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Compensation and Hiring Issues
A surprisingly high number of employees feel that they are being paid at par with industry standards compared to last year. This comes across as good news, especially in a year where pay cuts became a norm. However, there remains a broad divide on whether the salary paid is enough. Companies seem to have made additional efforts to make salary structures more tax efficient. While HR departments are tightening their peoples processes, they are factoring in inflation and rising input costs in their salary increase budgets for 2009. Companies are looking to balance the pressures of inflation and lower HR budgets by raising productivity and redeploying manpower. Companies have increased performance linkages to counter fixed-pay increases and have initiated a hiring freeze or a slowdown in recruitment. While variable pay and performance incentive have been adopted by the IT sector for quite sometime now, it was only in the last year thatmost organizations have actually used variable pay with the premise that it was designed with, leading to some level of dissatisfaction amongst employees. Companies have been struggling hard to develop performance and variable pay linkages, which is transparent and is followed in spirit and practice. Well, these efforts already seem to be producing resultsthis year a high number of employees feel that their companies have fair and transparent appraisal procedures. Also, there is a big jump over last year in the number of employees who feel that special initiatives and efforts are recognized and vouch for the relevance of the appraisal parameters within their company.

While companies have not carried out a complete freeze in hiring, they certainly have been very slow in filling up positions. Also, recognizing that there is life beyond the IIMs and IITs, a number of companies are also seeking talent from Indias second rung Tech and B-schools, especially campuses based out of tier-2 and -3 cities in the country. This has also brought down the recruitment costs for many companies. However, challenges still exist, with the demand patterns shifting from a numbers-driven, entry-level talent focus to a quality-driven, middle management focus. Before the economic downturn, the IT industry had a talent deficit, because of which issues such as employability were addressed in previous HR summits, and given the current scenario, the focus is on excess talent and how to better redeploy them without resorting to retrenchment. Now and in the near future, the HR of IT companies would need to adapt to various changes, including higher bench costs, lower attrition and global delivery models.

Misses and Major Displacement
This year, apart from the Top20 players, we also took a sneak peek at the next ten best employers. The reason being, that a majority of them are emerging companies and new entrants to the DQ-IDC survey. It was essential to give these companies more than just a cursory glance as there is every possibility that they might find their way up in the Top20 list. There were some important names that could not make it into the Top20 list. Accel Frontline climbed up a rank but missed the list just by one position. Ness and Nagarro fell five and three ranks respectively, missing the Top20 bus. Companies that have been displaced in a major way, include GlobalLogic that dropped thirteen positions and came down at #29 and Infrasoft Technologies that saw a dramatic fall from its rank #14 last year to #31, thus not featuring even in the next ten best employers list. Pune based Zensar Technologies, managed to climb 7 positions, finding its way back into the next ten best employers. Datacraft and Virtusa also gained four positions each, thus securing a better rank with the Top20 list. The biggest success story this year, seems to be that of Patni that managed to climb thirteen ranks announcing its return as the top employer.

Training is Deciding Factor
Training has become a major deciding factor in gauging the quality of the manpower and defining the maturity of their skill sets. This year a majority of companies scored lower than the industry average, indicating the challenges faced by them in making employees accept the benefits of training. Nevertheless, they have not pruned the training budgets and the survey indicates a definite improvement in the amount and quality of training. However, more needs to be done to increase the relevance of training among employees.

The prevailing market scenario has highlighted the need for companies to cross-train, and multi-skill their employees in order to gain even more relevance in the current context. The emphasis today is on increasing investment in domain-specific, technical and behavioural trainings. There are organizations, however, that are cutting back on expensive external or classroom-based training during the downturn, using instead on-the-job, experience-based development as an effective employee retention driver.

Clearly, the existing environment requires companies as well as their HR teams to think out-of-the-box, and come up with innovative approaches to survive the downturn and hold employees together.

Priya Kekre
priyak@cybermedia.co.in

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