How Do You Handle the Challenges of Managing IT Bench Strength Without Hurting Morale?

sagrawal
Hey Friends,

I am once again leveraging this channel of highly talented pool of HR professionals to get answers to some of my questions and am sure, I shall be successful in this endeavor.

I want to understand "the management of people on the bench." People from the IT industry would be able to identify with me faster than anyone else, since it's a common term used there.

For all the others, let me define it - the bench is essentially a pool of people who have been rolled off from their respective projects because either the project has ended and there is no more opportunity to utilize them currently in the same account, or they had been underperforming.

Most of the IT companies maintain some % of bench strength so that as and when business needs come, they don't end up hiring fresh people from the market and hence can kickstart a project immediately.

However, it leads to a lot of job insecurity and demotivation for people on the bench and hence are potential cases of exit.

Also, maintaining a bench strength leads to revenue loss for the organization since they are not contributing to the business but are still drawing huge salaries.

I want to understand from you guys, what are the best practices followed in the industry/creative ideas to manage these people both in terms of people management practices and also from a business management perspective of minimizing revenue loss from this account.

I am sure I would be able to get valuable inputs from this group on this topic.

Regards,
Shikha
ranga@bnaindia.com
Hi, I am Ranganathan, a research scholar at IIITB, Bangalore. I am writing a paper on the bench practices of Indian IT companies. Could you please provide any links, useful articles, or data that I can use for my work?

Thank you,
V. Ranganathan
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