How to Retain your Top Talent During The Great Resignation

TeamLease Edtech organised a panel discussion on “How to Retain Your Top Talent during The Great Resignation” on 25th of February. The panel has some renowned leaders, Mr. Anil Santhapuri, Director of Learning and Development at CGI, Ms. Kirti Seth, CEO - NASSCOM and Mr. Siddhartha Srivastava, Associate Director HR at R1 RCM and moderator Ms Neeti Sharma, President & Co-Founder at TeamLease Edtech Limited .

Each of the panellists had their own point of view and came forward to shed some light on this growing scenario in the Indian IT Industry post pandemic. In the past few months a lot of people have been resigning from their jobs and looking for other well paying and low risk jobs, in order to shield themselves from the adverse effect of the ongoing pandemic.

Let us have a look at these industry leaders sharing their take on talent retention during the Great Resignation.

Question 1: Is the situation in the Indian IT sector as bad as that in the west?

• The situation in India is bad as the attrition levels of NASSCOM have reached upto 30-35%. And it is believed that these attrition levels are going to be high in the near future. But on the contrary the number of people being hired in the IT industry has touched 5.1 million from 4.6 million for the last year. People are leaving one company and joining the other in the same industry, but are not leaving the industry as a whole. So, yes resignations are happening, at an organisational level but not at an industry level. As Ms. Kirti Seth, CEO - NASSCOM says, 'people and organisations have to think of ways to retain employees to prevent mass resignations from happening'.
• CGI experienced a different side of the story. After the pandemic most industries have started to re-look at digital transformation, which is bringing in more work. Adding to that investments in startups have increased by 30%, has made a lot of impact. So, the churn is definitely real but in the coming future it will taper down. Over the last many quarters, especially since people have started working from home, the employee engagement at CGI has gone up, and so has the attrition. So, the conundrum between the engagement scores and increasing attrition rates is what companies need to lay emphasis on.
• Mr. Siddhartha Srivastava, Associate Director HR at R1 RCM believed that the rising attrition rates in his organisation was largely due to employee burnout and other additional reasons like shift from office to work from home. The attrition rate seemed to be much higher amongst the mid-career employees, people who are between 35-45 years. Companies need to take two types of approaches to deal with this i.e reactive and proactive. They need to look at leveraging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and data driven methodology that can help in bringing down these attrition rates. Checkout the video.

Question 2 : Is the burnout only specific to India?

• While employee burnout is much higher outside India but within India it is high too. When it comes to the healthcare industry, employees working there have to do a lot of field work. Especially after being exposed to the pandemic, it is very probable that people are leaving due to burnout. On comparing the attrition rates of the healthcare and the IT industry to the other industries the attrition rate is 4-5% more as compared to the counterparts when it comes to the Indian market. Check out the video.

Question 3 : Employee engagement and attrition has increased, what should we do to lower the stress level of the employees? What is it that you recommend one to do?

• Ever since people have started working from home, the commute time has reduced but on the contrary people have been spending more time on their laptops. Some people have also used this time to socialise and learn new skills. But the fact that people have started spending more time on their laptops has led to burnout and fatigue. Gender roles also play a big part, so when the market opened up again after the pandemic died down a bit, people were looking to start afresh and so they decided to switch jobs in order to find a better alternative.
• The whole scenario can be studied through 3 E’s. The first one being Employee Engagement which was measured by the productivity of the employees. Then in the last decade with the introduction of design thinking people, another E came into play which is experience. Lastly after the pandemic the last E came into play which is energy. This last E is the personal energy of a person. Employers and organizations now need to look at their colleagues and professionals as a whole person. Check out the video.

Question 4: Why are organisations not looking to train their talent especially at entry level?

• The IT sector won’t survive unless organisations don’t work on aggressively rescale and train the employees properly. This comes into play as the accountability of skilling is shifting to the learners. The companies need to tell that they are going to give resources to learn to their employees. Last year, the stats suggested that nearly 60-70% reskilling was done internally by the companies itself. So, the companies are reskilling. The only thing why it is not making so much impact is because these companies have to focus more on knowledge management and make this system stronger. In that way, if organisations build their own talent, the talent is more likely to stay.

Final thoughts

• In the end, the conversation was concluded by thanking the panellists for their time and inputs. Everyone does hope that the great resignation would not be so prevalent in India. This can happen only if the managers are sensitised to empathise with their employees, because at the end of the day it’s not to do with numbers but how we manage people. We can tackle this great resignation by rescaling and upskilling. And not only this, companies have to look at other important key areas apart to tackle “The Great Resignation” effectively. Watch the full video.