“I finally got my Indian peer up to speed and we’re working well together. But now he is leaving and I have to start all over again…”

Churn is a big headache in India. The cost of attrition is 18 months’ salary and hiring externally hikes up salary costs by 20%. Aside from the tremendous costs, it has a huge impact on international team performance and satisfaction.

I once met a company in China where churn was so high that they broke jobs down into tasks that took only 30 minutes to train. Churn is not solely an Indian problem but with RPA, job complexities in India are only getting bigger, not smaller.

Since 30-minute job training is not an option, let’s dive into this subject.

What are normal attrition rates in India?

Job-hopping is widely accepted in India. A recent survey by KPMG India shows a 13,4%. attrition rate across industries. In some industries such as professional services however, a 25% rotation every single year is normal. Multiple heads of GBS in India reported an average churn of 17-18%.

Why is churn so high?

Millennials: You’ve probably noticed that your Indian colleagues are very young. On average, Indian employees are 29 years old. Over 50% of the population is under 25. You’re working with an almost exclusively Millennial workforce. So, how do Indian Millennials compare to their peers across the globe?

• Tracking whether you are keeping up with the Joneses and the Kumar’s has become easier than ever. Carlijn Boerrigter at EY found that social media has a huge impact on job hopping. How does your career progress compare to your class mates? The answer is only a mouse click away. Is your career not progressing fast enough? A new job is only one mouse click away, too.
• Job hopping is normal all around the world. Nicole Solleveld from YourConnect found that Dutch Millennials stay in a job for 28 months. KPMG UK reported a maximum tenure of 3 years. The US calls Millennials the ‘job hopping generation’. India isn’t such an outlier.
• Whether a Millennial lives in India, Europe or America, they want to learn, grow and know where their career is going. What is happening on a large scale in India now will be happening in the West, too, as more Millennials join the ranks.
• Once Millennials settle down, they job hop less. In India, that’s at around 30 years of age.

High demand for skills: There are more graduates than jobs in India, so you would expect low attrition. Unfortunately, many Indians received substandard education. Their skills are limited, therefore, and so is their ability to fit into a job. Real talent is in short supply and employers are fighting for it. If you don’t create a career development and compensation path for your talent, someone else will.

Tell-tale signs that your organisation has problems

Check the data: Churn rates vary per industry. Reputable recruitment companies in India know industry data so you can compare your churn to companies in a similar field. They can also tell you whether external factors such as location could be contributing to your churn.

Interview your source: Why are your people leaving? Anjali Raghuvanshi, Chief People Officer at Randstad India, recommends companies hold stay interviews to prevent staff from leaving in the first place. Should they hand in their notice, Anjali finds that face-to-face exit interviews work better in India than an online survey, because you’ll get more genuine answers. Staff often cite personal circumstances: getting married, relocating etc. Sometimes these are genuine. However, medical circumstances are often used to escape the notice period.

Detect a pattern: Anjali always looks for patterns. If almost everyone is citing personal circumstances for leaving, you need to ask yourself why. Is the manager too strict? Once you detect a pattern, alarm bells start should start ringing.

The key ways to retain talent

This graph shows the drivers for retention: what motivates professionals to stay at a company. The thousands of answers can be broken down into age, region, gender, seniority and more.

Source: Global Business Academy’s India e-learning program.

Career growth: With 16%, career growth tops the list for why Indian staff choose to stay with their employer. The older Indians are, the more important career growth becomes. A few points:

• In this age of Holacracy, Western organisations like to reduce hierarchy structures. In India however, organisations with more hierarchical layers and titles create an illusion of growth. The consequence of cutting out layers and titles, therefore, is that staff stay on the same level for much longer. As a result, managers need to do a lot of convincing that staff are growing.
• Anjali advises organisations to provide more clarity on career planning and compensation. Managers lack in informing their employees on how they are doing or where they stand.
• Indian employees usually voice their dissatisfaction with their feet, not with their mouth.

Flexible work schedules plus work-life balance: In India, organisations expect staff to work long hours. As a result, private and work lives are intertwined. Just as employees are willing to work evenings and weekends, they demand flexibility at work to take care of personal matters, go for long lunches or get time off for celebrations. Whilst this is less important for 20-29 year olds, it is increasingly important for 30-39 (22%) and 40-49 (31%) year olds.

Salary: Moving into a new job means an average incremental pay of 25% (Randstad). Indians often support the entire family: spouse, children, parents, school fees and hospital bills. And despite the lower average salaries in India, Mumbai is the second most expensive real estate market globally! In other words: every rupee counts.

Communication and leadership: Indian staff want to be involved in the strategy of the organisation or else they get disengaged (Randstad). Managers need to ensure that staff feel aligned to the vision, offer opportunities to learn and grow, and develop their key talent. In other words: Indian managers need to move from IQ to EQ. However, not all of them have these skills.

So, what do you do when you have a problem in your Indian office?

You have detected a pattern. The issue is internal, not external. Your Indian management says the churn is normal but you don’t think it is. Or you hear a lot of excuses. You’ve asked for action plans but you don’t see results. You have an uneasy feeling that you don’t have a grip on what’s going on.

So, what do you do? Fire people? Accept it?

Before taking any action, you need to check if your global policies work for India. Secondly, you need to understand what you are dealing with. And that means immersing yourself with knowledge about the Indian way of working. You need to be able to answer whether you have the right people – which means this is a case of skill development – or if you have the wrong managers – who are perhaps a little chalta hai, or old school, driving performance but also churn.

The post The Costs, Reasons, Indicators and Solutions to Churn in India appeared first on Global Business Academy.

The talk of the town at SSON’s flagship Shared Services and Outsourcing Week event in Orlando last month was RPA. Understandably so – the efficiencies it brings are incredible. Yet, for a cost-effective Global Business Support offering, India remains crucial – this will not change despite automation.

Now that we are taking the robot out of the human work, however, effective communication and collaboration between your global teams and India – still the #1 country in the Asia Pacific region for SSOs/BPOs – is more important than ever.

If you get a smile on your face when you read the word ‘India’ and your internal clients and colleagues face absolutely no challenges – deadlines are always met, you get instant feedback when there are problems and the quality of work is always perfect – then congratulations! This column is not for you.

Alternatively, have you gradually come to accept that miscommunication and collaboration issues are par for the course when working with India? Would you like to know the actual cost of non-alignment in terms of time, money, quality, reputation and employee satisfaction? Do you want to be inspired to re-examine your ‘normal’? Then this column is for you.

Because communication and work styles are so different in Asia, it can be difficult to gauge why problems arise. Quality levels are below expectations. Work is late. Problems are not highlighted. Why does this happen? Is it because Asia-based counterparts don’t understand what’s expected? Are they not capable? Are they unwilling? Or is there something bigger at stake?

Getting to the root of the problem requires knowledge about local communications and working styles. Improved cultural understanding significantly contributes to operational success.

My work with multinationals that collaborate across virtual (global) teams indicates that the vast majority experience below expected performance. And the cost of rework, including dramatically reduced trust in the SSO model, is huge.

This column will offer valuable learnings on how to manage the cultural divide that impacts global SSO/BPO/customer exchanges. Every month, we will examine a real business case that multinationals need to solve in leveraging India-based operations as part of a global service delivery model.
Examples include:

• The cost of rework: We share the business case of a company that faced an astonishingly high 30% rework percentage. In other words, for every 100 hours of work done in India, they had to do another 30 hours in Europe before it could go to the client.
• The costly long change curve: This global company calculated that it took 6 – 12 months before teams finally knew how to work effectively with their colleagues in India. We uncover the costly journey and how to speed up learnings.
• The cost of churn: Churn in India is a big headache. By the time many Indian employees have figured out how to work well with their global colleagues, they leave the job. The cost is huge and exasperating for all. Why is churn so high? What can you expect and what can you do?
• Low customer satisfaction: We share examples where both internal and external client satisfaction was low. Deadlines were not met, quality of work was not good, feedback was lacking. We examine the issues and what these companies did to solve it.
• Low employee engagement: We highlight the human challenges that many companies deal with, namely bias, frustration and lack of motivation – and how to turn this around.
• Desired proactiveness: Many clients in the US, UK or mainland Europe have the same wish for their Indian teams: greater proactiveness. How to come up with ideas, signal problems without causing offense, and ask for input. We deep dive into this important topic.

This series of columns reflects the Indian perspective as well as that of foreign multinationals and highlights the cost of miscommunication and non-alignment. Whilst India often gets the blame when things go wrong, the truth is that both parties need to learn valuable lessons to improve performance. The solution sits somewhere in the middle.

Topics are based on the problems frequently encountered with multinational clients. Please participate in these discussions by commenting on our LinkedIn posts: What have you run into? How did you tackle it? And where do you still see room for improvement?

Through this series, Ilse shares the knowledge she has acquired through coaching teams both in India and the rest of world in collaborating better. Much of her work is centred around communication and collaboration challenges within GBS, shared services and outsourcing teams.

The post The Hidden Cost of Non-alignment Between Global Teams and India appeared first on Global Business Academy.