Having put to use multiple methods to curb attrition, the business process outsourcing industry has now turned to number-crunching for faster and reliable solutions.
Companies operating in this space are adopting statistical models either built in-house or by third parties to measure attrition tendencies of the employees.
For instance, if a candidate has many dependents to support and has had prior work experience, there is a likelihood of him staying longer with the company. Performance during the initial test or an interview is another parameter used.
If a candidate performs extremely well, is likely to get better offers than an average performer. So the risk of losing such a person is higher. In such a situation, the predictive models also indicate the kind of retention programmes that need to be adopted.
Parameters used to measure the attrition tendencies of an employee after he joins an organisation include the number of leaves taken or denied, orientation of the peer network, the difficulty level of the process that he is working for and the increments or rewards that he has been getting.
Ramakrishna Reddy Dasari, vice-president, Fractal Analytics Ltd, a player in the advanced analytics space, said, "So far we have been working strongly with the banking and retail industry in areas like customer acquisition, enhancing operational efficiencies and optimising media spends. Use of analytics for attrition management has emerged as a potential area of growth in the recent past."
Fractal Analytics has bagged two major clients in the BPO industry, though Reddy declined to divulge the names. On whether the use of such predictive models has actually helped companies to curb attrition, Reddy said, "It is a little early in the implementation cycle to disclose validated results."
Kenexa, a provider of talent acquisition and performance management solutions, has also been providing HR analytics services as an add-on to its solutions.
Tarun Singh, director of Kenexa, said, "HR analytics report is as significant to an organisation as its profit & loss report because both indicate the health of an organisation."
Nipuna Services Ltd, the BPO arm of Satyam Computer Services Ltd, also plans to roll out an analytics tool in the near future. The company has developed it in-house and is currently piloting it.
The tool will help the company plot the performance level, risk of leaving and criticality of an employee's work on a matrix and thus indicate a retention plan to mitigate the probability of attrition.