IT firms increase work-hours for higher productivity

By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 26 November 2008, 01:10 IST   |    13 Comments
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IT firms increase work-hours for higher productivity
Bangalore: In order to offset the recessional setbacks, IT firms are resorting to the strategy of increasing the working hours. Many companies have also stepped up the monitoring of working hours to squeeze the maximum out of their employees, reports The Times of India. Some firms are closely keeping an eye on even the recess time of their employees. An extra minute taken during lunch time or coffee break will have to be compensated. Accenture India is perhaps the first MNC in India planning to increase the working hours from January 1, 2009. TCS had recently increased the working hours by an hour a day to 9 hours. Wipro employees already put in 9.5 hours (8.30 am to 6 pm) a day including a brief lunch break, while it's 9.15 hours in Infosys. But these weren't implemented stringently, until now. "It's sort of mandatory for us now to put in 9.5 hours of work a day. Our HR seems to be monitoring it very closely these days and even a 15-minute shortage/delay is being noticed," said a Wipro employee who got a reminder for short-swiping a few days ago. According to Infosys Technologies head (HR) T V Mohandas Pai, the company has stringent measures to make sure employees put in the required 9.15 hours every day. An increase in working hours will directly impact productivity and revenues. One of the reasons for companies to extend their working hours is to increase productivity and revenues. For instance, by increasing work hours by an hour a day an employee works an additional 22 hours a month. If an hour of his/her work is billed at $20, the company makes an additional billing of $440 per employee. That means, in rupee terms, a single employee can bring in additional revenues of Rs 22,000 a month for the company. Such work time extension works well for projects that are on what is called the 'time & material' model. Around 70 percent of tech projects are currently under this model, while the rest are fixed price projects where the service providers may resort to pruning the size of teams to bring cost down. "Companies, by and large, are targeting a per-employee productivity enhancement of 15 percent," said a strategist working with an MNC firm. The tech sector, he says, is given an essential services status - on par with water and electricity - in Karnataka, so companies here also need not pay overtime.

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