Previous

Page - 8

While rewards can act as a good tool for employee motivation and retention, employers should not confuse employees with too many rewards. It is better to focus rewards on the critical few behaviors and results, rather than diluting them by rewarding the trivial many.

Role of the Supervisor

The quality of the supervision an employee receives is critical to employee retention. People leave managers and supervisors more often than they leave companies or jobs. Anything the supervisor does to make an employee feel unvalued will contribute to turnover. Therefore, companies should look at ensuring proper competencies in their managers through training.

Providing Growth Opportunities & Career Options

The information age employee is very career conscious. It should be the company's endeavor to devise means of adding to their employees' skills. This symbiotic relationship of nurturing and utilizing talent and skills is a great competency in fighting against attrition. A few initiatives in this regard are worth mentioning. For example, Wipro Spectramind has tied up with BITS Pilani and the Symbiosis Institute of Management to provide distance-learning programme for employees. ICICI OneSource, the Bangalore based BPO, gives scholarships of upto Rs. 50,000 to employees who want to enroll in distance-learning programmes.

ICICI OneSource also gives employees who have been with the company for more than 18 months an option to switch to positions in other ICICI group companies. The system works as a big assurance for BPO employees that the skills they have learnt such as customer friendliness and rapid response to customer problems have wider applications and market demand. Apart from companies having multiple businesses, this strategy can be a good tool for IT companies having BPO arms. An option to shift to the IT arm of the company, based on certain competencies and conditions, can be a motivator. Integrating IT and ITES can help these companies provide their ITES employees with a greater growth incentives.

Next

* Contributed by -
Anirban Majumdar & Kamal Poddar,
Indian Institute of Management,
Kozhikode, Kerala.