With increasing attrition rates, corporate houses are fast coming to terms with the reality that if you don’t settle-in an employee, it is most likely, that you would lose him or her. Especially those from smaller towns, are likely to find moving to a big city as daunting as they might find it exciting. And they are going the extra mile to handle new recruits with caution. For instance, HR managers are now helping recruits and their families to settle down in the new city, in order to curb attrition. They have coined a term to describe the exercise, specifically aimed at employee welfare in the first year — “controlling infant mortality.”
Sunil Goel, director, GlobalHunt India, a Delhi-based headhunting firm explains, “Over the past three years, sectors like BPO, information technology (IT), retail, telecom, insurance and BFSI have witnessed the maximum attrition within the first year of recruitment. So supporting new employees has become a vital issue.”
With “infant mortality” (first-year attrition) rates increasing by 30 per cent in some sectors (according to reports), HR departments are now taking necessary steps to counter such behaviour. Says Aravind Gopal, HR executive of an Ahmedabad-based pharma firm, “With new recruits apprehensive of smaller towns and cities, any trouble at the workplace could spur attrition within the first year itself. To keep a tab on such early exits, we need to market the place to newcomers. It works both ways. Urban people being employed in smaller towns and vice versa. We give them guided tours, help them find suitable accommodation and be a know-all mediator.”
Many BPO and KPO firms are now conduct briefing sessions for candidates who come from rural or semi-urban setups. “The investments made with regard to hiring for non-metro locations are high when compared to metros. A host of overhead costs are involved including those for extensive training, structured handholding and accommodation for the staff, so we are coming up with solutions for the same,” says Anurag Ghosh, business head — staffing of Amnet Solutions.
Some HR teams, who want to make sure their employees feel “at home”, are coming up with innovative schemes too. For instance, a handset-manufacturing unit in South India, has introduced ‘family allowances’ for its employees. The reason — most of the workers hired by this company are women who hail from rural or semi-urban backgrounds. “For people from rural backgrounds too, working in a different city can be a huge culture shift. Their families too have to deal with additional expenditure. To deal with such cases, our company has introduced family allowances which are disbursed as cash-payoffs to the employees,” says Shyam K., HR executive of the company.