5 Most Powerful Tips to Improve Blue Collar Employee Retention

As much as demand for blue-collar workers is rising, companies are still finding it difficult to access skilled and semi-skilled workers in various categories. Attrition levels are high in various sectors, such as eCommerce, transport, and logistics, due to circular migration, often leaving many companies scrambling for new workers before the festive season.

It is time for companies to devise new strategies to retain this restless workforce. Rather than contractually obligating them to stay, companies need to provide incentives that benefit the blue-collar workforce and make their lives better. Here are 5 tips to improve blue-collar employee retention.

Tip #1: Upskill to Make Them Future Ready

The gig economy can help employers in many ways to hire workers at scale and in real-time. This caters to companies that are struggling to meet the demand, including latent demand that can’t be matched due to lack of visibility. However, BCG’s 2021 report on the gig economy in India reveals that workers in face many pain points, including the lack of learning and development opportunities. Many workers, such as mechanics, technicians, and carpenters, seek continuity in learning opportunities to master skill sets, while students in part-time jobs aim for future career growth.

Upskilling employees is now a major way for companies to drive business growth. It not only boosts employee morale, but also makes the workforce future-ready to deal with new technologies that are constantly emerging. Apart from addressing the talent gap, it helps develop strong and trusting relationships.

Tip #2: Automate Attendance and Scheduling

Traditional attendance systems, through paper-based registers and spreadsheets, are time consuming and effort-intensive. More importantly, they can lead to payroll errors, which is a blow to the morale of workers. Automating the attendance system can simplify scheduling tasks for supervisors, as well as provide employees with greater transparency and easy access to their work schedules.

They can then have the freedom to track data, like available leave days, time-off balance, overtime, and more. Technologies like geo-fencing and facial recognition help provide real-time insights into employee attendance, and also ensure minimal contact during the pandemic.

Automation of attendance through a system that enables compliance with various state policies, reassures them that they are not being exploited, while your company ends up saving on man hours that can be put to better use.

Tip #3: End-to-End Payroll Management

For financially strapped sole earning members of a family, job security and regularity in wage payments is extremely important. Moreover, they seek fair wages. With end-to-end management of the payroll process that is integrated with the attendance system, companies can ensure accurate and timely salary calculations. Timely salary payments lead to quick and accurate disbursals directly to employee accounts and UTR confirmations are sent to their devices.

Tip #4: Financial Assistance to Those Who Need Credit Access

In 2017, India was home to 190 million unbanked individuals. With the government’s Jan Dhan Yojana, 80% of the people now have bank accounts, but many remain out of reach of mainstream financial services. This is due to low or zero education, lack of credit history, lack of language proficiency, and the commercially unviable places they stay in.

If companies step up to provide critical financial resources, such as personal loans at better rates, zero-balance salary accounts, and income protection measures, like group personal accident cover and term insurance, they can help improve the quality of life of their workers. Workers will be able to utilise these resources to fulfil various aspirations, such as further education, children’s marriage and education, owning a vehicle, and much more. This, in turn, fosters loyalty and enhances retention.

Tip #5: Healthcare Support

For decades now, blue-collar workers have suffered from occupational hazards like diseases and injuries, and yet lacked access to affordable healthcare. The pandemic has further exposed how fragile India’s healthcare system is and the need for a complete rework from various stakeholders.

Blue-collar workers need access to proper medical facilities, and companies can tap into this need to retain them. Some ways to do so include having 24/7 on-call doctors available for video consultation, cashless and flexible health insurance, coverage for Covid-19 treatment, and access to discounted medicines and lab tests.

By providing social security and other benefits to blue-collar workers, companies can encourage many young workers from Tier-II and Tier-III cities to join the workforce. A skilled and happy blue-collar workforce will pave the way for the country to outshine in the global business landscape.