One of the challenges that business owners have to face when outsourcing or offshoring to a foreign country is retaining employees. High turnover rate remains as a huge problem for many high-tech BPO companies, according to this MIT study on the BPO industry of India . The same study cited the following reasons for employee turnover: dissatisfaction with immediate supervisor, nature of the job, lack of career development, and other psychosocial factors brought about by working in the night shift. Similar trends are ongoing in the Philippines -- in their 2012 report, the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) cited work-related stress and lifestyle diseases due to the graveyard shift as the major reasons call center agents leave their jobs.

So how do you keep your Filipino employees happy? Will providing several incentives and an above average amount of compensation be enough to retain employees for a long time? This week's blog post offers some suggestions that can help prolong employee retention without the need of shelling out the big bucks. Because sometimes, cultivating a strong company culture is more important than monetary rewards.

1. Create a mission.
Most of the Filipinos working in the BPO industry are millennials who want to feel like what they are doing is making a difference -- they refuse to be another cog in the machine. Your challenge as a leader is to provide a purpose that's bigger than your company, which you can achieve by letting your employees take part in CSR and community building activities. In KMC Solutions, we encourage our clients to join our annual CSR activities, which usually involves volunteering in building houses for the homeless and holding activities and workshops for kids and their parents from impoverished areas in the Philippines.

2. Encourage a healthy lifestyle among your employees.
To prevent sickness and stress due to work, especially for employees working the night shift, put a premium on employee health and encourage them to follow a healthy lifestyle. Create a mini-gym inside the office to encourage your employees easy to exercise in spite of their schedule. Conduct regular checkups in the office to ensure that all employees are fit and healthy. To prevent burnout, encourage your people to take vacation days and to maximize their breaks.

3. Provide and ask for feedback regularly.
Filipinos are naturally self-conscious about their job performance, and many of them are afraid of committing mistakes. So instead of giving an annual performance review, try doing it more often to help your employees work on what needs to be improved. At the same time, it is important to ensure that feedback is a two-way street. Employees need to understand that they have a voice, regardless of title, and that they can be heard loud and clear by senior management.

In order to succeed in managing your team, you have to value your people and let them know that they are valued. Maintaining clear communication lines is also necessary to avoid conflict and cultural barriers that often come with the outsourcing and offshoring process.