Notes from the Best Employees

Prasanto Kumar Roy

Our tech industry's range befits a country of a billion people. Companies with 50k employees, 10k hires in a year. Tech giants recruiting thousands in Pune, Jaipur, Indore. At the other end: tiny companies, a few hundred strong, competing for talent against the behemoths.

And so, in the DQ-IDC Best Employers Survey (BES) 2006, the BES Top 5 include two 50k-plus giants, TCS and Infosys. It's tough to manage huge companies, but India's largest tech player staying at the top of the BES chart says you can retain a large population and keep it happy, even without top pay. And the BES5 has two tiny, sub-1k players, RMSI and Cadence. The niche areas have their pots of gold.

One downtrend persists: BES 2006 shows an overall decline in employee satisfaction (e-sat).

That's despite the pampering that beats any other industry. The unprecedented extras are now standard. Doorstep pick up and drop. Plush campuses, cafeterias, gyms. Concierge services for personal chores. Hygiene factors.

E-sat is such a moving target. Even with luxury campuses with stadium, multiplex, auditorium, food court, e-sat can decline (Infosys, now #8 of 20) for the world's dream company. People adapt to the luxuries, and ask for more in terms of job and career. As HR demand far exceeds supply, employees have more choice.

Recruitment is the huge challenge as companies ramp up. Profiling and tests get smarter, but still can't fully stop early attrition because of mismatches, or the few bad eggs and fake resumes. Nasscom hopes its National Skills Registry, a giant database of authenticated resumes, will fix that. That's a tough one across a million people. How many will slip through?

And the stronger the demand and the job market, the more of a challenge attrition (or retention) becomes.

I write this at Kolkata, a city that's seen in the past two years as a compressed version of India's IT and BPO story. As tech and BPO majors ramp up here, they suck up the tiny HR pool. That leaves smaller players high and dry, especially the jobbers who anyway pay less, and don't have a major edge to offer employees-or recruits.

Those companies must find their niche, a place on the value chain where they can differentiate enough to offer better career prospects and to pay better. They have to learn the ropes and get past the hygiene factors fast. And fix the problems, such as reporting relationships with immediate managers (a key cause of attrition). Because the problem ahead is not bringing in the customer, for there's - business out there. The challenge is delivery, and that means people.

It's neo-Darwinian evolution: the fittest and the paranoid survive. And the measures are very different today. Such as: how happy are your employees?

© Dataquest