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Is TCS gearing up for another lay-off?
By siliconindia
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Friday, 24 April 2009, 19:07 IST |
13 Comments
Bangalore: India's largest IT firm Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has raised the performance bar for its 143,000 odd employees. Those under the company's scanner will now be given only three months to improve their skills.
"We have reduced the time period for improving skills. Earlier, if an employee would show even a small improvement, we would give an extension of a few more months. Henceforth, that will not be done," said Ajoy Mukherjee, Vice President and head, global human resources. The company will consider an employee's performance for the past three years so as to maintain consistency.
Earlier in the year, Infosys, the second largest IT service provider had also put over 5,000 of its employees under the performance scanner. This was five percent of its total workforce of over 100,000 employees.
Mukherjee dismissed allegations that the company had put over 1,000 employees under the scanner in India. "Globally, we had around 1,100 employees under our performance improvement programme. Of this, the India number was 700-725, which is not even 1 per cent of the TCS headcount. The reason for this number to be more than the usual 500 is that our employee base has also increased," said Mukherjee.
In 2007, TCS had laid off 500 people after poor appraisals and in 2008 the company laid off 25 employees from its Kolkata and Bangalore offices, according to company sources. Layoffs are a part of an employee utilization exercise for the information technology (IT) company.
In February, TCS Managing Director S Ramadorai had said, "There would be no hike in salaries in the forthcoming year" and added that "Job cuts are likely if the situation worsens".The company added close to 22,000 trainees in fiscal year 2009. Despite this, it managed to reduce its employee cost by Rs 121 crore.