Bangalore: With attrition rising to the pre-recession levels, BPOs have churned out attractive retention plans and the key one is to shift employees to premises situated overseas, reports Moumita Bakshi Chatterjee from Business Line. "Over the last few months, we have started posting key employees to our BPO centres in Florida and Texas. This gives them a global exposure, and acts as a strong retention tool. However, it is only meant for critical positions such as six sigma experts, domain or technology experts," said Sanjiv Kapur, Global Head BPO of Patni. The trend is an aftereffect of the open job market that has triggered a spike in employee churn. For instance, Genpact's attrition rate for March quarter (measured from day one of employment) stood at 23 percent up from 21 percent for the same period in 2009. In case of ExlService, the experienced attrition in March quarter was 32.7 percent for billable employees, compared to 21 percent a year ago. There are active steps taken on launching leadership development programmes and rewarding team leaders, to ensure top performing employees do not get carried away by the rival firms' offers. For instance, Spanco BPO, has recently turned on a 'Lead by example' programme that rewards deserving team leaders and team managers, based on feedback from workplace. "The new programme keeps the team leaders and managers motivated through recognition, while imparting competencies based on assessment. Specific programmes enable these professionals to gain new competencies to move to the next level," Sunil Kumar, Senior Vice-President - HR, Spanco BPO, said. While last year, the programmes were run by the programme owners, this year, the senior leadership has taken it in their own hands to ensure better motivation. As BPO major IBM-Daksh says it is driving the HR programmes with far more rigor than last year.