Day 1 Of Retention Workshop

I am attending a two day workshop on retaining people conducted by the Leadership Development Department of our company. As a BPO, attrition is a major challenge and especially when dealing with a domestic process – heavy call volume and lower salaries, when compared with an international process. As the training lead for the Kerala center, I’ve been asked to arrange one with my counterparts in corporate from May but due to many reasons we were unable to get one conducted for us till this week. Retention

The first batch was completed over the last two day and I was able to send two members of my team for it. Today and tomorrow, I’m sending two others and I’m attending it myself and as stated in an earlier post, we’re conducting it in a conference room in Hotel Park Residency, located near the Kakkanad Civil Station. The session was too long; most people were groaning towards the end but I guess portions had to be covered.

Lunch was the hotel buffet, which I felt should have been arranged seperately for the conference attendees but oh well! Let’s see : there was veggie & chicken soup, nan, drunken chicken (no idea who got the chicken drunk), fish curry, grilled pork chops, crab salad with 1000 Island dressing, another chicken curry, some vegetable curries, noodles, fried rice and two kinds of boiled rice with the usual sambar, avial, thoran & papadom. For dessert there was an ice cream and pudding. The pièce de résistance was the grilled pork shops – my only complaint is that it was a lot cooled by the time we ate it.

We trudged back in and we all had looks of disain on our faces when we learnt that we had to do an outdoor activity next! 35 minutes in the hot sun, we came back in. The hotel does not really have good service (we had a couple of goof ups and a couple of interruptions) and why is it that such big hotels have such bad coffee? Overall I was happy that the session has happened.