WORK LIFE BALANCE SPECIAL................ Small Towns a Big Pull for Young Execs

WORK LIFE BALANCE ... Small Towns a Big Pull for Young Execs  In reverse migration, pros aged 25-35 seek postings away from cities for work-life balance      BhaveshSoni was born and raised in Mumbai, but abandoned the maximum city and moved to Vadodara for a quieter, better life. His 25-km commute to work took him two hours in Mumbai; it’s a 10-minute drive in Vadodara. He paid . 10,000 for a domestic help; the cost has halved now. He will soon buy a four-bedroom penthouse for . 30 lakh in his new city; something similar would have cost him . 4.5 crore in Mumbai. “I can come home for lunch everyday,” says Soni, a deputy general manager for Serco Global Services, a BPO firm. “I have a two-year-old kid and need to strike a work-life balance.” He and another colleague, a training lead, asked for a transfer when the company opened a new centre in Vadodara. Serco Global is a large BPO with over 40% of its 47,000 employees working in non-metro cities. It typically needs to fill about 300 lateral and vertical vacancies every month Reverse Migration for Better Quality of Life And about 5% to 7% of applications for these jobs come from candidates keen on moving out of larger cities into smaller places like Vadodra. Even as millions continue to pour into India’s big, bustling cities in search of better employment, a sizeable number of young professionals, especially in the BPO sector, are doing the reverse – migrating to smaller towns for better quality of life and more time with family. Aegis, the Essar group’s BPO company, has cleared 400 such transfer requests from employees keen to move to smaller locations from large cities, all in the past 18 months. These executives, mostly in the 25-35 age bracket, have sought out postings in Chhindwara, Jamshedpur, Srinagar and Bhopal. “We are about to open a centre in Sivaganga and have already received transfer requests from our employees in Chennai,” says an Aegis official. MphasiS has seen similar movement to Indore, Raipur and Bhuvaneshwar from Bangalore and Pune. Most senior managers at Firstsource Solutions’ centres in Jalandar, Vijaywada, Siliguri and Cochin have come on such voluntary transfers from larger cities. “Who wouldn’t want to be a king in their region and a shift to smaller towns given the opportunity?” says Sangeeta Gupta, senior vicepresident, Nasscom. Earlier, companies would struggle to find even freshers for smaller towns; senior managers were next to impossible. Now, a lot of managers are open to such a move, adds Gupta. Serco Global has seen several team leaders, assistant managers and middle-management executives ask for transfers to smaller towns. Aditya Arora, managing director, Serco Global Services, expects a 10-12% increase in transfers to smaller towns in the next few years. “Getting employees to relocate from metros has become easier than it used to be,” Shiv Agrawal, MD of ABC Consultants, a placement firm, said. “Schooling and living standards are better, and for such transfers, companies do not have to pay any extra salary to the candidates as cost of living is lower in smaller towns.” RS Deshpande, former director of Institute of Social and Economic Change in Bangalore, says there are three main reasons behind this ‘reverse migration’ — push, pull and chain links. Push, because metro-dwellers are getting pushed out to smaller locations that provide them with similar social strata at lower cost. Pull, because smaller towns are developing and beckon young ITes workforce who want to enjoy better work-life balance. In the ‘chain link’ theory, people opting for such transfers attract peers to follow. Says Shazad Malik, 27, now a team leader at Aegis centre in Srinagar, who came on a transfer from Delhi: “Srinagar has developed in the last few years and five of my friends have also moved back from Delhi.” Such reverse migration is mostly seen among BPO workers, since the manufacturing and FMCG industries typically hire from local areas. This is not unique to India. Aegis employees, for example, have asked for transfer from its Dallas centre to small towns like Killeen and from Florida to Port St Lucie to escape higher costs of living.  ET131108 DEVINA SENGUPTA