Infosys continues to top the charts. However, satisfaction levels in the company are way down, fewer of its own employees now call it their "dream company", and others are begin ning to catch the trend. After last year’s performance, Wipro did some course correction and is back in the Top 5. The big surprises were Datacraft, Philips Software and SAP Labs—small companies that kept their heads, and saw their employees remain happy in tough times. The new HP fell in the rankings—but here’s the twist—overall satisfaction in the company is still high and it is still the "dream company" for most of its employees. Sun Microsystems entered fairly high on the charts, while hcl technologies and Cognizant Technology Solutions took a beating—especially as the effects of recession caught up with the two companies. The second DQ-IDC India HR Survey 2002 threw up some surprises and interesting trends…

THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE TOP GUN: The Infosys HR team at the company’s campus in Bangalore

This was not a year IT professionals would like to live through again. From pampered professionals to being shown pink slips—the fall was quick and painful for many. For the rest—the survivors—the tension was often immense. Results of the recession first showed on company bottomlines, and then quickly on employee pay-checks. Used to regular increments ranging from 30% to 60%, they had to make do with little or no hike in salary, even as the cost of living went up. Jobs seemed under constant threat, exacerbated by a general air of insecurity in most companies—put together, a fairly unnerving combination.

It began with customers wanting more for less from IT companies, and translated quickly into companies asking for more for less from their employees. Nearly 43% of employees surveyed said job-loads increased significantly as a result of the recession. For technical professionals, this happened largely because companies stopped hiring during a large part of the year. As a result, project teams got smaller, and fewer people were expected to deliver the same results. For marketing professionals, the recession often meant double the number of calls and follow-ups, just to sign up the same amount of business as they were getting last year.

Tough being an IT pro
But hard though it might be to believe—there were some upsides to the recession. Attrition—the scourge of the IT industry in the last few years—came down. The numbers show only a 2% drop, from an average of 14.4% to 12.3%. However, if one were to discount the abnormally high attrition rates at Mascon Global and Kshema Technologies, the average attrition this year was more in the range of 8.5%. In companies like TCS and SAP Labs, that figure was even lower at 4.1% and 4.9%, respectively—unheard of levels in the industry so far. Commensurate with this, retention went up from an average of 81% to 88%. Again, discounting the abnormal figures for Kshema and Mascon, the average is more around 91%.

For the second year running, some MNCs stayed away from the survey, citing "global norms on confidentiality". Among them were Cisco and IBM India, the latter having fared extremely well in the previous year’s survey. Even this once, though, IBM chose to stay out of the reckoning.

Company image and job content, as also career development, continued to be rated as the most important attributes by employees. But given the high rates of benching in recent times, career develop-ment assumed greater importance than last year. Job security and stability became more important than money, which was the third-most important attribute last year. The technology people were working on became more critical than facilities, resources and support. Interestingly, overseas opportunity, rated as unimportant last year, re-emerged as a vital attribute.

Note: Employees were asked to rank 14 attributes in order of importance. A score of 100 was given to the most important attribute and the relative strength of other attributes calculated. This is different from the most important reason for joining a company, as priorities before and after joining a job change

Satisfied with being dissatisfied
The broad parameters also showed some interesting trends. Average training hours in the industry were 103 hours (or 13 days) a year per person. Mascon was highest at 312 hours, followed by Infosys at 248 hours and Datacraft at 240. However, most companies—13 to be exact—invested significantly lower than the industry average on training. Adobe was the lowest, at 8 hours per person per year, NIIT was at 12 and iFlex at 21. Essentially what happened was that large companies that could

afford a large bench and did not lay off a lot of people last year, turned instead to training their employees. The others either ran on tight schedules or laid off those they could not bill.

Everything notwithstanding, however—overall satisfaction among IT employees remained pretty decent. The question asked was—What is your overall satisfaction with this company?. This was different from satisfaction on 14 different and specific attributes that led to the ‘Attribute Score’. Measuring the mean score on a scale of 5, employees of Datacraft and Philips said they were the most satisfied, giving their companies the maximum score of 5. NIIT was at the bottom of the list at 4.3, preceded by Hughes Software, TCS and Mascon at 4.4.

Perception of peer satisfaction also showed up in the same range, though interestingly, employees of Sun Micro, Infosys, Rolta and NIIT believed their peers were more satisfied than they were. Conversely, employees of SAP, Digital, HCL Infosystems, Kshema Technologies and TCS believed they were more satisfied than their peers.

A year of lessons learnt
This was also a year when the industry began to learn some lessons the hard way. Exactly a year ago—in September 2001—the big story was one of layoffs. And it spawned a whole new vocabulary—downsizing, rightsizing, correction, raising the performance bar, and so on. But no matter what euphemism companies and HR manager used, they couldn’t rob the process of its unpleasantness. The affects showed up quickly on the HR rankings. Last year, Wipro laid off 280 people under what it called its ‘Bottom 5%’ policy, and between the two surveys Dataquest did, in April and September last year, it fell promptly in the rankings. To begin with, the company had found it difficult to believe how the sacking of a mere 280 people in an organization of 10,000 could make such a difference. But it did. Similarly, just before the last survey, Infosys had cut back drastically on salary hikes (from an average of 50% to an average of 15%, linked partly to company performance—and that promptly saw satisfaction levels in the company slide.

This year, however, Wipro did some course correction. It eased off on its ‘Bottom 5%’ policy a bit, took a decision to avoid making employee-facing cost cuts as much as possible, and increased what is called "employee touch". That effort showed up in the rankings. Infosys made some changes in its increment policy, but not enough. So though the company continues to top the charts, most of its employee satisfaction indicators have continued to head southward. Similarly, companies like HCL Technologies and Hughes Software Systems plummeted in the rankings this year due to a series of employee-facing cost-cutting measures and layoffs—seriously unsettling employees.

The lesson learnt was not that companies should never lay off employees…merely, a better appreciation of the fact that if an unpleasant job has to be done, it is imperative to do it pleasantly and kindly.

For IT professionals, the lessons learnt were those of moderation—a Jerry McGuire lesson, if you will. The inordinately high expectations of a year-and-a-half ago are gone. From almost single-mindedly chasing money, IT pros are beginning to pay a lot more attention to job content, career development, and the technology the company is working on. And of course, job security and company image.

Indeed, for both companies and employees—this was the "Year of the Survivor".

Sarita Rani in Bangalore

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