High attrition has been a trend with the IT industry since a long time now. Will aggressive retention policies adopted by industry giants buck the trend?
In an attempt to retain key staff and improve employee morale, the Bangalore based IT giant, Infosys, has promoted 4000 employees this month alone. With this number, the company has given promotions to 12% of its 1,65,000 employee workforce since the beginning of the current financial year.
Promotions were given irrespective of verticals and markets. Major promotions took place in sales, delivery and business-enabling functions. As per the software exporter’s spokesperson, "We announced a quarterly promotion system earlier this year. In August, 5,000 employees across sales, delivery and business-enabling functions across geographies were promoted," said a company spokeswoman. "With the promotions we did at the beginning of this month, over 19,000 employees have been promoted since April 2014."
The current round is the fourth round of promotions this fiscal. Infosys has a long standing history of elevating staff once year and this once-a-quarter promotion system marks a shift in this long term strategy.
Though Infosys has adopted other policies too, including engaging with employees at different levels and offering 100% variable bonus payouts along with promotions, these policies seem dud as far as lowering attrition rates is concerned. Even so that in the second quarter of the current fiscal, attrition rates increased to more than 20 % in the second quarter through September, as compared to 19.5% at the end of first quarter.
Experts however, predict that these policies would show results only from the current quarter since a company of the scale of Infosys takes time to reflect improvements, be it of any nature.
Infosys says it is confident that it will bring down it attrition rate to around 14% in the coming months. "Given the amount of emphasis we place on training, we will be comfortable if attrition is 13-15%," chief operating officer UB Pravin Rao said.
Even Wipro has put in force policies to curb employee attrition, a program called 'Notch Up' has been launched to stem experienced professionals at Wipro from leaving. The company is looking to cover upto 5000 employees in three years, by giving them opportunities to study further.
This comes at a time when IBM on the other hand, is scaling down or at-least “trimming” its India operations. Reports suggested that the IBM India, Vanitha Narayanan, was sent back to the US offices. This comes in the wake of serious changes in the way the IT business is conducted, where cheap labour is no longer a sure bet, and other surer business models are required for IT companies to compete seriously with new service providers in the tech space.
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Promoting people to retain them.
Any company worth its salt must promote people who have the talent, enthusiasm,drive and performance.
Not promote all Tom,Dick and Harry.
Now these worthies will take the promotion order, shop around and go to the next company that is expected to do well.
One more reason to believe that Infosys is a sinking ship.
Management is desperate o get people and retain them at all costs.
In all such such companies, those who are confident of doing well anywhere are the ones that will leave and the incompetent who are duds will stay on.Because nobody except Infosys will see value in them.
And what can Infosys do with such worthless people.
It is a "loser" company now.
Promoting people to retain them.
Any company worth its salt must promote people who have the talent, enthusiasm,drive and performance.
Not promote all Tom,Dick and Harry.
Now these worthies will take the promotion order, shop around and go to the next company that is expected to do well.
One more reason to believe that Infosys is a sinking ship.
Management is desperate o get people and retain them at all costs.
In all such such companies, those who are confident of doing well anywhere are the ones that will leave and the incompetent who are duds will stay on.Because nobody except Infosys will see value in them.
And what can Infosys do with such worthless people.
It is a "loser" company now.