BANGALORE, INDIA: Relatively smaller companies were voted as best employers in the information technology sector, by 2897 respondents across 33 IT companies in India, reveals a forthcoming 'IT Best Employers Survey 2008', conducted by Dataquest the flagship publication of CyberMedia and IDC.

More than ten Indian firms having an employee base less than 4,000 were in the top 20 list. This follows the trend observed in the Dataquest Top 20, Dataquest's annual survey of the Indian IT industry, wherein revenue of smaller IT companies grew better than that of large companies, beating forecasts that they will be negatively hit by the US slowdown than larger companies.

The winner of the eighth Best Employers Survey 2008 was iGate, which displaced TCS, India's largest IT firm by revenue from the No. 1 position in 2007 to No. 6 this year. In 2007 survey, iGate had jumped 26 places to the No. 3 position.

It was closely followed by RMSI at number two. HCL Infosystems, Rolta India and Microsoft India were third, fourth, and fifth respectively in the employee satisfaction scores.

The survey ranked the companies on employee satisfaction (80 per cent weightage) and HR score (20 per cent weightage). There were some significant changes in rankings of the top 20 players. Microsoft and Intel, which did not participate in 2007, entered the charts in 2008 at the 5th and 12th positions respectively, the organizers said.

In pure HR score, TCS outscored all other companies, followed distantly by Rolta India. Smaller companies like Synechron, Tulip Telecom and Nagarro Software took the next three places, the report said.

Though companies like MphasiS EDS and Zensar were No.8 and No.12 in the HR ranking, they did not make it to the top 20 best employers indicating that employees do not always share the same perception with the company.

TCS ranked No. 1 in terms of opportunity to work overseas and company image. However, employee perception on fairness of the appraisal systems, salary hikes and relevance of perks and benefits seems to have pulled TCS down, the survey pointed out.

There were nine new entrants in the Top 20 list even as some of the large companies like Capgemini, Cognizant, CSC, IBM, Infosys and Wipro did not participate in the survey this year.

Based on the survey results, companies were also ranked on eight broad parameters - company image, organization culture, job content, salary, appraisal, people, outsiders consider it a dream company, and internal employees consider it the most preferred employer. In the first six parameters, iGate occupied the No. 1 slot.

Microsoft was ranked the dream company to work for amongst all employees surveyed, followed by TCS at No 2, RMSI at No 3 and HCL Infosystems at No 4, and iGate at No. 5.

On the other hand, RMSI took the No. 1 spot when it came to the employees considering their current company as the most preferred employer, followed by HCL Infosystems at No.2, Rolta India at No. 3, Microsoft at No 4 and IGate at No 5.

Why People Leave?

Half the respondents who took part in the survey said that salary and compensation were the top reasons to leave the company. Other parameters included growth opportunity, overseas opportunity, location of the company and flexible office hours or work-life balance.

Interestingly, work-life balance, which was the No. 8 reason for leaving in the 2006 and
2007, moved up for the first time this year to be one of the top five reasons to change a job.

"Salary growth was pulled down by industry growth down last year...there were even concerns about job security. So it's interesting that work-life came up as one of the top five reasons for switching IT jobs in India," said Prasanto Kumar Roy, chief editor at CyberMedia, publishers of Dataquest.

The survey also pointed out that women continued to form 23 per cent of the total IT workforce of the participating companies for the third year in a row.

The Top IT employers 2008

1. iGate Global Solution 2. RMSI 3. HCL Infosystems 4. Rolta India 5. Microsoft India 6. Tata Consultancy Service 7. SAS Institute Pvt Ltd 8. Synechron 9. Tavant Technology 10. Span Infotech India 11. Hexaware 12. Intel India 13. Datacraft 14. Infrasoft Tech 15. Fulcrum Logic 16. Global Logic 17. Ness Technologies 18. Tulip Telecom 19. Sun Microsystems 20. Nagarro Software

The survey was carried out by IDC India, a sister concern of CyberMedia, for Dataquest in two phases in seven cities - Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Pune and Bangalore - in June-July 2007.