Hyderabad: BPM sector sees high attrition rate

Hyderabad: Over the years, business process outsourcing (BPO) has transformed into business process management (BPM) in India. Interestingly, attrition has become a norm in this sector. Several employees are switching organisations at the drop of the hat in this sector.

Attrition has been observed chiefly at the entry and mid-levels, but at the supervisor levels, the number of people leaving is less.

KPMG India in its annual Compensation Trends report for the year 2017-18, notes that the average voluntary attrition rate was high in ITES than in IT sector.

Unlike IT sector which got hit by the Trump administration, H1B visas, ITES sector hardly leverages the H1B visas. Consequently, while the IT sector lives in constant fear of layoffs, the ITES on the other hand is trying its best to retain employees and attract new ones. 

On one hand companies are trying to attract talent by offering attractive benefits, guaranteed incentives and on the other hand, they are trying to retain employees by giving performance based variable pay and recognition awards.

Mr Srikanth Srinivasan, Nasscom regional director for Telangana state, said, “For skilled jobs in the IT sector the attrition levels are lower. But in enabled services, it varies and amongst low end jobs, attrition level is high. The primary reason for moving jobs is that they get a salary hike which is the faster way of accelerating their income.”

There is no dearth of jobs in this vertical and companies are constantly looking out for right candidates. 

A lot of the young population is employed in the industry that lacks proper career orientation. They tend to switch jobs for salary hike or for a more preferred location. Furthermore, automation is helping to remove the dull and monotonous part of the job.

"BPM attrition is high due to the monotony of the job. By and large this is getting resolved due to the employee engagement that is taking place in many companies. Most of BPM organizations are trying to up skill their employees and reduce the monotony using automation”, said Mr Srikanth.

According to a Future of Jobs in India report, there is a massive re-skilling initiative by Indian IT-BPM to prepare the workforce for future. Furthermore it states, 60-65 percent of employees in the IT-BPM sector will be doing jobs that require a completely changed skill-set by 2022. IT-BPM is the largest private sector employing 3.9 million people.

It creates approximately 12 million indirect employment opportunities The average attrition rate in ITES is about 15.4 per cent while in IT is 14.5 per cent.

The average increments projected for the fiscal year 2017-18 is 10.4 per cent which was 10.1 per cent in 2016-17.