Festive hiring shifts from finding workers to keeping them

Bengaluru: The festive bonus is no longer always one big cheque at the end of a busy month. For workers packing orders, staffing stores or delivering parcels, the extra money can now come through a higher rate on a busy day, an attendance reward after a week, a productivity payout or a bonus for simply staying through the entire sale season.As ecommerce, retail and logistics companies ramp up for the year’s biggest shopping period, the competition for frontline workers is increasingly becoming a retention battle. Companies are putting greater emphasis on incentives tied to attendance, performance and completing the festive season, even as the actual boost to workers’ take-home pay can depend heavily on targets and hours worked.TeamLease Services said spending on festive incentives rose 15-20% in 2025 over 2024. It does not yet have a comparable industry-wide increase for 2026, but says more of the incentive pool this year is being directed towards longer-duration retention payouts.“More of that money is going into retention-linked payouts, such as weekly or monthly attendance bonuses and end-of-season completion bonuses,” said Balasubramanian A, senior vice-president at TeamLease Services. “Daily surge pay still exists, but it increasingly sits on top of milestone-based rewards.”The shift reflects the cost of workers leaving midway through peak demand. Festive attrition in high-pressure frontline roles was 35-40% last year, TeamLease said. “Incentive budgets keep rising because retaining a productive worker through the peak costs far less than replacing one,” Balasubramanian said.Last season, monthly earnings across warehouse, fulfilment, picking and packing roles were 12-15% above normal months in metros and 18-22% higher in Tier-II markets, largely because of variable pay rather than revisions to base wages.The premium is visible outside warehouses too. Timbuckdo, which connects college students with part-time jobs, said one retailer hiring through its platform can raise pay from around Rs 110 an hour on regular days to about Rs 150 during high-footfall sale periods, taking daily earnings in one example from roughly Rs 600 to Rs 900. “Today the biggest competition for all of them is to get the attention of the gig worker,” Apoorv Sharma Prasad, one of its founders, said.Myntra, which is creating over 26,000 seasonal jobs for its Big Fashion Festival, said its reward system continues to include daily spot awards such as electronic gift vouchers or goodies for top-performing fulfilment-centre employees.“The additional incentives include cash rewards, added to the payroll for efficiently and regularly supporting the peak periods of the event,” said Govindraj M K, CHRO at Myntra.Flipkart said its delivery workers are being offered joining and retention bonuses as well as referral incentives this festive season, alongside insurance and healthcare benefits.Worker representatives, however, caution that advertised incentives should not be confused with guaranteed earnings. Shaik Salauddin, founder-president of the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers’ Union, said workers are reporting that 2026 incentives are more target-driven and conditional, often requiring specific order counts, attendance and peak-hour availability.“During the festive season, a full-time delivery worker may gross around Rs 25,000-35,000 in a month, while exceptional workers can cross Rs 40,000-50,000,” Salauddin said. “But these figures generally require significantly longer hours and hitting incentive targets.”For that Rs 25,000-35,000 range, he said workers may typically put in 9-12 hours a day for 26-30 days a month, with some peak days stretching to 12-14 hours. “The real question is not the headline earning. It is how much the worker takes home after expenses and how many hours it took to earn it.”You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.