Finance and accounts BPO EXL, part of the global transformation and outsourcing company EXLService Holdings, foresees India emerging as a global destination for the high-end outsourced finance and accounts operations. According to Sanjay Gupta, global HR head of the company, the possibility arises from the phenomenal performance capability of Indian workforce beyond the commoditised delivery like simple extraction of data from accounting spreadsheet to distinguished higher functional abilities like financial planning and analysis. But what bogs down the higher billing potential is the issue of employee stickiness, he tells S Saroj Kumar of FE.
Tell us how low employee stickiness quotient hits workforce delivery capability?
There is a paradigm shift in our performance capability with clients willing to outsource some of their hardcore operations like financial planning and analysis, financial reporting and process documentation. It may be a surprising to know that finance and accounts (F&A) BPOs have a very high appetite for CA and ICWA professionals other than MBA Finance in the job market.
We need workforce stickiness to build traction in high-end task delivery as it involves high degree of domain training and unskilling and reskilling the team to meet the specific objectives of the client task.
Losing stickiness comes as the painful part of the outsourcing story where attrition and poaching kill the ripening of human resource to hone themselves for higher order tasks in the industry.
One needs to build incremental skills to metamorphose the talent for comprehensive global outsourcing engagement. Ironically, F&A workers armed with CA, ICWA and CFA degrees are lured with higher compensation and other rewards like promotion from the competing companies in the market. For F&A BPO and KPO companies people are the non-negotiable asset and attracting and retaining the requisite talent is the most challenging task.
How do you go about talent management?
Talent management is a top most priority of any growing company. In a F&A BPO business delivery model people’s cost is 60% of the sales followed by the IT cost and other infrastructure costs.
The cost of people to the company is the single largest expenditure factor that calls for diligent management of people asset. Prolonged working hours, very few holidays on yearly planner and anxious performance reviews are a passe at the present industry HR standards. With employee stickiness at stake, the industry is emerging as employee-friendly sector with a lot of pro-employee initiatives. We offer job rotation for those who wish to take a break; this could be a child-bearing women or a yuppie who wishes to go for higher studies. There is lot of attention to detail studies on employees’s work-life balance and taking the right intervention for course correction.
How do you see the fitment in the recent Outsource Partners International(OPI) acquisition?
OPI is a $100 million all-cash deal buyout aimed at boosting out footprint in the southern market. We are quite concentrated in the northern and western markets with presence in cities like Noida, Pune, Jaipur and Gurgaon. This acquisition is poised to establish a toehold in the south region with OPI’s 3,700 workers.
OPI operationally would boost our sales force, account management engine and client management engine. More on south, we are building a 700-seat delivery centre at Kochi.
The multilocational foray in a way serves the purpose of derisking which the clients are all the time concerned about.