Call centre companies in India are joining hands to fight the biggest problem they face -- high rate of attrition.

Hit by an attrition rate of around 35 per cent, leading call center companies have reached an informal agreement not to poach employees from each other.

According to senior executives from various companies, ITES companies are also exploring various other options to retain employees.

These include providing additional benefits to steady employees, and adding a new clause in the employment contract, which makes it mandatory for employees to cool off for a period of three months before moving elsewhere.

"There is no formal agreement to this effect. But we have decided informally that the industry should take steps to fight this problem. Most companies have agreed to this," Arun Seth, head of the IT-enabled services forum of Nasscom, said.

Companies are also taking steps to ensure that such moves do not prevent the movement of jobs completely.

"We only want to deter employees from moving on. Individual companies can do certain things internally. However, there should also be a collective decision to stop large scale movement of people," S Varadarajan, vice-president of Wipro Spectramind, said.

Wipro Spectramind, which suffers from an attrition rate of about 30 per cent, is charting out various internal programmes for its employees.

"Many of our agents leave for higher education. Hence, we have tied up with Symbiosis and BITS Pilani to offer management and engineering courses to our agents. This has worked for us. Of the agents enrolled for these programmes, only 2 per cent have left us in the last six months," he said.

Aniruddha Limaye, vice-president (HR) at Daksh, said: "We do not want to indulge in large scale poaching. There is a broad level understanding amongst companies on this. We also want to build certain barriers to constant switching of jobs by employees."

"We are looking at certain clauses in employment contracts. We also have a very strict in selection process aimed at zeroing in on people who are likely to stay with us in the long run and fill the gaps which are forcing people to switch jobs," Limaye added.

Prakash Raymond Toppo, director human resource, GlobalVantedge, said the company takes care to avoid large scale recruitment from existing players.

"We want companies to be conscious of the fact that large scale poaching is not right. I think most companies are starting to realise that now," he said.

Companies are also looking at ways such as employing housewives and retired employees to cut down the rate of attrition.

"Such people are very stable and do not change jobs often. This experiment is being tried out by some companies successfully," Seth said.