to join another — because another company may be offering them more money or a better job profile — while few leave for other industries or for reasons such as higher education or marriage.

It’s a good idea to check with your service provider to see whether it has any non-poaching agreements with competitors. Some BPO companies do follow informal agreements based on “gentlemen’s words” that they will not poach from one another. Wipro BPO and TransWorks, for example, have such informal agreements with at least 10 companies.

Consider Employee Bonds

Euphemistically termed service agreements, ironically, these bonds are used as retention tools, more commonly in ITO rather than in BPO. A bond compels an employee to stay in the company for a period of time, generally 12-24 months — usually with a bonus on the back end. If the employee decides to leave before the stipulated period, he may forfeit his salary for a couple of months and may even have to pay back training costs to the company. Companies such as Wipro, Patni, Infosys, TCS and MindTree are known to use employee bonds. Arguing in favor of bonds, employers maintain that they don’t want people to use their companies as training grounds. Employees, on the other hand, claim that such bonds are one sided, and don’t stipulate the company’s obligations in case the employee is asked to leave or to improve the employee’s work satisfaction.

This is an area where the HR practices of customers and service providers often diverge. Few U.S. employers ask their employees to sign these bonds. Generally, because of the strong labor regulations in Europe, European companies have a culture that is less stringent on employees. In some countries these types of bonds may simply be unenforceable.

Bring Down Stress Levels

The call-center environment is often very stressful for workers — the stress comes from a combination of factors such as furious callers and demanding employers and simply the work itself. The work is repetitive (most of the calls are scripted), employees have call duration and call volume targets to meet, they work at night, deal with cultural issues arising out of working with foreign customers and often deal with irate customers. For those who leave a company to work outside the industry, stress is often the reason. Absenteeism is common. In any case, stress needs to be addressed to have a productive work environment.

The sourcing-evaluation process should include a look at the provider’s policy on managing stress levels in the workplace. Many service providers organize yoga and meditation centers, have gyms on their premises and some even assign agents as ‘fun managers’, whose job is to make the work environment lively and less stressful. Here’s an example of what the fun manager may do: He may declare Monday a Hawaiian day. Aloha signs may be put up on the board by the manager, and the agents assigned to the process may be asked to come to the office dressed in Hawaiian clothes. The ‘fun budget’ may be used to gift a pizza to the best-dressed person. (Admittedly, it’s possible that having to find and wear Hawaiian clothes could cause some workers stress).

BPO workers in India dealing with customers in U.S. time zones have a higher attrition rate than ones servicing customers in Europe. For some companies, this issue has spurred a follow-the-sun strategy where call centers are spaced around the globe so that call-center shifts are restricted to daytime only. In other instances, corporations have opted to send call center work to nearshore locations such as Mexico and Canada, rather than deal with the graveyard shift in India.

But, what if in spite of all the efforts by customers and service providers, employee churn remains high? Mehta has a solution, though he’s never had to use it. “None of the contracts that I have been involved in obligate us to continue to do business with any vendor,” says Mehta. “We have multiple partners at any given time. If we find that attrition is a problem with one vendor, we’ll start steering the business to other players. That is enough of an incentive for the vendors legal in that country not only to stem attrition, but also to provide quality.” n