Indian IT majors draw up ways to retain good performers
By siliconindia   |   Monday, 30 March 2009, 18:22 IST   |    11 Comments
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Mumbai: Recession ridden IT companies are now seeking options to retain talented employees even amidst layoffs. Indian IT biggies such as Wipro, TCS and Infosys are offering longer and more rigorous training programs to the people on the bench, intending to increase the productivity and making use of them when the economy gets back on track, reported The Economic Times. As part of the arrangements during the downturn, Wipro has asked some of its non-billable and skilled employees to move to subsidiary Wipro Infotech on the same pay package as earlier, but they will but they will continue to be on the payrolls of Wipro Technologies. "These are not under performers, but talented people we don't want to lose. The move to Infotech is currently for a year, and this will give them a chance to be productive," said Pratik Kumar, Executive Vice President, Human Resources, Wipro. Wipro is also offering to the employees, who have been on the bench for six months, an option to come to work for 10 days a month at half their salary. "This allows them to take up certification programs, work on innovation projects and help in creating question banks for domain specific internal tests. Once we see an opening for them on a project, we will transfer them immediately," said Kumar. Similarly, TCS has also brought out high-end training program for benched employees on areas such as enterprise resource planning, business intelligence and analytics. "We are building a larger skill set as we would like to be ready when the demand picks up," said a TCS spokesperson. The TCS employees are also asked to write research papers on technology that can be used by the company. According to Nandita Gurjar, Infosys global HR Head, reducing employee numbers for saving costs is a short-term solution. "When demand picks up, we'll be hiring skill pools at a higher cost; there will also be the cost of extra training. Weed out non-performers, but retain talent even if they are not being utilized currently," added Nandita.

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