Increasing Manpower Attrition and How It Is Affecting Businesses in India

While the workforce is an elemental part that drives the company's performance, targets, and business goals, businesses are facing significant barriers to achieving these goals. Sectors such as manufacturing, retail, automobile, hospitality, construction and many more are experiencing unprecedented post-pandemic crises of a staffing shortage, the average dearth being that of 15-30% of the skilled workforce, according to the Economic Times. This rise in attrition has resulted in companies actively seeking blue-collar employees, so much that the surge rose to the highest in the last 18 months. The discussion of the hour is why blue-collar workers are not willing to work in these companies anymore. A deeper dive into the matter suggests that it can be attributed to the lack of necessary employee support, incentives, training and compensation benefits, which are creating an unfavourable condition for the companies.

How is it affecting businesses?

Retention of blue-collar employees in an organisation is essential to meet the company goals and reach profit margins. To achieve this, companies are now forced to provide extra incentives and one-time payments to attract manpower due to a smaller workforce. “In blue collar, people are directly proportional to the outcome and everyone is a profit center. You pay ‘X’ dollars and you get ‘Y’ dollars. Hence, a shortage of manpower impacts the ability to deliver and delays business goals,” says Pravin Agrawal, the group CEO at Betterplace. He also mentions e-commerce and retail sectors as some of the major contributors to the demand for frontline jobs. Moreover, according to the Economic Times, fast-moving sectors such as consumer goods and e-commerce are also likely to take the brunt of manpower shortage. Such businesses are prone to fall short with the lack of workers affecting their and their client company’s delivery, workflow, company and employee morale and profitability. The lack of employee retention also taints the company's reputation, deterring the association of other potential employees or clients with them.

How can companies overcome the challenge?

As mentioned by Entrepreneur, India currently has over 250 million blue-collar workers, and prioritising their upskilling, financial assistance, and other employee support must be made an important goal. One prominent example is Elgi, a manufacturing company that generated zero attrition. Their ‘Compensation Model’ was designed to calculate employees' wages according to their needs and aspirations, bringing a negligible attrition rate.

How is Unify tackling the challenge?

Unify’s own employee support strategies are forging a path to overcome the workforce shortage in facility management. Our blue-collar workers are entitled to incentives, competitive salaries and other monetary benefits. We lent a helping hand to our employees throughout the pandemic patch, which resulted in the lower attrition rate Unify sees today. We are an IFM service that proactively helps workers gain knowledge of the field through training models. This not only aids in creating a skilled task force but also leads to high retention of employees. Further, we strive to deliver a better working environment for every worker so that the goodwill reverberates in their work.

Join hands with Unify to outsource your facility management and reap the benefits of a skilled and robust workforce.