Managing Attrition in Your India Teams

Continuing my series of posts on outsourcing, here's the one on managing attrition.

Attrition is a fact of life - employees leave a company after a while.

In a market as crazy as this one, attrition is probably the second biggest challenge after talent shortage.

Attrition is even more problematic for services companies as they generally pay less to maintain lower cost structures. Smaller services companies simply cannot hire resources in places such as the SF bay area.

Despite this, you may have found that your outsourcing partner always has the people you need at the time you need. How do they do it?

They use a very creative talent management solution - for every experienced engineer they place, one or more resources are shadowing their senior colleagues. These shadows are fresh out of college engineers that are getting trained on the job. Once the shadow is well trained, he/she can be used either to replace an engineer that just left the company, or on another project. This approach works well for both parties in controlling costs, maintaining quality and ensuring business continuity.

Most experienced software managers are well acquainted with this practice, but if you are new to this, you may find it a tad troublesome. I would recommend that you have a frank conversation with your outsourcing partner about shadows and encourage them to be above board with it.