20% HCL Employees Resigned In 90 Days: Can Gamification Stop Attrition?

HCL Technologies, like many other companies in India’s IT industry, is struggling with high levels of attrition.

Not Just In India

Its attrition rate in the October-December 21 quarter was 19.8%, up from 15.7% in the previous three-month period.

Commenting on the trend, HCL’s HR chief VV Apparao said that it has not impacted the company’s ability to deliver. 

He said that high attrition is a global phenomenon which is not restricted to India.

Utilising Gamification And Other Techniques

The firm is planning to take measures towards understanding employees’ sentiments better.

After gathering this feedback, it aims to craft an advanced tool for onboarding or training, to  curb attrition.

Some of the measures make use of techniques such as gamification and AI/ML tools which would track and address work related dissatisfaction.

Bringing In New Technologies

It also seeks to improve employees’ overall experience with respect to training and onboarding.

Apparao told ET that it has roped in EY (Ernst & Young) to implement the new interface.

He shared that they are “revamping” the entire IT landscape since the existing ones “have been developed incrementally over the past 30 years”.

It is “not great” from an employee experience perspective, therefore there is a need to bring in and make better use of new technologies.

Revamping Employee Lifecycle: Hire To Retire

The “Hire to Retire” platform will revamp the company’s entire employee lifecycle from recruitment, onboarding, training and finally retirement.

The biggest obstacle it faces is that it doesn’t know what the employee’s mindset is when they choose to quit..

Instead of a reactive approach, the firm will take a gamified approach in which the resigning employee will be given 2 minutes to answer queries giving an insight into “how comfortable they are”.

Fresher Hiring Doubled

To offset the losses brought on by attrition, it will also double its fresher hiring for the next fiscal.

Its current aim is to hire around 20,000 freshers by the end of the ongoing financial year 2021-22. 

It is betting on freshers seeing that global talent demand is for new-age skills such as cloud, IoT (Internet of Things) and cybersecurity.

After being hired, freshers can be trained and deployed on such skills.

Leader Building Program

The organization will launch a comprehensive program to develop future leaders from a pool of 600-odd employees between ages 35-45.

They will be provided coaches, mentors and management skills from B-schools like Wharton or ISB.

The programme would address the gaps in their abilities and train them via job rotation over a period of four to five years.