IT sector in India contributes about 40% to the Nation’s GDP, employing 25% of Indian workforce. Amongst various advantages that is infused by this sector, it is also known to employ a huge number of employees to constitute its “Bench Force”. So what exactly is Bench Force? Why does a company need one?

Bench force is needed by company to portray its ability to accommodate new projects. Thus, more the number of the employees in Bench Force, faster is the company’s ability to start new projects without actually having to disturb the existing projects. It also provides a cushion, in a sector which experiences one of the highest iteration rates. Thus, in case of employees choosing to discontinue with the organization, the organization can look into its existing Bench Force to try fill the project resource vacancy.

Unfortunately, though Bench Force seems advantages, it has its own set of cons. It accounts for major chuck of companies expenses. Also, at an individual’s perspective, it’s pretty demoralizing. There has have been instances where in employees have been posted on Bench for more many months, years just because Human Resource or Talent Management Team to effectively map employees with Project Vacancies. One such instance is of friend who started his career at one of top IT companies. After his initial training which was JAVA, he was added to companies bench force. Later, after an year on Bench, he was reallocated to training cell and was suggested to learn a other technology in which the Human Resource sensed requirement. This effort was soon futile as he was again assigned to Beach Force.

In conversations with bench employees, one can notice is the loss of focus. Due to lack opportunity and right exposure, these employees tend to lose their technical skills. This is disastrous to both the employees and the organization that employed him.

Though many organizations constantly work with the Human Research or Talent Management Team to formulate strategy and techniques that will benefit the bench force employee to nurture their knowledge and skills, I believe they are not very effective. I am not talking about self-motivated employees who constantly mine for methods to benefit themselves and the company. These employees are always an asset they do not need external motivators. I am talking about the class of employees who are not self-motivated. How do we motivate these individuals to harbour constant self-improvement? One method that might benefit employers and their employees by keeping them motivated is listed down below.

The key to motivate this class of employees is to provide external motivation. Incentivizing, recognition and appreciation can have positive impact on the employees. Consider this scenario; it’s a known fact that mobile platform and mobile services are upcoming markets. Also, unlike enterprise applications, Mobile solutions are not heavy in nature and demand less development time. What if organization motivates their Bench force to explore the idea of mobile Application development? What if Bench employees can either individually or as a group create, plan, develop and implement Mobile application projects. To motivate organizations can device Profit sharing models where in part of revenue earned is directed towards the developer of the Mobile application. Yes, this does involve overhead for organization to ensure optimum resources like hardware, software and other tools to facilitate such innovations be available. Such policy will also help the organization grow for example:

There a bunch of non-tangible benefits to such as

As software developer myself, working in this industry, I believe the bench, which constitutes almost 25% for the IT Company’s workforce, can definitively be better utilized benefiting the company as well as it employees.